Christianity is promoting citizenship rights in China today primarily through invisible and unstructured church communities. Through the pastoral regions’ culture based on “justice- and love-centered Christian ethics,” churches and Christians are holding fast to their faith ideology and its application principles, not giving up meeting and worshiping together, popularizing the model of using the law to defend their rights, and influencing church and society. This model has pushed forward the development of civil society in China and facilitated the birth of a new form of church-state relations. To sum up, the model of a constitutional citizenship society and church-state relations, an institutional cultural capital borrowed from the West, is being contextualized well in China through Christianity’s “new culture movement,” and it won’t duplicate the absence of a code of ethics in the civil society model in the Western world today.

Mark Chuanhang Shan, from Xinjiang, China, has written a number of books and articles, including "History of Christianity in Xinjiang, China" (Boston: Chinese Theological Association, 2009), "Beware of Patriotic Heresy in the Chinese Church", etc. He has an M.A.R. from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary and an S.T.M. from Boston University’s School of Theology, and is currently a Ph. D. student in Historical Theology in a Seminary.