David Aikman, initially educated at Oxford, completed a Ph.D. in Russian and Chinese history at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist and a foreign policy consultant based in the Washington, D.C. area. For a time he was the TIME magazine Beijing bureau chief.
In his book, Jesus in Beijing, Aikman recounts the words of an unnamed scholar from one of China’s premier research institutes, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The scholar was speaking to a group of 18 American tourists in Beijing in 2002, and here is what he said:
“One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world,” he said. “We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt.” ((David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2003), 5-6.))
