Canter Bridge

When peering through the window of a train car at a fascinating, fast-changing, complex landscape, you can’t make the train slow down for a bit of gawking. The best you can ask for is a window with minimal smudges.

That’s what you get when contemplating the velocity of change in China today through the lens of ChinaSource, now a decade old in its present form. Published quarterly by the organization that bears the same name, ChinaSource is intended—as its tag line declares—for those who serve China. This is a centrist, Christian, English-language publication written principally for those outside China with missional interests in that great country.

As a China watcher of sorts, this reviewer finds ChinaSource to be the single most insightful piece of China journalism that I read.

Without exception, every issue during the four years I’ve been reading presents fresh, up-to-date, and reliable information on some aspect of the country it surveys. Contributors include a balance of Chinese and non-Chinese. Each issue is themed, with some room on the margins for pieces that do not address the thème de jour.

The issue before me (10/3) addresses ‘the family in China’. Typically, contributors will approach such a theme from sociological, theological, missional, economic, and other angles. The result is a coherent, kaleidoscoping view into aspects of Chinese reality that do not fail to remain complex in spite of such expert analysis. Here lies one of the work’s great strengths: every effort is made to clarify but not necessarily to simplify.

There are of course many other resources for the kind of reader who is likely to find ChinaSource helpful, both digital and print. Few will furnish the same low-smudge view of China’s fast-changing landscape that ChinaSource habitually achieves.