Religious Revivals in Communist China
(Religion in World Affairs)
Arthur Waldron
ORBIS
Vol.42 No.2 ( Spring 1998 )
Pp.325-334
COPYRIGHT 1998 Foreign Policy Research Institute
The traditional role of religion in China is not unlike that found
under Islam: religion and the state are effectively joined, and a
ruler without religious sanction is as difficult to imagine as a
faith independent of the state. The demands of Confucianism, for
centuries China's official system of belief, are perhaps less
exacting than those of Islam, but their place in society is similar.
What is more, they continue to frame the problems with which
religion confronts the Communist regime in Beijing today. Unless
China's fundamental culture changes dramatically, no Chinese leader
can rule without some sort of broadly recognized moral or
ideological sanction. By the same token, the notion of religion as a
separate estate - the realm of individuals and private organizations
- will seem strange or even subversive to many Chinese, especially
to government officials.
Yet communism today is dead. Not long ago there was a sense that
Marxism, suitably Sinified by the party of Mao Zedong, could indeed
serve as a new and revolutionary orthodoxy for modem China.
Certainly communism was, in effect, a religion for its early Chinese
converts: more than a sociological analysis, it was a revelation and
a prophecy that engaged their entire beings and was expounded in
sacred texts, many imported from Moscow and often printed in
English. That faith has vanished today, leaving in China a great
void that some shared belief must fill.
As communism has decayed dramatically over the past decades in
China, religious practice of one sort or another has steadily
increased. An extraordinary and entirely unexpected revival has made
long-padlocked Buddhist temples teem again with worshippers; in
Tibet and Xinjiang the Lamaist Buddhist and Islamic faiths,
respectively, have become ever more vigorous, even as relentless
persecution continues. Communist officials now exploit its ethic of
hierarchy and authority to bolster their rule. Ironically, only
Daoism, perhaps China's sole truly indigenous faith, has actually
been eliminated by the nearly half century of Communist war on
religion.
Like China's remarkable economic development, which is far better
known, the revival of religion seems not to have been intended by
the officials who set it in motion by lifting a few prohibitions.
Rather, it has grown far beyond the manageable change they had
envisioned would become, like economic development, a powerful
factor for change that may threaten the status quo the regime seeks
to preserve. Even though its numbers are relatively small,
contemporary Chinese Christianity is a good initial index for these
changes and the problems they cause for the central government.(1)
The Current Christian Revival
If any religion could safely have been pronounced dead in Communist
China, it would have been Christianity. After all, most forms of
Christianity were introduced by foreigners, often in the wake of
military force, were sustained by large foreign missionary
establishments, and seemed mostly to attract "rice-bowl Christians"
(drawn to the food, medicine, and education the missions provided)
rather than genuine converts. Christianity was particularly hated by
the new Communist rulers, and ruthlessly repressed for thirty years
starting in 1949.
Novelist John Hersey assuredly believed Christianity to be dead when
he published a memoir of his missionary parents in China.(2) It is a
tale of lost faith and futility in the face of bland Chinese
indifference to Western concerns and never more so than at its
tragicomic conclusion, when Hersey returns to attempt to bury his
parents' ashes, as they had wished, in Shanghai's Christian
cemetery. Of course, the cemetery has long been destroyed and
forgotten: a concrete apartment house now fills the site. "All that
effort for nothing," the son concludes, speaking, perhaps, not only
of his attempt to fulfill his filial duty, but of the entire
missionary enterprise in China.
Hersey's bleak assessment seemed unchallengeable in the mid-1980s,
when by all accounts religions in China had dwindled or vanished
under Communist repression, and not only foreign transplants such as
Christianity, but indigenized faiths such as Buddhism.
Yet, a mere thirteen years later, a religious revival is just as
undeniably under way in China, and on a scale and of a vigor that is
astonishing. Christianity, that alien faith his parents had labored,
in vain as Hersey imagined, to foster in China, is today more
vigorous than at the height of Jesuit influence in the seventeenth
century, or at the peak of Protestant evangelization in the 1920s.
The mass faiths are also rebounding: Buddhism's numerous shrines are
thronged with devotees and pilgrims, Islam is reinvigorated,
particularly in the Western border area of Xinjiang, home to a large
Turkic population, and vast lamaseries dynamited by the Chinese army
during the Cultural Revolution are being reconstructed in Tibet,
where loyalty to the Dalai Lama appears unshaken.(3)
This religious revival is best understood, like so much occurring in
China today, as an unintended consequence of some fairly limited
measures of liberalization. When the Communism took power in 1949
they created an array of state-run organizations designed to control
and direct religion - a Buddhist association, an ecumenical
Protestant "three self" committee, and a "patriotic" Catholic
association independent of Rome - as the sole "legal" sponsors of
religious activity. Those unwilling to join went underground or died
in the gulag.
When Hersey was visiting in the early 1980s, those structures and
restrictions still existed - as indeed they do today. But they had
been loosened by the new "pragmatic" Chinese leadership which
expected thereby to pacify the few remaining indigenous believers
and win approval from the World Council of Churches and other such
organizations. The strategy was not unlike that taken toward the
economy: forget about Marxist fundamentalism and let the people
trade food and other products. So what if there are a few free
markets? Socialism will survive. Likewise, why not unlock the iron
grates in front of that temple? All that will happen is that a few
old women will be pleased.
But the Communist leaders misjudged. Both actions started chain
reactions that have proceeded far beyond expectations. The economic
development, for instance, is today so well known as to be taken for
granted as an intended product of government policy. Yet its broad
effects across society now oblige Chinese and foreigners alike to
consider, for example, how economic development requires clear laws
and objective adjudication, and thus threatens the dictatorship that
is fundamental to communism. The religious revival is less well
known outside of China, and certainly far less analyzed. Yet it is
already proving to be perhaps as significant and widespread in its
effects as the more obvious economic changes.
Numbers of Protestant Christians in China have climbed so
dramatically that their officially sponsored organization has had to
scramble to accommodate even its own members. Thus, foreign visitors
who wished to join Protestant worship in Beijing in the 1970s were
regularly taken to a lovely small chapel with an adjoining parsonage
for the minister, who was always happy to meet them. A decade later,
however, the chapel was far too small, and what looked to be a vast
old octagonal revival hall on the campus of a school was pressed
into service. This is not to mention the numerous house churches,
where unofficial Christian groups gathered, or the revival of
indigenous Chinese Christian sects, such as the True Jesus Church
(which now has converts and churches in foreign countries as well).
Roman Catholicism has shown similar vigor. Because of their loyalty
to the pope, Catholics were persecuted relentlessly during the 1950s
and 1960s, foreign missionaries were expelled or imprisoned, and
Chinese clergy were murdered or sent to the gulag. But belief did
not disappear. In Fanshen, his classic and highly sympathetic
account of how communism came to "Longbow Village" in rural China,
William Hinton recounts the dramatic unmasking of a corrupt local
priest. Once the party cadre had opened the people's eyes to the
fraud perpetrated upon them, Hinton explains, the local Catholics
quickly discarded their mistaken beliefs. Yet today, as Hinton
himself documents in his sequel, Shenfan, the real Longbow Village
is once again solidly Catholic.(4) Elsewhere, Catholic churches have
been reopened or rebuilt, and the great Marian shrine of Sheshan,
near Shanghai, is once again a major site of pilgrimage.
Numerically, of course, Christianity remains a minor religion in
China. Yet that fact has not reassured the Beijing government,
anxious as it is about any independent source of authority and the
growth of civil institutions beyond its control. There is plenty of
real faith even in the official churches, where worshippers show an
uncanny sense of who can and cannot be trusted. Officially sponsored
worship is tolerated, but the independent Protestants and the
underground Catholic church are persecuted. Some of the faithful
follow secret lives of devotion: it is reported that many of the
good and selfless nurses in Chinese hospitals are secret Christians.
Nonbelievers too - historians and social scientists - are
increasingly acknowledging the real contributions made to China by
Christianity and its missions. So despite the recent appointment of
an old-fashioned hard-line atheist, Ye Xiaowen, to handle religious
affairs, Christianity continues to gain ground in China.
Why not, one might reasonably ask, simply tolerate religion? The
reason is that the spontaneous spread of religion, like the largely
uncontrolled growth of the Chinese economy, is more troubling to the
Chinese leadership than many observers understand. Chinese
authorities refuse openly to accord a greater measure of religious
freedom for the same reason that they still refuse to permit freedom
of the press, freedom to form political parties, or other freedoms:
they understand quite correctly that doing so will drive the final
nails into the coffin of Communist rule. And that rule is more than
a matter of mere power, repression, or privilege for those in high
places, because Marxism and Maoism were, and to some extent remain,
quasi-religious phenomena themselves.
China has always been a state with an ideology. Its territory -
roughly as large as the United States (which also has an ideology) -
is too big to rule by force, or on the basis of consanguinity, or by
appeals to local interests. The great question of the twentieth
century has thus been: what ideology would serve a modem China in
the way that Confucianism served two thousand years of traditional
China - as an internalized cultural basis for common action? To this
query the phrase "Sinified Marxism" was the informed answer for four
decades after the Communist conquest of 1949.(5)
Not only does that answer no longer persuade the educated, who
recognize the intellectual bankruptcy of Marxism, it no longer works
with the masses, whose possible one-time faith in communist class
morality and the Marxist secular apocalypse of revolution and
abundance has long since been swept away by the misery and famines
the Communism actually brought.
Recognizing this fact, Beijing has turned in recent years to
nationalism as the new basis for legitimate role and common action.
But this, too, has its limits. The Chinese have rarely thought in
narrow or exclusive terms, and their best thinkers want general
answers to general problems - which, ironically, is why Marx
appealed to them in the first place. Furthermore, nationalism says
nothing about morality or about the crimes and horrors of past and
present, which so preoccupy Chinese in their private lives. Religion
may not be able to resolve the enigmas of evil, but at least it
ponders them.
The current religious revival in China, then, responds to a burden
of personal and collective suffering over fifty years that is
inexplicable through communist belief (the party, after all, is
theoretically infallible). It also seeks to fill the immense moral
and cultural void that has been excavated, at the center of Chinese
life, by Communist rule. Religion is not the only response to these
needs, as any visitor will testify: China today is a turbulent
country, where throngs of merchants, real and figurative, hawk their
commercial and ideological wares, while a weakening dictatorship
steers to avoid the shipwreck of its authority. China has
encountered such times of troubles often over its thousands of years
of history, and whenever it has, religion has, as often as not, been
a volatile factor.
The Tibetan, Islamic, and Buddhist Revivals
Tibet and Xinjiang are the places in China where religion currently
plays the greatest political role. This is because religion in those
territories has been recognized as the essence of national culture,
creating a situation similar to that of late-Communist Poland, where
even atheists paid homage to the national Catholic faith. In both
territories Chinese oppression and gross miscalculation have greatly
exacerbated the situation.
Prior to the overthrow of the Chinese imperial system in 1911, Tibet
was linked to the Qing dynasty by the official patronage of the
Dalai Lama by the Qing emperor. This vague relationship gave each
party what it wished: from the Tibetan point of view, it was a great
honor that the Dalai Lama conferred in permitting the Qing emperor
to be a patron; from the Qing point of view, the emperor was
properly recognized as superior by the tributary. Then, in the era
of the Chinese Republic that followed from 1912 to 1949 Tibet was
for all practical purposes independent. But when the Chinese
Communists brutally invaded Tibet in the 1950s, they employed no
such Qing subtlety. Today they face a national movement that has
already won the struggle for international legitimation, even though
Tibet's territory and administration remain in Chinese hands.
By contrast, Xinjiang, or East Turkestan as it is also known, was
conquered by the Qing in a series of bloody nineteenth-century
campaigns. Having annexed the area, however, the Qing took great
care not to offend the indigenous Muslim Uighurs. Chinese garrisons
(the present provincial capital, Urumqi or Dihua, began as a
military camp) were purposely located at a distance from regions of
dense Muslim settlement. Although governance was difficult, given
the absence in Islam of a distinction between church and state, the
Qing satraps accomplished it by working with local Islamic elites.
But when the Chinese Communists reoccupied Xinjiang, they once again
adopted a cinder approach.
Chinese nuclear and missile tests were carried out in Xinjiang
without consulting the inhabitants, and much of the territory became
in effect a Chinese military reservation. Many mosques were
demolished during the Cultural Revolution (only to be reconstructed
in the 1980s). Most important for the future of Xinjiang, however,
has been the reestablishment of pan-Islamic links across its borders
with the rest of the Central Asian Islamic world.
Authority in traditional Xinjiang derived from connections to the
various international Sufi brotherhoods that played a similar role
throughout Central Asia: the Naqshbandiya being the most important.
Today that order is patronized and domesticated by Turkey. But more
militant Islamic ideas are not hard to find: they come from Iran,
other Central Asian states, and not least from veterans of the
Afghan resistance to the Soviet Union. Bomb detonations and
gunfights are now regularly reported from Xinjiang.
Both Tibetan Buddhism and Islam have important foreign connections.
Lamaist Buddhism is the religion not only of Tibetans but also of
nomadic peoples along an arc from the Himalayas through Qinghai and
part of Sichuan north and east into Mongolia. The end of
Soviet-style communism in the Mongolian Republic has been followed
by a rebirth of that traditional faith. Reincarnated Buddhas are
appearing in Mongolia, links with Tibet are being reestablished, and
the Dalai Lama has visited Ulan Baatar. Islam's foreign connections
are more obvious, but it must also be remembered that Muslims abound
in China proper and have risen up in revolt in the past.
Beijing is understandably worried about Tibet and Xinjiang, but
unwilling so far to admit the failure of its current policy which is
one of denial and police repression, coupled with feeble attempts to
justify both, and private appeals to the United States, Israel, and
the various Islamic countries, for help. Prospects are not good for
its success. Neighboring governments certainly do not want to offend
the Chinese, but they also know that cooperating with foreigners to
persecute Islam will scarcely be popular with their people at home.
The Turks of Xinjiang have already undergone the scorched earth
treatment in the nineteenth century and emerged. Tibetans remain
defiant despite the most appalling torture and oppression. Beijing
meanwhile adopts a self-contradictory policy: repression and
cultural destruction (most of Lhasa is now a Chinese-style city and
classic medieval Tibetan structures are being leveled) coupled with
transparent attempts at cooptation (such as the kidnapping of the
young Panchen lama and the investiture of a Chinese candidate).
While one may be assured that these policies will wreak much
destruction, it is difficult to imagine them actually resolving the
problems in either Tibet or Xinjiang.
Least threatening among the reviving religions in China must be
counted Buddhism and what remains of Daoism. Historically both have
well-developed doctrine, but in their popular form they have
generally been part of the syncretic and poorly understood religious
practices of the illiterate masses. Moreover, they stress escape
from worldly suffering through meditation and scriptural recitation,
or taking up residence in remote monasteries. Apocalyptic variants
of Buddhism, such as the White Lotus faith of the eighteenth
century, have powered mass movements in the past.
Today, southern and southeast China in particular are alive with
Buddhist observances, and young monks and nuns and pilgrims of all
ages are in evidence - some of them communist cadres who have turned
to Buddha - and delight in the freedom to travel, share fellowship
and devotion, and perhaps acquire some sacred souvenirs.
Invisible to the outsider but possible to track through the official
Chinese press and other sources is a resurgence of charismatic and
apocalyptic Buddhism. One reads regularly of the arrest of a group
of followers of a claimant to some sort of divine or kingly status.
Sometimes popular religion even fixes on communism itself:
unregistered and unofficial temples to Mao Zedong and other
Communist worthies have been built here and there in China.
If the example of Taiwan, Thailand, and other strongly Buddhist
states is to be followed in China, moreover, we may expect teachers
of Buddhism, with their own sects, to become increasingly important
politically as communism weakens. If even the U.S. vice president Al
Gore has found himself courting Buddhist donations in California,
one may wonder whether China can be far behind.
The Legacy of Confucius
Religion cannot be reduced to anything else without distortion and
oversimplification. It is an autonomous phenomenon, not simply a
cloak for personal or economic or national interests, although it
can be all of those as well. Before turning to the significance of
religion for China's social and political future, then, it is worth
considering the role of individual devotion.
The vast burden of China's twentieth-century past has already been
alluded to above. Look at almost any recent Chinese movie - Farewell
My Concubine or To Live, for example - and you will be confronted by
an avalanche of images of evil - real evil. For the events portrayed
in these films have not been dredged from the twisted imagination of
some Hollywood writer, but rather from the everyday experience of
hundreds of millions of Chinese. Every Chinese bears the burden of
this evil and more than are willing to face up to it bear some
responsibility. Although materially China has made much progress in
the last two decades, the more difficult task of confronting,
admitting, and pondering the meaning of this suffering - a task on a
scale comparable to dealing with Nazi, Soviet, or Japanese imperial
guilt - has scarcely begun.
In most of the world the doctrines and language of religion have
been crucial to this process. In the West, the successive
catastrophes of the twentieth century called into being a whole
cultural enterprise that meditated on war and peace, memorialized
the dead, pursued some of the malefactors, and generally attempted
to find meaning or value in the whirlwind - even if it could get no
further than Job did when confronted by the divine questions.
The Chinese world as yet manifests little by way of analogue to this
process. Confucianism has never accepted the existence of radical
evil - evil at the root. As the opening words of the famous
Confucian text Three Character Classic reminded the generations who
traditionally memorized it, "man is originally good." Society and
contact with other human beings are what make him evil. But
education in virtue can forestall that process and create genuinely
good people, who in turn can make society good. This belief must be
sorely tested by the reality of China's past century, and the issue
must arise of who then is responsible for the catastrophe.
Whether Confucianism is in fact a "religion" is a question without a
definitive answer. Its "this-worldly" focus is very different from
that of the great theistic religions with their three-story
universes. Confucius himself refused to speak of the gods "until he
understood the affairs of men." Confucianism has always frowned on
"superstitious" religious practices, even while insisting that its
serious followers spend hours in self-examination and study.
Certainly it is more than a felicific calculus. As the French Jesuit
scholar Michel Masson has persuasively argued, faith permeates
it.(6)
But the emphasis of Confucianism is on the moral practice of the
individual, not on whether he is "justified." (That question does
not arise, for to be truly good is considered eminently possible).
Chinese traditional thought about the legitimation of rule derives
from this. The true ruler follows the kingly way (wangdao) of virtue
and is thus able to rule without force and create perfect harmony.
The philosophers admit that there is another path to rule, the way
of the hegemon (badao) which relies on coercion and harsh laws - but
this is neither enduring nor morally creditable.
On sale at Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, are little red books
with plastic covers entitled Lunyu (the analects) and looking just
like the books of Mao's sayings that were so ubiquitous during the
Cultural Revolution. The souvenir is good fun and very popular, but
one suspects that a lot of Chinese value it because it manifests the
simple fact that for as long as people can read Chinese, Confucius
will be a classic, whereas Mao's crude utterances have quickly
faded. The religious bedrock of China, if such a thing can be said
to exist, is a set of attitudes about morality and responsibility
that come from Confucianism.
The theistic religions tend to stress the inscrutability of divine
action. By contrast, Confucianism puts responsibility into the hands
of individuals, rulers in particular. It has nothing like the
Judeo-Christian notion of divine justice, but equally it is less
forgiving. At the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, obliterated by Nazi
bombers, the inscription above the former altar reads "Father
Forgive." When in China the tomb of the great hero Yue Fei was
smashed by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, a graffito
appeared asking "Who did this?"
Such attitudes do not bode well for individuals - or the memory of
individuals - implicated in the various disasters of communism in
China. Traditional Chinese histories always judged individuals in
extensive biographical sections. That approach is by no means dead.
This moral, if not exactly religious, dimension to Chinese culture
may figure in surprising ways as, in the decades ahead, Chinese seek
to cope, individually and collectively, with the issues of meaning
and responsibility in their recent history.
Chinese Religions and Foreign Affairs
In China's immediate future, however, religion seems likely to be a
secondary factor in processes of change. Issues of meaning and
history are critical to cultural health, but for the next decade or
so whoever is trying to run the country will be preoccupied with how
to feed and employ the vast population, meet aspirations for greater
freedom and voice, maintain the flow of foreign money, and somehow
hold on to power.
Indeed, religion may well turn out to be a more important factor in
foreign policy than in domestic policy. At present, Beijing is
attempting to avoid penalties for violating religious human rights,
manage its uneasy connections with foreign religious groups active
in China, and persuade the Vatican to remove its ambassador from
Taipei. A decade or two ago, when global cold war politics dominated
Western relations with China, these tasks were easier. But today
there is no more Soviet Union against which China served as an ally,
while knowledge of the persecution of religion in China is
widespread and international reaction, however slow and muted, is
growing.
Moreover, the precipitous collapse of liberal Protestantism in the
West and concomitant rise of evangelical Christian groups savvy in
politics mean that Beijing is facing far tougher interlocutors on
matters of religious persecution than in the days when all it had to
confront was a flaccid World Council of Churches. The new
evangelical and Catholic lobbies are not fooled by official
Potemkin-village religion, and are more sympathetic to truly zealous
evangelicals like themselves, whom the regime persecutes. Likewise,
the Polish pope has proved resistant to the entreaties of some of
the Vatican bureaucracy for a quick settlement in China that would,
in effect, recognize the state-run church and leave underground
believers in the lurch.
The situations in Tibet and Xinjiang are, from Beijing's point of
view, even worse. Many in China understand that true compromise is
the only way out of both problems, but so far such voices have been
overruled by hardliners. Massive repression has already been tried,
however, in both places, and if executions, exile, imprisonment, and
inundations of propaganda were going to work they would have done so
by now.
The problems in Tibet and Xinjiang are probably not
regime-threatening, but they are chronic ulcers. Denied every form
of peaceful redress, Tibetans and Uighurs will likely turn
increasingly to violence in the years ahead, violence of the sort
that is extremely difficult to stamp out once it has begun even by
means of major reforms. The rising generations in Tibet and Xinjiang
have a hatred for the Chinese oppressors and a steely determination
to resist that is akin to that of the peoples of Eastern Europe
under the Soviets, not least in that it is sustained in good part by
religion.
In China proper, religion will play a role in the growing debate
about values and morality, expressed in questions about how the
country should legitimately be ruled. Practical questions about
mechanisms will be the primary focus of this debate: what sort of
legislature and executive? what rights for citizens? and so forth.
But as with the framing of the United States Constitution, some sort
of moral orientation will be necessary. If there is no political
reform in China, then one can expect religion to continue to develop
on the personal level within the country, and to grow both as a
source of resistance to tyranny at home and as a source of tension
with the rest of the world.
The classic European pattern of king and bishop, or church and
state, never existed in China. Political authority was absolute, and
religion, or Confucian philosophy, was controlled and coopted much
more completely than in the West. China's different tradition and
social architecture mean that in the contemporary world China may
confront the same sorts of issues as other countries, but cannot
address them in the same ways. Given that totally unitary rule,
whether by emperor or Communist party, is probably at an end in
China, the independent role of religion there will almost certainly
grow in strength and significance in the years ahead. The words of
defeat, "all that effort for nothing," spoken by Hersey about
Christian missions, will then be more appropriately said of the far
larger and far bloodier business of Chinese Communism.
1 The best survey of Christianity in China is Daniel Bays, ed.,
Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).
2 John Hersey, The Call: An American Missionary in China (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1985).
3 On Tibet, see Warren W. Smith, Tibetan Nation: A History of
Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations (Boulder, Colo.:
Westview Press, 1996); and Cutting Off the Serpent's Head:
Tightening Control in Tibet, 1994-1995 (New York: Human Rights
Watch, 1996); on Xinjiang, see Donald H. McMillen, Chinese Communist
Power and Policy in Xinjiang 1949-1977 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview
Press, 1979); and Raphael Ismaili, with the assistance of Lyn
Gorman, Islam in China: A Critical Bibliography (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1994).
4 See William Hinton, Fansben: A Documentary of Revolution in a
Chinese Village (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), pp. 118-124; and
William Hinton, Shenfan (New York: Random House, 1983), p. 283.
5 See Benjamin T. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1951).
6 See Michel C. Masson, Philosophy and Tradition: The Interpretation
of China's Philosophical Past: Fung Yu-lan, 1939-1949 (Taipei:
Institut Ricci, 1985).
Arthur Waldron is Lauder Professor of International Relations at the
University of Pennsylvania, director of Asian Studies at the
American Enterprise Institute, and a senior fellow at the Foreign
Policy Research Institute.