FPRI Wire

Religious Revivals in Communist China

Volume 7, Number 3
February 1999

by Arthur Waldron

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.

This essay is a condensed version of an article that appeared in the Spring 1998 issue of Orbis, a special issue on “Faith and Statecraft,” available from FPRI.

In China, traditionally speaking, a ruler without moral or ideological 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, continue to frame the problems with which religion confronts the Communist regime in Beijing today. By the same token, the notion of religion as belonging to the realm of individuals and private organizations will seem strange or even subversive to many Chinese, especially to government officials.

Not long ago Mao Zedong’s suitably Sinified version of Marxism could indeed serve as a new and revolutionary orthodoxy for its early Chinese converts — a sort of revelation and prophecy that engaged their entire beings and illuminated their sacred texts. But communism as a faith is dead today in China, leaving a great void that some shared belief must fill.

As communism decays further in China, various religious practices grow steadily and dramatically. Long-padlocked Buddhist temples teem again with worshippers; in Tibet and Xinjiang the Lamaist Buddhist and Islamic faiths, respectively, have become ever more vigorous, despite relentless persecution. Like China’s remarkable economic development, the religious revival came about as an unintended consequence of some fairly limited measures of liberalization and has become a powerful factor for change that may threaten the status quo the regime seeks to preserve.

The Current Christian Revival

If any religion could safely have been pronounced dead in Communist China, it would have been Christianity. Introduced by foreigners, often in the wake of military force, Christianity was sustained by large foreign missionary establishments, which attracted mostly “ricebowl Christians” (drawn to the food, medicine, and education the missions provided) rather than genuine converts. By the mid-1980s, Christianity, as well as indigenous faiths such as Buddhism and Daoism, had dwindled or vanished under the bloody rule of Chinese Communism. Yet, a mere thirteen years later, an astonishing religious revival is undeniably under way. Christianity, though a minor religion in China, is today more vigorous than at the height of Jesuit influence in the seventeenth century, or at the peak of Protestant evangelism in the 1920s.

In 1949 the Communists created an array of state-run organizations (Buddhist, Protestant, Catholic) designed to control and direct religion. Those unwilling to join went underground or died in the gulag. In the early 1980s those structures and restrictions still existed— as they do today; but the new “pragmatic” Chinese leadership relaxed them to pacify the few remaining believers and win approval from comparatively flaccid groups like the World Council of Churches. Just as Beijing misjudged the impact of a few free markets on the vigor of socialism, it also underestimated the significant and far-reaching effects of loosened restrictions on religion.

Numbers of Protestant Christians in China have climbed so dramatically that their officially sponsored organization has had to scramble to accommodate its own members. Protestant visitors to Beijing in the 1970s prayed in a small chapel. A decade later worshippers gather in a vast old octagonal revival hall on the campus of a school. Roman Catholicism has shown similar vigor. Churches have been reopened or rebuilt, and the great Marian shrine of Sheshan, near Shanghai, is once again a major site of pilgrimage.

There is plenty of real faith in the official churches, although the government continues to persecute independent Protestants and the underground Catholic church. Some of the faithful (nurses, for instance, in Chinese hospitals) follow secret lives of devotion. Secular historians and social scientists increasingly acknowledge the real contributions made to China by Christianity and its missions, and not even the recent appointment of hard-line atheist Ye Xiaowen to handle religious affairs has kept Christianity from gaining ground.

Chinese authorities refuse openly to accord a greater measure of religious freedom for the same reason that they still refuse other personal freedoms: doing so will drive the final nails into the coffin of Marxism. Recognizing this fact, Beijing has turned in recent years to nationalism as the new basis for legitimate rule and common action. But 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 and seeks to fill the immense moral and cultural void created by the intellectual bankruptcy of Marxism.

The Tibetan, Islamic, and Buddhist Revivals

China’s other great religious traditions are also rebounding: devotees throng to Buddhism’s numerous shrines; Islam renews itself, particularly in the Western border area of Xinjiang; and Tibetan loyalty to the Dalai Lama appears unshaken. In Tibet and Xinjiang, where it has assumed the essence of national culture, religion also plays the greatest political role. In both territories Chinese oppression and gross miscalculation have greatly exacerbated the situation, and increasing anti-government violence may be sustained in good part by religion.

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 and was independent for all practical purposes until Mao’s brutal invasion in the 1950s. Today, Tibet has already won the struggle for international legitimization even though its territory and administration remain in Chinese hands.

By contrast, Xinjiang (East Turkestan) 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, purposely locating garrisons at a distance from regions of dense Muslim settlement. The Qing satraps accomplished governance by working with local Islamic elites. But when the Communists reoccupied Xinjiang, much of the territory became in effect a Chinese military reservation, where they carried out nuclear and missile tests without consulting the inhabitants. 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 with the rest of the Central Asian Islamic world.

Beijing is understandably worried about Tibet’s and Xinjiang’s important foreign connections. It feebly tries to justify its current repressive policies while appealing to the United States, Israel, and the various Islamic countries for help. 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.

Buddhism and what remains of Daoism are the least threatening among the reviving religions in China. Historically both have well-developed doctrine, but in their popular form they appeal largely to the unschooled 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, including some charismatic and apocalyptic ones, such as unregistered and unofficial temples to Mao Zedong. If China follows the example of other strongly Buddhist states, we may expect teachers of Buddhism, with their own sects, to become increasingly important politically as communism weakens.

The Legacy of Confucius

The images of real evil portrayed in recent Chinese films like Farewell, My Concubine or To Live derive not from the twisted imagination of some Hollywood writer, but rather from the everyday experience of hundreds of millions of Chinese, who must bear the burden of confronting, admitting, and pondering the meaning of this suffering. The doctrines and language of religion, which in most of the world have been crucial to this process, have as yet found little analogue in China. To the extent that such a thing can be said to exist, the religious bedrock of China is a set of attitudes about morality and responsibility that come from Confucianism, which teaches that “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.

Whether or not Confucianism is in fact a “religion” is a question without a definitive answer. Confucius himself refused to speak of the gods “until he understood the affairs of men” and frowned on “superstitious” religious practices, even while insisting that its serious followers spend hours in self-examination and study.

Whereas the theistic religions tend to stress the inscrutability of divine action, Confucianism puts responsibility into the hands of individuals, rulers in particular. The true ruler follows the kingly way (wangdao) of virtue and is thus able to rule without force and create perfect harmony. The alternate path of the hegemon (badao), which relies on coercion and harsh laws, is discounted as neither enduring nor morally creditable.

Confucianism’s emphasis on individual accountability rather than divine action has also meant that it is less forgiving than its theistic counterparts. When Red Guards smashed the tomb of the great hero Yue Fei during the Cultural Revolution, a graffito appeared asking “Who did this?”

This moral, if not exactly religious, dimension to Chinese culture may figure in surprising ways in the decades ahead as 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 as rulers grapple with problems of 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.

Moreover, the precipitous collapse of liberal Protestantism in the West and concomitant rise of evangelical Christian groups savvy in politics and sympathetic to truly zealous evangelicals like themselves mean that Beijing is facing tough interlocutors on matters of religious persecution. Likewise, the Polish pope has proved resistant to a quick settlement in China that would, in effect, recognize the state-run church and leave underground believers in the lurch.

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. 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.

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