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Islam and Christianity often get a hard time from China’s authorities, while local beliefs, Taoism, and Buddhism enjoy the support of the government. Journalist and researcher Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, followed local pilgrimages for almost a decade and recently joined the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin to study the relation between those beliefs and the state, he tells in an introduction at the start of his new study.
China regularly ranks among the worst-performing countries on freedom of religion. That makes sense, given the crackdown on Muslim Uyghurs and the the destruction of Christian churches. These are the regular features of reports on China by the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, as well as international human rights monitoring groups.
But there is a flip side to the Chinese government’s approach to organized religions: over the past few years, some have begun to enjoy government support. This applies to much of China’s biggest religion, Buddhism, and its only indigenous religion, Taoism. The government has also endorsed folk religious practices that it once deemed superstitious, subsidizing pilgrimages and temples.
Driving these seemingly contradictory impulses is the ruling communist party’s need for new sources of legitimacy. With economic growth slowing, the long-standing social contract of prosperity in exchange for political acquiescence is less tenable. That’s caused the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which still promotes atheism, to give overt support to traditional faiths…
In some ways, the Chinese state’s embrace of religion shouldn’t be too surprising. Beijing needs new sources of support, especially given China’s slowing economy. In addition, the disasters of communist rule in the twentieth century mean that for at least fifty years, few people have bought into the state’s main ideology, communism. Under Xi, China has pushed a return to communist values, urging the country’s nearly one hundred million CCP members to “return to the original mission.” Some of the party’s stated values include widely accepted virtues such as honesty, integrity, patriotism, and harmony. But belief in communism is low, forcing the state to turn to traditions.
In doing so, the CCP draws on China’s imperial past when ruling. Imperial officials often decided which faiths were orthodox and heterodox, regularly banning sects that violated norms. Indeed, traditional China was a religious state, with the emperor serving as the mediator between heaven and earth, and his main palaces—including the Forbidden City—representing the empire’s spiritual focal point.
China’s modern-day rulers have drawn on this past but also on the lessons of modern authoritarian states. Similar to how Russian President Putin evolved from KGB operative in Soviet times to defender of the Russian Orthodox Church today, Xi is positioning himself as a champion of Chinese traditional values. It’s unlikely Xi will ever be seen praying in a Buddhist temple, as Putin worships in churches. But in its own way, the Chinese Communist Party is taking a page out of the same authoritarian playbook, where endorsing traditions as a source of legitimacy is seen as a way to compensate for problems at home.
Xi Jinping’s rise to power in late 2012 marks a new era, the third, in the history of the Chinese Communist Party’s religious policies. Instead of the destruction of the Mao years and the relatively laissez-faire approach of the reform period, the state has embarked on a form of highly curated revivalism.
One part of its approach rests on a deep suspicion of Christianity and Islam. The party’s policy toward Islam has been the most draconian. Some believers, especially Uighurs in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, have been subjected to a policy of forced secularization. This has included sending hundreds of thousands of Muslims to re-education camps, compelling restaurants to serve pork and alcohol, and forbidding fasting during Ramadan.
The policy toward Christianity is more nuanced. Last year, Beijing struck a deal with the Vatican to jointly appoint Catholic bishops. The Vatican seemed to hope to reverse the decline in the number of Catholics in China. But for Beijing, the measure was a way to tighten control over the Catholic clergy — and, by extension, the church itself.
Protestantism poses an especially vexing problem for the party. It is arguably China’s fastest-growing religion, with an estimated 60 million or more adherents today (compared with one million in 1949), including some 20 to 30 million who are thought to worship in unregistered (or underground) Protestant churches. But the faith lacks a unifying structure that would allow for negotiations. And so the government has fired a few shots across the bow, closing several of the country’s best-known underground churches.
The plan stems from a widespread feeling that China’s relentless drive to get ahead economically has created a spiritual vacuum, and sometimes justifies breaking rules and trampling civility. Many people do not trust one another. The government’s blueprint for handling this moral crisis calls for endorsing certain traditional beliefs.
Over the past few years, the authorities in Beijing have given churches across the country orders to “Sinicize” their faith. According to detailed five-year plans formulated by both Catholic and Protestant organizations, much of this process involves the predictable palaver of state control: “to actively practice core values of socialism, love the motherland passionately, support the leadership of the Communist Party, obey the law and serve society.”1
But the authorities want more than just political control; they want a say over Christianity’s spirit, too. According to one document, “Chinese styles” are to be promoted in the religion’s “building, painting, music, and art,” and also in Christian liturgy and theology. Other documents speak of reflecting Chinese traditions, but what this means isn’t exactly clear—perhaps filial piety, ancestor worship, and explicitly rejecting foreign influence.
While these new regulations affect China’s other religions too, they hit each one in different ways. They probably matter least to Daoism, which is an indigenous Chinese religion, and little to Buddhism, which is a global religion but has been in China for so many centuries that it has spawned local schools and practices. But for China’s other two main religions, Islam and Christianity, the rules raise serious concerns. In the case of Islam, the state’s aim seems to be mainly political control of sensitive border regions, because of the faith’s predominance among several ethnic minorities, especially the Hui and the Uighurs, who live in China’s far west.
Christianity poses a subtler and possibly more profound challenge. This is not only because it has spread among the ethnic Chinese, or Han, majority, who make up 92 percent of China’s population, but also because it has grown fastest not in remote border regions but in the cultural heartland and among white-collar professionals who are supposed to be leading China’s modernization. This makes Christianity the first foreign religion to gain a central place in China since Buddhism’s arrival two millennia ago. Hence the authorities’ unease and their vague desire for Christianity to become something Chinese and nonthreatening.
These concerns have arisen before. Christianity has had a presence in China for four hundred years. Missionaries such as the Jesuit Matteo Ricci got a foothold in the country by acting like Confucian officials: dressing in gowns, learning the formal language of classical Chinese, and downplaying differences between Christianity and Chinese thought. The Jesuits called God tianzhu, or “lord of heaven,” a plausible term for the Heavenly Father, but not coincidentally also the name of an old Chinese deity. Over the following decades, Christianity spread in North China by fitting into familiar folk religious patterns: offering moral precepts that sounded like Confucian principles or worshipping a virgin saint who seemed much like local female deities. Missionaries in this era, before imperialism made them arrogant, softened unfamiliar or disturbing ideas, such as Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.2
The new effort to sinicize Christianity is something different—and probably unique in its encounter with Asia. In years past, Chinese and other Asian governments were weak, and even if Christianity found followers it was later tarnished by the fact that missionaries arrived along with Western gunboats. Now we have a strong government in Beijing that accepts the reality of Christianity but wants it to conform to Chinese foreign and domestic policy. This isn’t unusual in Christian history—look at the innumerable British churches with tableaux and plaques that glorify British imperialism—but Beijing’s firmness is something new in Asia.
It is not only the Chinese in Kenya who are embracing Christianity. Many Chinese students in America, Australia and the UK are returning home Christian, says Ian Johnson, author of "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao." Their conversion chimes with a broader trend at home: China itself is on track to be the world's biggest Christian nation by 2030, by some estimates.
For much of the 20th century, Chinese citizens were taught to worship the founding father of the Communist Party, Mao Zedong, the revolutionary leader who destroyed much of the nation's Buddhist and Taoist religious infrastructure during the Cultural Revolution. "There used to be 900 temples in Beijing alone," says Johnson. "Now there are 20."...
Mao's death in 1976 left the Chinese searching for a new value system. Christianity seemed fresh and modern to the country's newly urban residents, Johnson says, although more people in China are still Buddhist.
By 2017, there were between 93 million and 115 million Christians in China -- around 5% of the country's population -- but fewer than 30 million practice in official churches, according to Purdue University scholar Yang Fenggang. If those estimates pan out, there would now be almost as many Christians in China as there are members of the Communist Party, which had an estimated 90 million members in 2016.
That has riled the government. Under President Xi Jinping rhetoric has grown on the need to "Sinicize" religions perceived to be Western, despite the fact many Christians in China do not feel "un-Chinese or foreign," says Johnson.
Today, only state-sanctioned Christian organizations are legal in China. Overcrowded state churches run as many as 5 services a day and their pastors' wages are paid by the government, says Johnson. The alternatives are so-called house churches which operate illegally but can offer a more personal ministry, with pastors on first-name terms with their congregation...
In Chinese state media, the clampdown on faith goes largely unreported and Christianity is "virtually invisible," says Johnson -- the government doesn't want to "encourage anyone to think about religion."
The less-than straightforward relation between China's communist rulers and religion is one of the complicated concepts author Ian Johnson ofThe Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Maotries to explain. From repression, to tolerance and now moving to a idea to use religion to restore some order, that relationship has changed profoundly, he tells The Politic, although it varies depending on what religion you look at.
The Politic:
President Xi Jinping´s administration has embraced different traditions, including religious ones, that serve his party. Can you talk a little bit about this, what has he done, and why is it important now that he has been re-appointed for another five-year term?
After he took power in 2012, he very quickly made a series of highly symbolic visits. He visited the hometown of Confucius in Qufu, and he prayed to Confucius. He made another visit to UNESCO in Paris and praised Buddhist tradition, and he also had public meetings with Buddhist leaders. So then, they began to push this propaganda campaign of the China dream—this is Xi Jinping’s signature slogan—and this dream is a national rejuvenation, but it’s also social justice, and they use traditional images and traditional ideas and concepts to promote that.
That was the beginning of the efforts. This is one of the reasons he is very popular, and it’s probably because they feel that society went out of control. His campaign against corruption is very popular, [the thinking is], “Yes, we need to stop corruption, but we also we need some kind of frame to get society in order.”
If you think about it broadly, you got the Mao Era, and the Reform Era, and then the government backed away from the control of society, and they let people do what they wanted to do as long as they didn’t challenge the government. By the 2000s, people thought that things had gotten out of control. The internet was coming up, [new] NGOs were forming, and they didn’t want the Party to be challenged. So, starting before Xi Jinping, but especially after he took power, there’s been this effort to reassert control over society. I think they see religion as a useful tool in the overall effort to restore some sort of order in society.
From what I understand, in the 19th century, religion and politics were very intertwined. And now, apparently, it is becoming intertwined again, so how are people receiving these changes? And what are the implications of this?
Well, I don’t think they can go all the way back. In the old system, the emperor was a quasi-deity, the son of heaven.
One implication is that there are other religions in China besides the ones the government is happy to support. The government is comfortable with Buddhism, Daoism, these so-called traditional religions, but it is less comfortable with Christianity and Islam, which also have significant populations. I think this could be a source of tension in the future. Already there are quite Islamophobic bloggers who write against Islam and question whether Islam is part of China. Actually, Islam has been in China for over a thousand years, so it’s not like it arrived last year. And about half of the Christians of China are not part of the official church, they are part of unregistered churches. I think they want to make them register with the government, those roughly thirty million Christians, and that’s going to be difficult, it can cause a lot of tensions.
Why do they oppose Christianity and Islam?
I think they don’t oppose it per se. I think what they don’t like is the foreign influence, foreign ties. It is the same with NGOs. NGOs in China can form, but they can’t take foreign money. So, with Christianity and Islam, you have inherent foreign ties. In Catholicism, bishops must be appointed by the Vatican, and in Protestantism, you also have ties with global, Evangelical movements. They send, not missionaries, but trainers, especially Chinese-Americans who come with a tourist visa and then teach and train pastors. Then, Islam also has a really strong global component, for example with the pilgrimage to Mecca. Some countries also want to donate money to build mosques, and the government is always trying to limit that.
Mostly in Zhejiang province Chinese authorities have been trying to bring the 60 million Christians under state control, and took down between 1,200 and 1,700 crosses from churches, sometimes causing violent clashes. Journalist Ian Johnsoninvestigated for the New York Times the current state of the government action.
Ian Johnson:
Several clergy members in the region said they were under pressure to demonstrate their loyalty to the Communist Party. Some churches, for example, have begun extolling Mr. Xi’s campaign to promote “core socialist values” — a slogan meant to offer a secular belief system that bolsters the party’s legitimacy.
Other churches have begun displaying their building permits, implicitly endorsing the government’s authority to approve or reject church construction, including crosses.
“We have to show that we are loyal Christians,” said an employee of the historic Chengxi Church in Wenzhou, “or else we could face trouble.”
In February, a prominent lawyer was shown on state television confessing to having colluded with foreign forces, especially American organizations, to stir up local Christians. The lawyer, Zhang Kai, had been in Zhejiang providing legal advice to churches that opposed the removal of their crosses.
Unregistered churches appear vulnerable, too. In December, the police detained several members of the unregistered Living Stone church in southern China’s Guizhou Province after they refused to join a government-run Protestant church. The pastor was later arrested on charges of “divulging state secrets.”
“It’s easy for them to fabricate a crime and accuse you,” said the pastor of a large unregistered church in Wenzhou. “We have to be very careful.”
Many worshipers in Shuitou are eager to keep their heads low, in hopes that the storm will blow over.
One Sunday last month, about 300 people attended services at the Salvation Church, women sitting on the left side and men on the right — a reflection of traditional views toward worship. In the front of the church, above a big red cross, were six big characters that read: “Holiness to the Lord.”
Most of the people there were in their 50s or 60s, in part because many of the younger worshipers were boycotting Sunday services to protest the church’s decision to comply with the government’s order to remove the cross.
They have begun attending services on Thursdays instead, to mark the day of the week the cross came down. They used to participate in the church’s Bible study groups, but now study independently. Some wonder if they and others may stop worshiping in registered churches entirely and go underground.
A senior church leader, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he and others had agreed to take down the cross because they feared the church would be demolished if they did not. People were on the verge of losing their jobs, he added, and church elders felt they had no choice but to call on parishioners to give in.
“More than three decades ago, we didn’t even have a church,” he said. “Persecution in church history has never stopped. All we can do is pray.”
