Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
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.
With around 26 million inhabitants, the megalopolis is home to a multitude of religions from Buddhism and Islam, to Christianity and Baha'ism, to Hinduism and Daoism and many other alternative faiths, which are constantly growing and evolving.
In the book's introduction, Ian Johnson, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and specialist in Chinese religion, adds: "Freed from being defined by where they were born, China’s urbanites have created new identities, discovering for themselves what they truly believe with the aid of new technologies, social media and convergence of faiths and cultures.
"Some of this religious life takes place in skyscrapers and apartment blocks, but also in the pockets of the past that still dot Shanghai: a traditional New Year’s dinner, the persistence of burning paper houses, cars, and money for the dead, or a rambunctious music group announcing a wedding, birth, or funeral. Faith in China may be vulnerable, yet its unwavering importance is beyond doubt. Its very presence in people’s hearts makes it impossible to eradicate. More than economics or politics, it is these moments that are the new heart of China."
“The AAR is pleased to recognize these journalists whose news reporting includes well-written, diverse and engaging topics,” said Alice Hunt, Executive Director of the AAR. “The news articles address some of the prominent religion news stories of 2018 that not only inform but also enhance the public understanding of religion,” Hunt added.
Ian Johnson submitted articles that address an unfettered interest in religion in China that speaks to the relationship between religion, politics, and society, including "#MeToo in the Monastery," "10 Million Catholics in China Face Storm They Can’t Control," and "The Uighurs and China’s Long History of Trouble with Islam." Jurors described this work as a “deep-dive series of articles with an excellent mix of journalism and public scholarship.”
The winning series “also provides new and relevant information to today's political and religious debates and is informed by scholarship that the public sometimes has a hard time accessing,” cited the jurors.
China is trying to pacify Islam by force, but is achieving the opposite of the stability it wants to secure, says Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China, to Foreign Policy. "By using more force to increase stability, the government is achieving the opposite effect.”
Foreign Policy:
According to Ian Johnson, a New York Times contributor and the author of The Souls of China, the government wants to limit the Abrahamic faiths that are officially recognized in China, that is, Islam and Christianity, because it sees them as too influenced by foreign ideas and trends—though Islam has a history of over 1,000 years in China, and Christianity has had a permanent presence for more than 400 years, Johnson noted.
To that end, China released new regulations in 2017 on religious organizations and their activities, including an explicit ban on any unregistered religious activities. New laws and regulations always have a gradual roll-out in China so the recent crackdowns are merely enforcement of those 2017 regulations. The “soft opening” is over, which Johnson concludes will lead to increasing conflict.
“You will have an even more pacified Islam that is moribund and controlled by the state, and a search for more authentic religious experiences through unofficial churches. By using more force to increase stability, the government is achieving the opposite effect,” he told Foreign Policy.
China's central government has been cracking down on both Protestantism and the Islam over the past year. The direct future looks grim, says journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao at Foreign Affairs in an addition to a piece he wrote two years ago. The government can still go back to its previously pragmatic take, but Johnson is not sure it will.
Ian Johnson
The government’s attitude toward Islam has been even more problematic. Ten of China’s 55 non-Chinese minority groups, primarily the Hui and Uighurs in the country’s northwest and far west, are Muslim. Here, the issue isn’t just control but the forced assimilation of these peoples.
Officially, the state is pursuing a war on terrorism in its far western province of Xinjiang.
Although the problem of violence there is real, all independent observers agree that the main cause of unrest is the heavy hand of the state, which for decades has pursued a policy of resource extraction and resettlement in order to increase the population of ethnic Chinese.
The resulting downward spiral of repression and violence has culminated in a recent campaign of repression aimed at the very practice of Islam. State authorities have forced Xinjiang stores to sell alcohol and tobacco, for example, and forbidden students from fasting during Ramadan. The repression seems to be spreading beyond Xinjiang to Hui communities in other parts of China, where authorities are tearing down Islamic domes, removing Arabic-language signs, and silencing the outdoor call to prayer.
Most shocking has been the return of something that indeed has echoes from the Mao era: reeducation camps. At first, the notion of such camps seemed like an unbelievable rumor, but the state has confirmed their existence, justifying them as needed to control extremism. In them, Muslims are essentially secularized by force, forbidden from anything seen as too religious.
Until now, if one thought of large Asian countries where the mixing of religion and politics has caused strife and violence, India, Indonesia, or Pakistan might come to mind. In the future, this list could include China.
This need not happen. If the state steps back and takes a deep breath, it could avoid the conflicts that its current policies seem bound to create. One has only to think of the years of protest caused by the crackdown on Falun Gong to get an idea of how banning even one sect can become a messy, protracted affair. House churches have also been equally stubborn—just banning the Shouwang Church in Beijing in 2009 resulted in years of protests. And the inevitable backlash against such misguided policies as forcing Muslims to eat pork and drink alcohol is scarcely imaginable.
Up until now, I’ve always believed in the pragmatism of China’s reform-era leadership, despite the brutality of many measures taken during that period. Yet China is no longer in the reform era. Instead, it is entering a new period, one that may make observers look back fondly on the relatively light touch of the country’s past leaders.
Islam has been high on the hitlist of the central government, but Christian faiths seem to get a different treatment. journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, dives for the Independent into the differences between Protestants and Roman Catholics.
Ian Johnson:
The government seems to be handling Christianity in two different ways.
It has pursued diplomacy towards Roman Catholics, forging a deal with the Vatican that would have Rome recognise government-appointed bishops in exchange for the Vatican gaining some say in how they are appointed.
This, in theory, would bind all Catholics to the government-run church and make underground churches unnecessary.
Protestantism, which lacks a centralized structure, has had several important churches closed or destroyed, apparently as a warning.
These include a large unregistered church in Beijing, the Zion church, which was closed in September, and whose leader was placed under house arrest.
The crackdown in Chengdu appears to be of another magnitude, partially because Mr Wang is so outspoken and nationally famous.
Before converting to Christianity in 2005, he was named one of the 50 most prominent public intellectuals in China.
In 2008, Mr Wang founded Early Rain, and his sermons were often extremely topical, touching on what he saw as rampant materialism in Chinese society and the political compromises made by the government-run church.
He also opposed the common use of abortion in China, a practice pushed by the government as it sought to control the country’s population. And he staunchly opposed female pastors, expelling one couple from his church because the wife had studied theology and wanted to preach.
His statements on these topics landed Mr Wang in and out of custody, and he was forbidden from travelling abroad on several occasions.
But he also advocated radical transparency, making his sermons available online and giving police names of people who attended Early Rain — an effort, he said, to avoid acting as if the church had something to hide.
After the new religious regulations were promulgated last year, however, Mr Wang’s criticism of the government became increasingly strident.
Earlier this year, when China’s Parliament put President Xi Jinping’s name in the Constitution and lifted term limits on his office, allowing him to serve beyond his current term, Mr Wang was scathing.
“Abolishing the term limit on the leader of state does not make a leader but a usurper,” he wrote. “Writing a living person’s name into the Constitution is not amending the Constitution but destroying it.”
Most recently, he waded into even more sensitive issues, such as the unrest in minority parts of the country.
In one sermon, he said that the government was waging war on “the soul of man” in Xinjiang, Tibet and Chinese parts of the country, but that it would fail because people would ask themselves: “In the middle of their pitiful and wretched lives, ruled by despotism, and money and power, where is your honour? Where is your dignity? Where is your freedom?”
Seemingly sensing that he could be detained at any time, Mr Wang months ago wrote a declaration to be published 48 hours after his detention.
In it, he said he was “filled with anger and disgust at the persecution of the church by the Communist regime.”
It was not his role to overthrow the government, he said, though he predicted one day its rule would end.
China's recent troubles with Islam and unruly provinces like Xinjiang are not new, nor typically for communist rule, writes journalist Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, for the New York Review of books. "It would be tempting to say that all of this is just typical Communist excess, something in the party’s DNA that forces it to turn to repression and violence to solve problems. But the long history of Islam’s persecution points to older, deeper problems in the Chinese worldview."
Ian Johnson:
Today, though the state no longer adopts the utopianism of a Buddhist religious state, it does have a similarly coercive, assimilationist policy toward its ethnic minorities. When the ethnic Chinese Communist Party took over in 1949, it copied the Stalinist policy of creating nationalities. Fifty-six were identified, including Chinese, Mongolians, and Uighurs, each officially celebrated as comprising a mosaic of groups that formed the People’s Republic.
As in imperial times, this policy was less tolerant than it seemed. In the Mao era, all minorities were supposed to meld into a great Communist brotherhood. In the reform era from the late 1970s to about 2010, development was meant to eradicate all differences, with ethnic groups pursuing money instead of their own cultures.
More recently, the state has taken a more overt policy of Han Chinese chauvinism. Thus the state produces strange statements, such as celebrating Chinese myths, such as declaring the Yellow Emperor the “founder of the Chinese nation,” when, in fact, the nation of China is made up of multiple ethnicities, most of which have no link to the Yellow Emperor. It has also taken steps to reduce Islam’s (and Christianity’s) visibility in China by tearing down churches and mosques—while promoting what it sees as indigenous religions: Buddhism, Taoism, and folk religion.
This prejudicial policy is a leading reason for Xinjiang’s suffering. While cloaked in the war on terrorism, many of the state’s actions are aimed at Islam itself. Shops in Xinjiang have been forced to sell alcohol and tobacco, while university students have been forbidden to fast during Ramadan. Women with veils and men with beards have been systematically barred from some local public transportation.
This has culminated in the reintroduction of a Mao-era measure: re-education camps. Then, the idea was to punish people who had the wrong class background; now, it is Muslims who have not assimilated enough. At first, reports of this seemed like a rumor, perhaps an exaggeration—something that seemed an impossibility in the twenty-first century. Recently, though, the state has admitted they exist, saying they are needed to control extremism.
In recent months, there are signs that the campaign has moved beyond Xinjiang to the Hui Muslims, the descendants of the first Muslims, who are centered in Ningxia province but also live scattered across China. In Ningxia, Islamic domes and signs in Arabic are being pulled down, while the call to prayer has been banned.
It would be tempting to say that all of this is just typical Communist excess, something in the party’s DNA that forces it to turn to repression and violence to solve problems. But the long history of Islam’s persecution points to older, deeper problems in the Chinese worldview.
Most worrisome, it is these very traditions that the state is promoting as a way to bolster its legitimacy, instead of building a pluralistic society open to different faiths, beliefs, and convictions.
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.
“As one guy who told me, 'We used to think we were unhappy because we were poor. Now, we’re no longer poor, but we’re still unhappy,'” says Ian Johnson, a long time correspondent in China, most recently writing for The New York Times and the New York Review of Books, and author of the new book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao.
If it’s tempting to pull out the old saying "money can’t buy happiness," many Chinese are more interested these days in figuring out what can. And so, a search for meaning has intensified in recent decades, as the descendents of those who once revered Mao Zedong and the Communist Party, and Chinese emperors before that, now embrace new centers of meaning, and new communities that share their values...
“A lot of it is driven by this feeling that there are no shared values in Chinese society anymore,” says Johnson. “People constantly talk in social media –—and this is uncensored (by the Chinese government), it’s OK to talk about it — this lack of minimum moral standards in society, that anything goes, as long as you don’t get caught.”
Another driver, Johnson says, is a desire for community in a society that has rapidly urbanized, with rural Chinese moving to new cities, and old urban-dwellers losing their neighborhoods to demolition and construction of new developments.
The Communist Party officially recognizes five religions — Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism and Islam, and tries to control each under the umbrella of the state, forbidding most ties with foreign centers of power, such as the Vatican. The party has long been wary of competing parallel power structures, including "house churches," gatherings of Protestant Chinese who seek to practice their faith outside of the strictures of Communist Party rules. Many such adherents still remember and respect Watchman Nee...
Turning to religion or spiritual practice is one way Chinese are now looking for meaning, but, as in the past in China, what starts with finding a new moral center, can lead to a yearning to shape new relationships and rules in society. China is still finding its moral compass and its direction, some 40 years after Mao’s death, and what started as a search for meaning may yet lead to more sweeping societal change. It’s a prospect that makes the Communist Party nervous, and keeps it vigilant.
“I think all religions have an over-arching idea of justice and righteousness, and heaven, ‘tian,’ that ‘s above all else,” Johnson says. “It helps create among people that it’s not the government that gives us rights and laws. It comes from something higher. And I think that’s the change that could come to China in the future.”
Almost none of it. Almost all comes from donations. Donors are businesspeople using the money they’ve saved to benefit their communities.
What about overseas donations? In the West, many big mosques are financed by the Saudis or Gulf states.
That rarely happens in China. The government keeps tight control over this. They don’t want to have these sorts of ties overseas.
Is there any international dimension to Islam’s revival?
The revival has two aspects. One is almost always personal: a marriage that didn’t work out, or interfamilial strife. And then they learn about larger phenomena through translated texts, social media or on-the-ground missionary activity. Saudi Arabia is a natural pole star. Egypt has major pull given its academic institutions and religious scholars. Missionary work increasingly comes from the Dawa movement. These activists are primarily from South Asia. The idea is that Muslims should return to the pious behavior of the Prophet Muhammad. This can mean a variety of things, from daily prayer to rejecting chopsticks in favor of eating with one’s hands. These people interact with the Hui trying to find themselves. That’s where the rekindling occurs.
Some of this seems to parallel Christianity’s rise in China. It also benefits from overseas missionary ties.
True, but Islam is different in that you have this global discourse on terrorism, which is oppressive and limits the capacity of Muslims inside China to interact with Muslims outside of China. Islam is so politicized that it’s quite different.
Does that hamper Islam’s ability to function as a force for soft power? China makes much of the fact that it is the world’s biggest Buddhist nation. Couldn’t it also win friends in Central Asia or the Middle East by pointing to its vibrant Muslim population?
There’s no doubt that the state looks at Islam in a different way than it does Taoism or Buddhism. It makes it hard for them to participate in even a nationalistic revival — even slogans of Xi Jinping, such as the Yidai Yilu [the One Belt, One Road initiative to link China to Central Asia and South Asia through overland and sea routes]. I was in China this summer and everyone was talking about it, but the question is if Muslims can participate in this. That would be good for the state, but the anxieties are great, too.
