Religion in China

Arnold Beichman

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times.

Some years ago ata Washington meeting on the future of Asia, one of the panelists was the military attaché at the Chinese Embassy. The then-head of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Deng Xiao-ping, was busy introducing the first of many internal reforms, explaining Marxism didn’t have all the answers.

At the end of the panel presentations, I asked the Chinese diplomat whether, in the light of Mr.Deng’s surprising announcement, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was still a Marxist-Leninist state.

He stared at me and then began talking rapidly in Chinese. We were all amazed, because until that moment he had been speaking in better than passable English. In any case, the translation didn’t answer my question.

Later I realized that while Mr. Deng’s China was revising Marxism, the other half of Communist ideology, Leninism—the totalitarian party—was unamendable and that for the Chinese leadership Leninism, unlike Marxism, has all the answers.

In other words, neither Mr. Deng nor any of his successors were going to do a Gorbachev—that is, rob a Leninist dictatorship of its revolutionary legitimacy.

The best proof ofmy thesis, that the PRC is welded to Leninism (while Marxism is in the eye of the revisionist beholder), is how badly to this very day religious Chinese are treated by the party, the police and the government. And I say to this very day because of the January 6 appearance in the official party organ, People’s Daily, of the latest article denouncing religion and congregants in language that goes back to theearly post-revolution days in Russia.

The Soviet CP established a national newspaper called the Bezbozhnik, “The Godless,” and in 1925 it established the “League of the Godless” in a campaign against the Russian Orthodox Church.

In China, the People’sDaily message touting“ scientific atheism” against what it calls “theism” is this: You can diddle with the economy as much as you can get away with, but you risk life and limb when you organize any institution, especially a religious institution, that might threaten CCP totalitarian power. As I read the People’s Daily article, I thought to myself: How can anyone conceive of a reunion of Taiwan, a democratic land offree religious practice and free trade unions, with a Communist dictatorship—one that regards all religions as contemptible?

The People’s Daily commentary by Gong Xuezeng, a prolific anti-religion propagandist, is titled “Education in materialism, atheism must be further enhanced.” Particularly noteworthy is that the article refers twice to onetime President Jiang Zemin, as the ultimate authority and ignores his successor, Hu Jintao.

Communist Party members, says Mr.Jiang, “not only must not believe in religions; they also must propagandize atheism and the scientific world view to the masses of the people.” The writer says, “In the end, scientific atheism will overcome theism” but he warns “the struggle between atheism and theism will be a long one.”

The Gong article is written in at hick, doughy language nowhere else to be heard today except among academic leftists in Western universities. In the PRC, party prose creates the or ethical euphemisms to mask what really happens to Chinese who believe in God and church. To learn what is truly going on, I turned to the State Department’s 2002 and 2003 annual International Religious Freedom Report, which accuses the PRC of:

(1) Restrict[ing] religious practice to government-sanctioned organizations and registered places of worship.

(2) Regulat[ing] religious groups to prevent the rise of groups that could constitute sources of authority outside of the control of the government and the CCP and . . . crack[ing] down on groups that it perceives to pose a threat.

(3) Subjecting “members of some unregistered religious groups . . . to restrictions, leading in some cases to intimidation, harassment, and detention.

(4) Closing underground mosques, temples and seminaries, as well as some Catholic churches and Protestant “house churches,” many with significant memberships, properties, financial resources and networks.

(5) Sentencing many religious leaders and adherents to as much as three years in re-education-through-labor camps.

(6) Restricting religious practice and places of worship in Tibet “where the level of repression remains high.”

The language of the State Department annual reports is bland and soothing and understates the reality of China’s unrestricted Leninist war against freedom of religious practice.

The reality is that the more the PRC moves away from Marxism, the more intense will be the PRC’s exploitation of Leninism, whose genocidal horrors we saw in Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia. Ω

“Government is everywhere to a great extent controlled by powerful minorities, with an interest distinct from that of the mass of the people.”—Goldsworthy L. Dickinson, The Choice Before Us, Chapter 4, (1917)

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