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Religion in China
By Arnold Beichman
Published January 25, 2004
Some years ago at a Washington meeting on the future
of Asia, one of the panelists was the military attache
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 of my 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 Jan. 6 appearance in the official party organ,
People's Daily, of the latest article denouncing
religion and congregants in language that goes back to
the early 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's Daily 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 of free 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 a thick, doughy
language nowhere else to be heard today except among
academic leftists in Western universities. In the PRC,
party prose creates theoretical 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 3 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.
Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow,
is a columnist for The Washington Times.
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