People's China: third epoch

National Review, Jan 29, 1996 by Robert Elegant

Equally dangerous is the predicament of state-owned industries, which are not merely inefficient, but incompetent. In any open system, more than half would already have gone bankrupt. But the dire social -- and, of course, political -- consequences of increasing the army of the unemployed by tens of millions forces enormous wasteful subsidies.

Tradition and religion: Chinese intellectuals have since 1850 been shaking off the dead hand of Confucianism, the state ideology that had determined not only the nature of government but also most private actions for two millennia. Yet today neo-Confucianism is virtually the official ideology of a Communist Party that knows Marxism - Leninism and the Thought of Mao Zedong to be fraudulent.

Many Chinese are going back to beliefs like Taoism, Buddhism, and folk Confucianism, particularly in the countryside. But a surprising number in the cities are turning to Christianity, particularly to Catholicism, which offers certainties now glaringly absent from Chinese life.

The authorities have learned that they cannot suppress religion, but only attempt to manipulate it. Official estimates speak of four million Catholics in China today, a million more than there were in 1949, when the People's Republic came to power. Unofficial estimate set the figure at ten million. Since 1980, a thousand or so priests and bishops have been rehabilitated, many from jail, and returned to their parishes. One prominent bishop gets on well because a senior official in the Bureau of Religious Affairs was once his warden in a "re-education camp."

China is changing rapidly. Yet the authoritarianism and the thought-control the Communists are being slowly forced to diminish both go back at least two thousand years. A dissident activist sent back to prison expresses his despair in words used by a first-century historian when he learned that he was to be castrated for his family's alleged treason. Everything changes in time, yet little changes over time.

Nonetheless, China will soon be a great power again. Her vast population, her great territory, and her rapidly expanding industry will see to that. If she splinters into autonomous regions, the facade of central government will still stand in Beijing -- and the world will still have to reckon with an assertive China. And if central control is preserved by the military, Asia will have to reckon with a nationalistic and aggressive China.