Maoism and Religion in China Today *

Septemb er 1968 Vol . XIX, No.9 Library-3041 Br oadway (at 120th Street) . New York . N.Y 10027 Telephone: (Area 21 2 ) 662·7100 Subscription: $3 a year ; 1-15 copi es , 35¢ Editorial Office---Room 6 78. 47 5 Riverside Drive. New York. N.Y 100 27 each; 16-50 copies, 25¢ each ; 1 ele ph one : (Area 212) 870· 2175 Circulation Office---637 West 12 5th 51.. New Yo rk. N.Y . 1002 7 more than 50 c opies, l 5¢ each Telephone : (Area 212) 870·2910 MAOISM AND RELIGION IN CHINA TODAY * The "Decision of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution," adopted August 8, 1966, opened the most in tensive campaign against religion since the Communists came to power. By every re port available to us, it appears that the intention now is to suppress even the cap tive remnant of the organized religions that had survived earlier stages in the pro cess of centralist control and ideological conformity. Section I of the August 8 document, "A New Stage of the Socialist Revolution," reads (in part): In order to overthrow a political regime, it is always necessary to prepare the public opinion and carry out work in the ideological field in advance . Although the bourgeoisie have been overthrown, yet they at tempt to use the old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the mind of man and conquer his heart in a bid to attain the goal of restoring their rule. On the other hand, the proletaria~ must squarely face all challenges of the bourgeoisie in the ideological sphere, and use its own new ideas, new culture, new customs and new habits to transform the spiritual aspect of the whole society.1 Although religion was not mentioned as a specific target of the Cultural Revolu tion, there was clearly a "spiritual" dimension to the Cultural Revolution which in many ways resembled a religious crusade; it soon became clear that all religious thought and practices were understood to belong to the "four olds" and had to be purged. Red Guard groups attacked Buddhist temples, Christian churches and Muslim holy places indiscriminately. Even Confucius was vilified, Red Guards parading his portrait through the streets of Canton labeled, "I am an ox, a demon, a snake and a devil." Religious leaders and ordinary lay members suffered alike in the early Red Guard vigilante stage of the Cultural Revolution. The last remaining Christian missionaries, eight elderly nuns from the Convent of the Sacred Heart who had been teaching children of foreign diplomats in Peking, *" Maoism and Religion in Chi na Today," first prepared for Chi na Institute lecture se ries, February-March, 1968. To be published in The Religious Situation -- 1969, Boston, Beacon Press. Donald Cutler, editor. 2 were expelled from China August 31, 1966; while a Reuters dispatch a week earlier re ported that the Red Guard "appeared to have taken over permanently the churches serv ing Peking's 20,000 Christians." Fides reported all churches in Canton closed and placed under the control of Red Guard units, while the South China Morning Post re ported from Shanghai: "The final page of the history of Christian religion was writ ten on August 24. On that day all churches, active or inactive, whether conducted by their meager congregations or preserved by the Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Religious Cults, were stripped of the crosses, statues, icons, decorations and all church para phernalia by the revolutionary students, wearing Red Guard armbands, and determined to eradicate all traces of imperialist, colonial and feudal regimes." The total suppression of all religions -- with pressures on individual believers as well as on the clergy and leaders -- raises questions that go beyond the official Chinese Communist attitudes toward religion, for these are known to us. Was the en forced elimination of visible religious practice predetermined from the beginning of the Communist period? Were the early stages of religious toleration in the context of patriotic commitment to nation-building and the Korean war in fact deliberate and cynical manipulation for the sake of an effective, but temporary, united front during the New Democracy period when a wide variety of non-Communist voluntary associations were permitted to endure? Or did the Communist leadership sincerely believe, in classical Marxist-Leninist analysis, that religious belief and practice would natu rally disappear as its social and economic causes were eliminated in the new China? Were they "revolutionary romantics," nontheistic utopians who believed that the masses of religious believers had been misled by the false teaching of the feudalis tic and capitalistic exploiters -- and, in the case of Christianity, by the foreign imperialists -- and that revolutionary change of the material and social conditions that had generated religious belief and practice would automatically bring about its demise without crushing coercion? If the latter, the total suppression of religion in 1966-1967 is out of character, and there is cause for hope that a change to more moderate leadership will result in revitalizing of Article 88 of the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religious belief. On the other hand, if the left wing of the Cultural Revol ut i on gains uncontested control, the Constitution may be rewritten with no mention of religion. The Chinese Communists, confident in the truth of their own doctrine, have not seen religion as primarily an ideological competitor. They have feared not a rival faith, but institutional and political conflicts that could interfere with the na tion-building and production goals of the new China. With total mobilization of all citizens and all social groups understood as essential, party and government leader ship understandably saw the independent functioning of autonomous religious groups - such as the Roman Catholic Church, with 3 million Chinese believers under the reli gious authority of a foreign hierarch -- as a threat to national unity. In due time, as with the minority political parties, the labor unions, the artists and writers, the women of China and other once-voluntary associations, each religious group was led to organize its own government-related "patriotic association," which became the channel through which central control was exercised. Quite apart from their ideological rejection of religious belief, the revolu tionary leaders saw the institutional superstructure of the three integrated reli gious systems as a major block to socialist nation-building. As autonomous organiza tions with international relationships, they posed a political threat. Under econom ic mobilization their ownership of land, schools, hospitals, publishing agencies and other institutions placed them in the landlord-capitalist class, while thousands of the clergy and members of religious orders were nonproductive in Marxist terms. As early as August 4, 1950, government regulations declared that religious workers such as Buddhist monks, Taoist priests, fortune tellers and soothsayers were parasites be 3 cause they engaged in no productive work, while abbots, as managers of religious landholdings, were classed as landlords. By 1967 all able-bodied monks, nuns, priests, pastors and other religious workers were engaged in productive labor, many in churches, temples or monasteries converted into small-scale industries. All reli gious landholdings had been seized and redistributed in the land reform of 1951, while the 16 Christian colleges and universities, 419 middle schools and several thousand primary schools and other Protestant and Catholic institutions were all seized and nationalized in 1950-1951. Popular religious practices, such as burning of "paper money," celebration of "superstitious festivals," sacrifice to the hungry ghosts or ancestors and accepting donations from the faithful were condemned as eco nomically wasteful, therefore noncontributory to Socialist production goals. But the treatment of institutionalized religion was consistent with the general policy of the New Democracy period, and cannot justify the particular charge of reli gious persecution. The stages by which the government tightened its control of orga nized religion up to the present period, and the methods used, reflect and parallel the stages of increasing centralized control that mark the history of the regime: the early united front period, with a variety of social classes and limited freedoms still permitted; the mass mobilization of the Korean war period, with the elimination of counter-revolutionaries and ideological conformity as the objective of mass trials and widespread thought reform campaigns; the tightened control over each segment of society -- the rural masses, the intellectuals, the political minorities, the mer chants and industrialists, the religious; the "100 flowers" period and subsequent crackdown on counter-revolutionaries during the rectification period; and finally the present period of internal struggle, with Maoism displacing all religious practice. In each case religious leaders and intellectuals suffered with their secular counter parts, while the religious laity struggled to harmonize twin loyalties to nation and religion, an inner conflict that destroyed the integrity of families and persons, raising self-doubt in the hearts of believers and sowing mutual distrust in the ranks of the clergy and leaders. The religious systems as institutional rivals to govern ment and party had been rendered harmless long before 1966, while religion as an ideological rival had, in classical Marxist-Leninist terms, been dismissed even ear lier. Typical is the following Maoist definition of religion from Kuang Ming Jih Pao: We believe that ...religion, the theist idea and superstition ...all de note man's belief in supernatural, mystic forces. That is to say, they all exist in man's mind as ideas. These ideas are fantastic reflections of the objective world in man's mind. Their characteristic consists in reflecting the objective world in the form of supernatural, mystic forms. That is, it consists in regarding certain natural mystic forces as determinants of nat ural and social phenomena.

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