Last week, Bitter Winter published the first English translation of the Chinese Communist Party’s new “Administrative Measures for Religious Clergy”, which would take effect on May 1.
First among the measures is the establishment of a comprehensive national database to record and locate the state-authorized clergymen of the five authorized religions (Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism and Taoism). Any deviant member of the clergy who is not registered in this database will violate the law immediately. As Nina Shea notes in the first place, clergy will have to demonstrate that they ‘support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and support the socialist system’. Their loyalty to the CCP will then from time to time be judged in a way similar to the broader social credit system of the country.
These measures are further proof of the CCP’s eagerness to avoid the tactical mistakes made by the Soviet Union in the last century. The Chinese communists do not try to erase every last trace of theism, thus inviting the undivided opposition of religious believers and institutions (as the Soviets did with regard to John Paul II’s Vatican). Instead, they seek to exacerbate religious opposition to the regime by taming and co-opting domestic religious beliefs, transforming it into a different path for the government’s social control agenda. For this reason, President Xi prioritized the “sinisation” of religion in China, except that he required the prominent presence of his own parable in every house of worship.
The tactical approach that the CCP has taken towards the Roman Catholic Church is particularly instructive about how party policies on religion differ from those of communist regimes in the past (and even present when one considers the Kims in North Korea). take). Instead of trying to expel the Catholic Church completely from China, the CCP wants to increase its own influence over the Vatican. (They followed exactly the same approach to many other things like American sports leagues, international institutions, and even capitalism itself.)
On September 22, 2018, the CCP signed an agreement with the Vatican – the text of which is still secret – according to which the two parties agreed to ‘work together’ on the election of Chinese bishops. In practice, this basically meant that the Chinese submitted their approved candidates to the pope, which they then officially approved, almost as a formality. The whole matter reflects very badly on Pope Francis and the hierarchy of the Vatican. The hope was to allow Chinese Catholics worshiping underground to come out of their hiding places and live out their faith in public; but this ‘liberation’ was bought at the price of relinquishing all control of Chinese Catholicism to a militant atheist cabal of genocide communists.
The naivete of the Vatican in agreeing to such an arrangement has been fully exposed by these new “administrative measures”: Article 16 states that bishops in China will be democratically elected by the state-run Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and consecrated by the Chinese Catholic Bishops Conference. There is no reference at all to the pope or the Vatican, who was completely cut out of the process. The CCP strengthened its sole control over Chinese Catholicism with the formal support of the Catholic Church itself (the agreement was renewed in 2018 last year), leaving Chinese Catholics dissidents of the Party without formally supporting their own church.
In other words, it’s not your grandfather’s evil empire. The CCP is smarter, worse and more economically dominant than the Bolsheviks ever were. And at the moment they are succeeding in submitting Catholicism along with the other major religions in the world in the service of Marxism, something that even Marx himself did not think was possible.
As the only serious geopolitical competitor of China, the United States also happens to be the most religious country in the developed world and the only country that regards religious freedom as the first and most precious gem in its constitutional crown. If any nation on earth with a geopolitical levy has to take serious offense against China’s war on religious freedom, it’s probably the US. And yet it seems that the American public has no appetite for a full-scale geostrategic conflict with China. Policy proposals for a new Marshall Plan to compete with the CCP’s Belt and Road Initiative do not come up in our public discussions. Worse, the US has not even been able to bring together the collective will to offer US visas to Hong Kongers. The awareness of the Cold War that supported our hostility to the Soviets over the past century is simply not a life force today, although Communist China undoubtedly poses an even greater challenge to the free world than the Soviets did.
The most likely explanation for this has to do with the signature tactics of the CCP, as discussed above: they prefer to co-opt and manipulate people and forces instead of destroying them. Over the past few decades, they have done exactly that with regard to free trade and global capitalism. Chinese producers have become deeply attached to American consumers, making the party an indispensable part of the American (and world) economy. The CCP is deeply involved in our daily lives as consumers in a way that the Soviet Union never was. By making American consumers their economic vassals, the Chinese have sterilized any appetite for full-scale geopolitical conflict among America’s ruling elite, who are terribly aware of what a decoupling policy would likely mean for their own election prospects. If voters are exempted from economic complicity in communist atrocities in exchange for higher prices, are we sure they will face the big road? One really has to wonder if the first Cold War would have ended the way it would have if the Soviets had kept the prices on the American market.
The Chinese communists did not try to destroy capitalism. They put state property of mind and soul first as state property of the means of production, and they were more than happy to use capitalism to achieve it. We in the free world were convinced after the fall of the Soviet Union that economic and political freedom was necessarily added to the hip. We therefore sought the liberalization of the world economy in the belief that political freedom would follow. It never occurred to us that the communists of the future are not interested in nationalizing railroads or post offices, but in nationalizing childhood, love, death, sex, and Jesus Christ – and using the almighty dollars for it. We never considered the possibility that the 21st century could turn out to be the horrible child of Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping.
Well, to borrow a phrase from Solzhenitsyn, the great truth has now dawned, especially for religious Americans. We in the free world have made the Chinese Communist Party the most powerful producer and consumer in a global capitalist economy. In one of the most cruel irony and paradise of human history, Xi Jinping now fights the world as a Marxist robber baron, a being whose existence has eluded our categories of political thought for the past 200 years. With each new revelation of the fight against the CCP against religious believers, religious Americans are faced anew with the fact that even an innocent trip to Walmart can be a contribution to the carnage of the holy innocents; that the money we spend on our household goods goes into the pockets of the Neros and Diocletians.
It is said that Americans should choose between free trade and free markets with respect to China, as China’s policy is to make markets unfree. It is even more true that, with respect to China, religious Americans must choose between free trade and religious freedom, for American believers are currently unknowingly financing the martyrdom of their fellow believers. Christianity (and most of the world’s major religions) regards believers as an indivisible, supranational body. For this reason, religious Americans must lead to the charge being economically disconnected from China. They know that the short-term national economic interests of the United States are worth nothing if and when compared to the integrity and community of believers. If, despite this knowledge, American believers persevere in China’s grip on the American consumer, they should not be surprised to be greeted heavenly with a beautiful flash the next time they are on their way to Costco, and with a voice calling out : “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”