L.ast week, Bitter winter published the first English translation of the Chinese Communist Party’s new “Administrative Measures for Religious Clergy”, which was due to take effect on May 1.
The first of the measures is the creation of a comprehensive national database to record and track the state-authorized clergy of the five authorized religions (Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism). Any deviant member of the clergy not registered in this database will immediately break the law. As Nina Shea points out, in order to register in the first place, clergymen will have to show that they “support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and support the socialist system.” Their loyalty to the CCP will then be periodically assessed in a manner similar to the country’s wider social credit system.
These measures are further evidence of the CCP leadership’s eagerness to avoid the Soviet Union’s tactical mistakes over the past century. The Chinese communists do not seek to eradicate every trace of theism, inviting the undivided opposition of religious believers and institutions (as the Soviets did with regard to John Paul II’s Vatican). Instead, they try to weaken the religious opposition to the regime by taming and co-opting domestic religious beliefs, making it another passage for the regime’s social control agenda. For this reason, Chairman Xi has prioritized the ‘sinization’ of religion in China, with the exception of the mandatory presence of his own likeness in every house of worship.
The tactical approach that the CCP has taken towards the Roman Catholic Church is very instructive about how party policy on religion differs from that of communist regimes in the past (and even present when considering the Kims in North Korea) . Rather than trying to drive the Catholic Church out of China altogether, the CCP is trying to increase its own influence over the Vatican. (They have taken the exact same approach to many other issues, such as 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 sides agreed to “cooperate” in the selection of Chinese bishops. In practice, this basically meant that the Chinese presented their approved candidates to the Pope, who then officially approves them, almost as a formality. The whole affair reflects very badly about Pope Francis and the Vatican hierarchy. The hope was to release Chinese Catholics who worship underground from hiding and live out their faith in public; but this “liberation” has been bought at the cost of all control of Chinese Catholicism to a militant atheist clique of genocidal communists.
The Vatican’s naivety in agreeing to such a settlement has been fully exposed by these new ‘administrative measures’: Article 16 says that bishops in China will be democratically elected through the state-controlled Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and consecrated by the Chinese Catholic Conference of Bishops. There is no reference at all to the Pope or the Vatican, which have been completely cut out of the process. The CCP has reinforced its sole control over Chinese Catholicism with the formal support of the Catholic Church itself (the 2018 agreement was renewed last year), leaving Chinese Catholic dissenters of the party even without the formal support of their own church.
In other words, this is not your grandfather’s evil realm. The CCP is smarter, worse, and more economically dominant than the Bolsheviks once were. And right now, they are succeeding in putting Catholicism, along with the other great religions of the world, in the service of Marxism, which not even Marx himself thought was possible.
As China’s only serious geopolitical rival, the United States also happens to be the most religious country in the developed world and the only country to see religious freedom as the first and most precious jewel in its constitutional crown. If any nation on Earth is going to be seriously offended with geopolitical force by the Chinese war on religious freedom, it is likely the U.S. And yet there doesn’t seem to be a hunger among the American public for a large-scale geostrategic conflict with China. Policy proposals for a new Marshall Plan to compete with the CCP’s Belt and Road Initiative are not emerging in our public discussions. Worse, the US has not even been able to muster the collective will to offer US visas to Hong Kongers. The Cold War Consciousness that underpinned our enmity towards the Soviets in the last century is simply not an inspiring force today, even though Communist China arguably poses an even greater challenge to the free world than the Soviets.
The most likely explanation for this has to do with the CCP’s signature tactics, discussed above: they prefer to co-opt and manipulate people and forces rather than destroy them. For the past few decades they have done just this with regard to free trade and global capitalism. Chinese producers have taken a deep grip on American consumers and have made the party an indispensable part of the American (and world) economy. The CCP is deeply involved in our everyday lives as consumers in a way that the Soviets never were. By making American consumers their economic vassals, the Chinese have stabilized any hunger for large-scale geopolitical conflict among the US governmental elite, who are terribly aware of what a policy of decoupling would likely mean for their own electoral prospects. If voters are free from economic complicity in communist atrocities in exchange for higher prices, are we sure they would take the highway? You really have to wonder whether or not the first Cold War would have ended the way it did if the Soviets were in control of prices in the American market.
The Chinese communists have not tried to destroy capitalism. They have prioritized state ownership of the mind and soul over state ownership of the means of production, and they have been more than happy to use capitalism to achieve that goal. We in the free world were convinced after the fall of the Soviet Union that economic and political freedom were necessarily linked. We have therefore pursued the liberalization of the world economy in the sincere belief that political freedom would follow. It never occurred to us that the communists of the future may not be interested in nationalizing railroads or post offices, but in nationalizing childhood, love, death, sex, and Jesus Christ – and using the almighty dollar to do so. We never considered the possibility that the 21st century could turn out to be Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping’s hideous lovechild.
Well, to borrow a phrase from Solzhenitsyn: the great truth has now come to light, 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 cruelest ironies and most insidious paradoxes of human history, Xi Jinping now rules the world as a Marxist robber baron, a being whose existence for the past 200 years has escaped our categories of political thought. With each new disclosure of the CCP’s crackdown on religious believers, religious Americans are once again confronted with the fact that even a harmless trip to Walmart could amount to an in-kind contribution to the sacred innocent massacre; that the money we spend on our household goods goes into the pockets of today’s Neros and Diocletians.
Americans are said to have to choose between free trade and free markets when it comes to China, as China’s policy is to make markets unfree. It is even more true that, with regard to China, religious Americans will have to choose between free trade and religious freedom, for from now on American believers are unwittingly funding the martyrdom of their fellow believers. Christianity (and most of the world’s major religions) views the faithful as an indivisible, supranational body. For this reason, religious Americans must take the lead in decoupling economically from China. They know that the United States’ national economic interests are worth nothing more than ash and sand in the short term compared to the integrity and community of the faithful. If American believers persist in their assent to China’s grip on the American consumer despite this knowledge, they should not be surprised to be greeted with a stunning flash of heavenly light the next time they make their way to Costco. a voice crying out, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”