Taming the Gods

by Ian Buruma

  The purge of the unbelieving demons was a bloody affair. After the fall of Nanjing, 40,000 Manchu men, women, and children were burned, drowned, or put to the sword. Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist temples were razed. And Jesus expressed his satisfaction in classical Chinese poems, passed down from Heaven to his younger brother Hong, now known as the Heavenly King, or Lord of Ten Thousand Years. Some of the goals of the Taiping were actually quite progressive. Social and economic equality was a primary goal. Land was distributed to families, according to their size. Women were given senior jobs in the administration and allowed to sit for examinations. Whether one can call the division of men and women in separate living quarters a progressive move is a moot point. It was certainly in line with the kind of puritanism encouraged by Christian movements all over the world.

  But within a decade things began to unravel as they usually do in godly kingdoms on earth. A rival, named Yang Xiuqing, claimed that he was the Holy Ghost, thus senior to Christ’s younger brother. And the Heavenly King began to behave in the manner of decadent Chinese rulers before and indeed after him. More and more remote from his people, pampered by a harem of concubines (even as his subjects were clubbed to death on the merest suspicion of adultery), he obsessively combed the Bible for references to his sacred mission in China.13

  When the Qing armies, supported by Western powers, who did not like the Taiping attitudes to trade nor their version of the Christian faith, finally laid siege to Nanjing in 1864, it did not take long for the Heavenly Kingdom to come crashing down. The people starved, even as their king promised that God would drop manna from Heaven. The king himself died, ostensibly to join his elder brother. God’s help failed to materialize. And those who survived the famine were massacred, some of them drowned in sewage flooding the tunnels the Qing troops had dug under the city walls. Once order was restored, as many as thirty million people had died as a consequence of a failed Confucian scholar’s religious dream.

  If Voltaire had been alive, the terrible story of the Taiping would doubtless have confirmed his dim view of Christianity. Here was proof, if ever it was needed, of the destructive forces unleashed by monotheistic dogma.

  Would he have been right?

  That Christian hysteria can be murderous is hardly news. But in this case, an older current of violent millenarianism ran under the veneer of Christianity, which appears and reappears throughout Chinese history whenever the powers of an imperial dynasty wane. The Taipings were a dramatic symptom of the Qing Dynasty’s weakness. When Hong had his first intimations of divinity, China was being humiliated by British gunships in the Opium Wars. The common fate of feeble rulers in China is to be overthrown by men who promise to purge the world of moral corruption and rebuild Heaven on earth.

  If rebellion usually had a religious component in China, so did imperial rule. The story of the founding emperor of imperial China, Qin Shi Huang, literally the First Emperor, would have bolstered Voltaire’s claim for the superior wisdom of Confucianism even further. For the First Emperor, who conquered several kingdoms to establish a Chinese Empire in 221 BC, who standardized Chinese script as well as weights and measures, and who built the beginnings of the Great Wall, was a pitiless enemy of the Confucian scholars and their traditional mores.

  Since Chinese history was written by Confucian scholars, accounts of the First Emperor’s wickedness are bound to be exaggerated. We do not know all that much about him. But he did exist, China was unified, and we know that Legalism was the philosophical foundation of his rule. The emperor and his chief adviser, Li Si, sought to control the population through a punitive legal code meant to inspire terror rather than respect. The many grand projects embarked on during Qin Shi Huang’s rule, which lasted until 210 BC, such as roads, canals, dams, and of course the Great Wall, were the result of mass mobilization and military discipline imposed by harsh punishments for any infringements of the laws.

  From what little we know, the First Emperor aspired to be not just a worldly despot but also a master of the spiritual realm. If nature was divine, something ancient Chinese, including the emperor himself, almost certainly believed, he tried to conquer it, not just by damming great rivers but by quite literally stamping the landscape with written Chinese characters, as though claiming the ownership of a vast work of art by adorning it with his imperial seal. The written character is the chief symbol of Chinese civilization, which is why Chinese (as well as Japanese and Korean) rulers still like to display their calligraphy in public places, to show that civilization is in good hands. Inscribing mountain slopes and other places of natural beauty with official slogans—a habit that persists to this day—is a demonstration that all under Heaven is under the ruler’s control. And all under Heaven meant Chinese civilization, or civilization tout court. The Great Wall, originally built to keep the northern nomads from encroaching on the empire, came in time to have a more symbolic function as the barrier separating the civilized from the barbarians.

  The emperor’s full title was Huangdi. Di is actually an ancient term for a divinity, or supreme being. Like Napoleon crowning himself in the presence of the pope or Nero declaring his own divine status, adopting this title was a way for the First Emperor to appropriate any form of spiritual or mystical authority that might be used against him. As is often the case with despotic rulers, the emperor became obsessed with his mortality, searching for elixirs to live forever. Necromancers, foolish enough to foresee his end, were murdered. Even nature itself was punished for natural disasters that might be construed as ill omens. The emperor, according to legend, once had a mountain destroyed after a devastating storm blew from its wintry peak. The emperor’s death finally came as the result of swallowing mercury pills, which were believed to make him immortal but in fact speeded his death. Worried that the announcement of the ruler’s mortality might create chaos and confusion in the empire, the imperial corpse was kept in a carriage by his courtiers, who tried to disguise the smell of putrefaction by hitching it to two wagons filled with rotten fish.

  Confucius, who died more than two hundred years earlier, would surely have deplored the First Emperor’s hubris. Legalism was the antithesis of his thinking. This is why the emperor banned the Confucian classics and, again according to legend, had the heads of Confucian scholars lopped off after burying them up to their necks. He saw them as a threat, precisely because they put traditional mores above the letter of the law. They “used the past to criticize the present,” which was taken as a direct challenge to the legitimacy of his rule. For this he was, quite understandably, denounced as a frightful tyrant by generations of Chinese historians.

  The First Emperor’s reputation only changed for the better in relatively recent times. Mao Zedong, who also loathed Confucianism, and indeed all intellectuals who used the past to criticize the present, rather admired the First Emperor, as indeed he admired the Heavenly King of the Taiping. The latter, in his view (as well as that of Karl Marx), was a great rebel hero and the former a great unifier. Mao, in his own eyes, and those of his admirers, was both. After hounding many men to their deaths in one of his bloody purges, Mao once said: “[The First Emperor] buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried forty-six thousand scholars alive. . . . You [intellectuals] revile us for being Qin Shi Huangs. You are wrong. We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold.”14

  Neither Legalism nor millenarianism, then, can be said to have been conducive to liberal rule, let alone anything resembling democracy. Confucianism, at its best, was certainly more moderate. Whatever later generations of Confucian philosophers made of the Master’s words, Confucius himself held that government, to be successful, had to be based on popular consent. Even though Confucius, like so many great figures in Chinese history, was eventually venerated as a deity, he was a thoroughly secular figure during his lifetime. And yet, when it comes to the influence of metaphysics in political affairs, the case for Confucianism is not so straightforward. Modern Chinese critics of Confucianism, who saw it as an ideological barrier
to “Mr. Democracy,” may have had a point.

  In the Chinese tradition, harmony of the universe and harmony of society, politics, and cosmology are inseparable. Hence, the importance of omens and natural phenomena but also rites. Since the Chinese ruler was given the mandate of Heaven to be the custodian of cosmic as well as social harmony, he was the source of spiritual as well as secular authority. It was the duty of the Confucian mandarins to protect his authority by imposing their moral ideology on society. They were the guardians of the ruler’s virtue and the “priests,” as it were, of the official dogma that gave legitimacy to the state.

  Confucius, and later Mencius, conceded that the people had the right to rebel against rulers who no longer provided them with social order or an adequate supply of food. If disharmony ruled, the mandate of Heaven would be withdrawn. But since politics, morality, and cosmology were so closely linked, political transformations would normally be couched in spiritual and moral terms. In this sense, millenarian rebels, such as the Taiping, lived in the same mental universe as the Confucianists. If society is held together by moral virtue and the Will of Heaven, and not by social contract or law, then any rebellion has to be seen as an attempt to restore virtue and appease Heaven.

  Until monarchs were divested of their divine rights, more or less the same might be said about European politics, too. And the relative importance of shared ethics and the rule of law in modern democracies is still a matter of debate in Europe no less than Asia. The question is whether the split between spiritual and secular authority, which occurred in Europe, ever took place in China.

  In theory this should have happened when China had its revolution in 1911. The Qing Dynasty was brought down, ending more than two thousand years of imperial history, and the Chinese Republic was founded. This followed decades of reforms, rebellions, and harsh crackdowns. In 1900, the Boxers United in Righteousness, or Boxers for short, a band of martial arts enthusiasts inspired by folk beliefs and popular stories about righteous rebels, tried to revive China’s spirit by attacking foreign missionaries. One of their poetic effusions ran as follows:

  There are many Christian converts

  Who have lost their senses,

  They deceive our Emperor,

  Destroy the gods we worship,

  Pull down our temples and altars,

  Permit neither joss-sticks nor candles,

  Cast away tracts on ethics,

  And ignore reason.

  Don’t you realize that

  Their aim is to engulf our country?”15

  The Boxers were mostly rural folk who believed that spirits would make them invulnerable to bullets or swords. In the way the Boxers viewed China’s decadence in moral or indeed spiritual terms, they were not just typical of previous insurgents but set the tone for rebellions to come. They were defeated by the foreign powers, who were perhaps less interested in saving missionaries and spreading the gospel than in protecting their commercial interests.

  Even on a much higher intellectual plane, many late nineteenth-century Chinese reformers with liberal ideas were traditional moralists at heart. Kang Youwei, for example, was an extraordinary thinker who combined Confucian notions of humanism with socialist ideas on public welfare, state education, and female emancipation. Although he never shook off its influence, he rebelled against his Confucian education and wanted to destroy the traditional Chinese family. But he became most famous for his mystical vision of uniting mankind under one benevolent government. What was needed was not just a political change (he was in favor, at various times, of a constitutional monarchy and a communist state) but a spiritual transformation. Only then would China, and ultimately the world, rise to great heights again.

  Sun Yat-sen, the father of the 1911 Revolution, picked up progressive ideas from his studies in Japan and the West and wanted to make China into a democracy, as he understood it. Like many people at the time, especially in East Asia, Sun was much taken by social Darwinism. In the struggle for survival, only the fittest races had a chance. The Chinese race, he believed, would take hold of its destiny by getting rid of the Manchus and building a democratic, socialist state. Even now, many Chinese still feel the humiliation of the late empire, when China was not only ruled by Manchus but was too weak to resist being exploited by Western imperialists. Sun wrote in 1906: “Our nation is the most populous, most ancient, and most civilized in the world, yet today we are a lost nation. . . . [O]ur ancestors did all they could for our prosperity; it is we, their descendents, who should feel ashamed.”16

  Apart from being a Darwinist, as well as a Chinese patriot, Sun was also a Christian. In a speech to Chinese Christians in Beijing, he said: “Several years ago, when I first advocated a revolution and began working and agitating for one, I knew that the essence of such a revolution could be found largely in the teachings of the Church. Today, it is the Church, not my efforts, that is responsible for the Republic of China.”17

  Of course he knew to whom he was speaking. Few Chinese would have taken this view. But in the sense that he saw the revolution in moral, even religious, terms, he was not only speaking his own mind but also conforming to a familiar Chinese pattern. Many Christians around the world would have shared his idea of politics, of course, but Chinese Christians, especially those of Sun’s generation, bore the imprint of two traditions: their Christian ethics were grafted onto a Confucian view of the world, and especially of their own society as a moral universe whose harmony, based not on laws or contracts but on moral ideals, should mirror the harmony of Heaven.

  The May 4 Movement of 1919 was not on the face of it a religious enterprise. It was sparked by the Treaty of Versailles, which concluded World War I. The Chinese government was unable to prevent the Western powers from handing over German concessions in China to Japan, a belated and largely passive participant in the Great War. To Beijing University students and a number of patriotic intellectuals, this was a sure sign that the government was too corrupt, weak, and cowardly to safeguard the nation’s interests. So they called for a national revival, a political, moral, and cultural housecleaning. The cobwebs of the past, especially Confucianism, should be swept away, and “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” would rule. Indeed, the whole idea of what it meant to be Chinese needed rethinking. Lu Xun, the leading writer of the movement, observed that the 1911 Revolution had failed to change the Chinese character. What was at stake was not just politics but civilization itself.

  Since Chinese civilization is symbolized by the written word, the Chinese language became a central topic of debate. One of the most striking figures at the time was Chen Duxiu, who argued for the abolition of classical Chinese as an elitist expression of outmoded ideas. He, too, was a moralist, in a Darwinist but also a quasi-Confucian way. The Chinese people would be “eliminated in the process of natural selection,” he said, if they were unable to cultivate their individual characters.18 Chen became one of the first members of the Chinese Communist Party in 1920.

  “May 4,” in fact, represented many things. It promoted an almost blind faith in science. Democratic change was called for, as well as a new Chinese prose style. The word “new” popped up as a mantra in pamphlets, slogans, books, and periodicals. What was not new, however, was the all-encompassing ambition of the movement, the ideal of a born-again, unified China. Not all who participated were Marxists. Some were liberals, followers of John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, or Herbert Spencer. But Marxism lent itself well to a people in motion, especially the bookish Chinese. It was “scientific,” modern, anti-capitalist, egalitarian, and theoretical. It also had a unifying dogma to replace Confucianism. It promised the birth of a new morality, a new man, a new China. What was still lacking was an emperor, blessed with a mandate from Heaven. Chen Duxiu was unable to take on that role. Mao Zedong did instead, which is why Chen was written out of the history books, for the divine chairman brooked no rivals.

  Mao unified China and imposed a harsh new order, in the manner of the First Emperor. For this he is
still venerated by many Chinese. Some traditionalists even worship him as a folk god, whose golden image dangles from many a rearview mirror in Chinese taxis.

  In some respects Mao’s rule was a caricature of the worst aspects of traditional Chinese politics. He borrowed from the Legalists a system of draconian punishments for the merest hints of dissent. The cult of the Little Red Book was a grotesque echo of the dogmatism of Confucian ideologues. The enforced veneration of Mao’s words, especially his calligraphy, turned the respect for the written word in Chinese civilization into a cult of the ruler himself. He was worshiped as a god, especially during the Cultural Revolution, when the simple act of crumpling up a newspaper bearing his image could lead to a death sentence. If ever there was a case of religious and secular authority being one and the same, Maoism was it. As in the Soviet Union under Stalin, or Hitler’s Germany, this proved the danger of forcing people to renounce all religious beliefs and to worship a worldly leader instead.

  Still, Mao was right to fear that charismatic rule cannot last. It never did in Chinese history. The messianic founders of new dynasties, who came to power through millenarian rebellions, were followed by weaker men who let the mandarins run the empire while they withdrew into their palaces to write elegant poems or play with their concubines. (Mao also conformed to this pattern for extended periods, only to reemerge as a ferocious tyrant.) Mao was followed by Deng Xiaoping, an able and sometimes ruthless leader who did not aspire to a cult of his person. And then came a succession of bureaucrats who still have their calligraphy, as well as their scholarly works (written by other bureaucrats), published to show that they are civilized men. They are far from being gods.