Empire of Lies

by Guy Sorman

  Tell me, asks Liu Xia, what is the difference between European fascism and Chinese communism? I keep quiet. Xia continues, “From the Thirties until 1950, French intellectuals had to visit Moscow. Romain Rolland, Louis Aragon, André Malraux—all heaped praise on the Stalinist regime. The same people or those who followed them now venerate China.” One thinks of Malraux, said to be enamored of Stalin and Mao. Malraux was also the first French writer to have had a Chinese hero, Chen, in his book The Human Condition. But Chen was a faceless being with no personality of his own; being Chinese was enough to define him. No other character of Malraux has been dealt with in this way. Could this be a subconscious reflection of a certain image of China, one not peopled by any identifiable characters? The only writer who preserved France’s honor in the Thirties was André Gide, who condemned Soviet fascism in his Return from the USSR. When will there be another Gide to denounce Chinese communism?” asks Liu Xia. She says French intellectuals liked Mao and the Cultural Revolution because they never experienced the events from within. I offered another explanation: perhaps, they were attracted to a kind of vicarious, revolutionary violence. Sartre was no more a humanist than Mao. “They liked violence for its own sake,” she replies.

  The Propaganda Department has successfully implanted a preposterous idea in the Western media: certainly, the Party is not democratic, but it is preventing China from sliding into fascism, an inevitability if it disintegrates. Liu Xia knows this argument well; it is one used by the Chinese media as well, on Party orders. Such a worthless argument merits no reply.

  It is with a heavy heart that I leave Liu Xia, the “Jew” who has won a reprieve. She remains a hostage of a fascist regime.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Mystics

  “There is only one God: Jesus.” Old Li’s theology may be shaky, but his faith is not. I met Li quite by chance at Baoji in Shaanxi Province, located in central China. Wherever I went, I kept bumping into Christians; they seemed to be everywhere. Are there really so many, or is it just that they are more visible?

  For a country the size of China, Baoji is a medium-size town, with a population of 800,000. Like all Chinese cities, it is an ordinary town, with nothing left of the pre-Sixties. Spicy noodles are its sole claim to fame. People stop at wayside stalls to eat them out of huge bowls. Communism has destroyed traditional architecture but has not been able to touch the large variety of local food. I met Li at an old people’s home, hardly the kind of place to figure on a traveler’s itinerary. But in a country where children are duty-bound to look after their parents, the home is nothing short of a revolution. So much for filial piety! Traditions are fast dying out in this single-child society, enamored of materialism. The aged have increasingly been left to their fate; the only time their children come to see them is at the New Year festival. The Baoji old people’s home is a plain building. Since it receives no public aid, it takes in only pensioners who can pay. All the inmates are former civil servants.

  The lady in charge assured me, “None of the pensioners has had any political trouble.” I did not quite understand what she meant. But discrimination, to a greater or lesser degree, is a characteristic of Chinese society as a whole. Though these right-thinking civil servants do pay for their upkeep, the money is not enough; volunteers come in every day to visit and take care of the kitchen garden that provides their meals.

  Old Li is a volunteer, even if his emaciated body and ageless face give him the appearance of a resident. But his eyes shine with the dancing light of a mystic. He loves Jesus, who he says made him good and, as he says, “made him run.” Li calls himself a “new Christian.” He wants to distinguish himself from China’s old Christians, who were Christians because their ancestors had converted. He is a new Christian because his conversion is recent and because in Chinese, “new religion” means our reformed churches. A “Christian” in Chinese is a Protestant, as opposed to a Roman Catholic. Orthodox Christians, who can be found in northern China under Russian influence, claim theirs is the “true religion.”

  Before becoming Christian, Li was a Maoist—but not a communist, he hastens to add. As a worker in a Baoji factory, he didn’t have enough education to join the Party. He is full of praise for Mao Zedong. What does he think of Deng Xiaoping’s “70 percent good, 30 percent wrong” analysis? He is incensed. “Mao was 100 percent good for China.” Li’s story is proof. He had steadily worked his way up the workers’ hierarchy to reach the seventh echelon, the highest. At sixty, he settled into a comfortable retirement. His wife, a teacher, has also retired. She, too, is Christian. Their joint pension seems a pittance when converted to dollars, but life is not expensive in Baoji. Had he never been a victim of the extortions of the Red Guard? He didn’t know what I was talking about. He hadn’t seen anything of the Cultural Revolution. His “work unit” had paid him his wages, given him food and accommodation. He had heard of the misfortunes of some, but they were “black families,” landowners and enemies of the people. No one he knew came from such families. He has vague memories of schools being closed for reasons he has forgotten and youngsters with nothing to do. People do “silly things” at that age. Fortunately, Mao Zedong restored order and sent everyone back to school. That was how Li, a worker of the seventh echelon and a member of the workers’ aristocracy, had experienced Maoism. This is also what schoolchildren learn in their textbooks.

  American-Chinese Christians

  Soon after he retired, Li began to find it hard to swallow. He tried everything he could but got no relief. Then his wife heard of a bishop, a certain Wang. The bishop placed both his hands on old Li’s head and called upon Jesus. Li was cured and converted. Both he and his wife started attending catechism. They read the Gospel, learned hymns, and joined the Christian community of the Living Source. They were baptized together. The community has 2,500 faithful in Baoji. On Sunday mornings, they congregate joyously in the newly built temple in the city center. Bishop Wang, ninety-seven years old, leads the prayer and delivers lengthy sermons. He takes care not to ask people to convert or make them go into a trance, as is the practice of Pentecostal celebrants. He carefully follows the code of conduct that the Party laid down for authorized pastors.

  The bishop says Christians are “good and charitable, obedient children and good parents.” For Bishop Wang, the Gospel is like the epistles of Confucius; there is no contradiction. “Jesus is as Chinese as he is European,” he says. This was a lesson he had learned from an American pastor who converted him in 1942. At the time, he had been a young peasant in Shaanxi. His entire family had followed him on the path of Christianity. “Buddha was Indian, not Chinese, yet Buddhism is a Chinese religion. So Christianity is and will remain Chinese.” What about the notion of original sin? It is a concept alien to every belief and tradition in China. Would the Chinese have to embrace it to become Christians, or the Christians abandon it to become Chinese? Bishop Wang once again states: “There is only one God.” His disciple Li listens rapturously. He is stirred by the vitality of his bishop and does not profess the least interest in abstruse metaphysics.

  The authorities have given a great deal of latitude to the large congregation assembled in this huge temple. “Christians only do good,” Wang says, “so the local government cannot but encourage them.” What he does not say is that the religion he belongs to has the Party’s blessings and that he himself is paid by the Party. In exchange, he has agreed to respect “the three principles of autonomy” of the church in China: no foreign missions, no foreign subsidy, and no interference from foreign ecclesiastics. A Communist apparatchik vets his sermons. In addition, every Sunday he has to denounce the Falun Gong sect, a task he does not find distasteful. Wang shares the Party’s views about Catholics, more tightly controlled than the Protestants. “They pray to the pope, not to God. The pope only recognizes Taiwan, not real China.”

  Hadn’t Taiwanese Christians helped in building the Protestant temple of Baoji? Yes, but they were originally from Shaanxi. They had “str
ayed” to Taiwan. The church piano, too, had been donated by a Baoji immigrant in California. In fact, the church’s entire look was American. Wang had cut out a photo of a Los Angeles temple from a magazine and asked local artisans to replicate it. Was it an evangelical, Baptist, or Pentecostal church, or something else? Wang said it was pointless to go into details. He did not make any distinction between these reformed sects. You had to know only one thing: “There are real Christians, and there are Catholics, who are heretics.” Did he approve of the “Protestants of silence”? Yu Jie had spoken of them and their practice of meeting without a pastor to study the Bible. Both Wang and Li claimed not to have heard of them. That was probably true. The house churches recruit first and foremost intellectuals in big cities. Will the Protestants of silence and the patriotic Protestants together be able to constitute the critical spiritual and revolutionary mass that Yu Jie hopes for? It seems unlikely, for their motivations are not the same.

  For his part, Li, still a Maoist and a patriot, rails against the conduct of the pontiff. The Catholics pray to the pope, not God, he charges. What kind of Christians does that make them? “Catholicism is all well and good for Shaanxi peasants. They’re a credulous lot. Some of them have even joined the Falun Gong. It just shows how stupid they are and their inability to recognize the true God.” Li and Wang, because they are against the Vatican and the Falun Gong, are close to the Party line. This makes them appear more as objective allies of the Party than as dissidents.

  But how far can the Protestants go, and how much influence will they have in the future? No one can tell. Like his fellow brethren, Li is not satisfied just believing. He feels that he must spread the faith. “Jesus makes me run,” he says. It is a fact that Li is traveling across China. New Christians are zealous proselytizers, a factor that has contributed significantly to the growth of official Protestant churches. When he is not helping out at the old people’s home, Li travels by train or bus to meet other Christians and convert new ones. He wants China to become “a large happy family, united by a single God.” He seems to recall that this was what President Mao Zedong wanted.

  Li’s faith may well move mountains, but can it move the Communist Party? There is a curious link between Christianity and communism in China. In 1899, a Protestant pastor introduced the country to Communist thought through The Global Magazine, a review he published in Shanghai. It was there that Sun Yat-sen discovered The Communist Manifesto. Until today, the Chinese Party remains grateful to this unusual missionary. The present alliance between official Protestants and the Party is reminiscent of an older association between the Jesuits and the imperial court. Yesterday’s Jesuits and today’s evangelists both brought their God to China under the guise of modernity. But whereas the Jesuits failed to impose Catholicism as the official religion of the Empire, the Protestants may well succeed. American churches are at work behind the scenes, and their resources are immense.

  The myth of an atheist China: a Jesuit invention

  Why are we blind to the gods in China when they are so prolific? Peopled with Buddhas, saints, and immortals, the Chinese pantheon is no less impressive than the Indian one. There is a reason for our blindness. Our understanding of the Chinese civilization was shaped by the travel accounts of Italian and French Jesuits and all their prejudices. The misconceptions we formed persisted for three centuries in our literature and philosophy. Take, for instance, Louis Lecomte, the father of sinology, or of the French love of things Chinese, to be more precise. When, in the footsteps of that other great pioneer, the Italian Matteo Ricci, Father Lecomte visited China from 1686 to 1691, he decided resolutely to ignore the temples and faiths. In his New Memoirs on the Present Situation in China, he wrote that the Chinese practiced the godless morality expounded by the atheist philosopher Confucius. His writings contributed greatly to the theories of the Enlightenment. Surely, our Jesuit concluded, with their fine sense of morality the Chinese were living in the expectation of the God of the Christians. They were empty vessels waiting to be filled. This was the argument that the Jesuits supported since the time of Matteo Ricci in their bid to win favor with the pope and the courts of Europe.

  Were Lecomte and all the missionaries sincere? How could they not have seen the temples overflowing with people day and night, the impressive ceremonies, the long funerals, the incense, the bells, the Daoist masters and the Buddhist monks, the two main religions of old China that owed nothing to Confucius? When Lecomte was in China, there were more temples in Beijing than churches in any European city. Beijing was a holy city. Yet he dismissed all this as “a bunch of superstitious practices of the Chinese,” unworthy of being treated as religions. Until the twentieth century, no French travelers after Lecomte took the slightest interest in Daoism, the source of these “superstitious practices.” Nor did they bother about Chinese Buddhism.

  A Chinese traveler to Europe observing Europeans cross themselves in front of a crucifix or burn a candle in front of the icon of a saint could just as easily have concluded that Europeans were a superstitious people without religion.

  There are none so blind as those who will not see. So it was for our feckless explorers. The Jesuits only chose to mix with mandarins who held both the popular religions in contempt and did their best to repress them. The mandarins were disciples of Confucius, whom they used to legitimize social order, hierarchy, stability, respect for elders, and veneration of the emperor by his subjects. What of Confucius the philosopher? The Confucians, said Matteo Ricci, constituted an academy of learned men to which Christians could easily subscribe. Confucius claimed to base his philosophy on the revelations of a mythical golden age. Was Confucianism a religion or a philosophy? If a philosophy, it was certainly not a secular one, with its temples, rituals, and sacrifices. Buffaloes were slaughtered, the Master of Heaven invoked, and ancestors worshiped. Was it, then, an atheist religion? The concept found favor with Leibniz, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. In his Essay on Universal History, Voltaire asserted that Chinese society was characterized by a high degree of morality even though it had no religion. An abstract god, the Master of Heaven, kept watch. Evidently, the Supreme Being of the French philosophers had Chinese origins. And atheist French intellectuals have always felt a great affinity for China and its supposedly godless society.

  The accounts of the Dutch travelers were at variance with the French view of China. These travelers had come to trade, not to evangelize. Consequently, they had a very different perception of seventeenth-century China; they were more attentive to the popular religions than to the Confucianism of the court. Dealing mainly with bourgeois guilds, they had little to do with the celestial bureaucrats. Two centuries later, the situation remains the same. Northern Europe continues to trade with China without a very developed diplomatic relationship. Public opinion is sensitive to human rights violations in China. It is just the opposite in France. Ideology triumphs over pragmatism. Having inherited the Jesuit worldview and being partial to the idea of enlightened despotism, French leaders are happy to do business with “strong” Beijing regimes. Civil society and democrats do not count. The accommodating attitude toward the establishment is meant to protect our interests. It also stems from our ignorance of Daoism, the religion of the people, which is both individualistic and rebellious.

  Daoism, the religion of subversion

  In China, the elite have had one religion, the people another. The conflict persists; it has only assumed a new form. Confucianism was the ideology of the ruling class and its civil servants, the atheist religion at the top. Confucian cosmology established a hierarchy between man and nature. The world could be preserved only if man submitted to the higher order. Of course, the rules of such an order were known only to the princes and mandarins. Daoism and Buddhism were the religions of the ordinary people. In Europe, we are conversant with Buddhism but know little or nothing of Daoism. Lao-tzu, a contemporary of Confucius and Plato, said that in the beginning there was Tao, or the Way. Daoism is, in point of fact, the real great
religion of China. All the sects in China, including Christianity and Buddhism, have been visibly influenced by it.

  Daoism is the antithesis of Confucianism. In Daoist cosmology, man and nature merge. Our body is but a representation of nature. It is by taking care of the self that we can maintain the order of the world. In the image of the sages and immortals that people its pantheon, the Daoist aspires to longevity and prosperity for both the self and the immediate community but displays indifference to the Imperial State.

  The Daoist and Confucian cosmologies gave rise to two distinct ideologies, the Confucians looking to the state and the Daoists to the individual. “A good prince,” wrote Lao-tzu, “is one whose name no one knows.” Hostile to the established order, Daoists remain free spirits to this day, refusing to be cowed by the state and its agents. In the golden age of Daoism, unlike the golden age of Confucianism, man lived in harmony with nature and at peace with his neighbors. That was “before the princes introduced turmoil because it was their will to decide everything in accordance with abstract principles,” Master Bao Jingyan wrote in the third century A.D. His thoughts, truly anarchist, were translated into the French by Jean Lévi.

  Daoism is a democratic creed. At the time of the Empire, the faithful elected their priests. The elected leaders of Daoist associations were aldermen responsible for law and order and well-being. In the nineteenth century, Daoist associations in overseas Chinese colonies, especially Borneo, transformed themselves into democratic republics. They were crushed by the Dutch, who had colonized Borneo. These Chinese Daoists were not passive nor did they conform to the stereotype in which the Confucians and Jesuits sought to enclose them. Daoist temples were havens of civil society that resisted the highhandedness of the administration. In overseas China, the Daoist temples were and remain places of economic solidarity and initiative. Many a Chinese venture has been financed by a Daoist association. This is still the case in Taiwan. Most of the 10,000 Chinese restaurants in the United States got started thanks to funds raised by Daoist associations. In 2005, the sinologist and philosopher François Jullien wrote, “It is impossible to understand contemporary China without understanding Confucianism.” But can China be understood without any knowledge of Daoism?