Empire of Lies

by Guy Sorman

  Daoism practices tolerance, enabling the Chinese to amalgamate diverse practices and sinicize beliefs that came from elsewhere. In India, only monks who renounced the world could become Buddhists. Not so in China. Any lay person could do so as long as he revered the Buddha and followed his precepts. Like the Daoist immortals, the Chinese Buddha became an intercessor. In turn, Daoism derived a great deal from Buddhism, in particular its spirit of compassion. From the Confucians, the Chinese took geomancy and the cult of the ancestors. Kristofer Schipper, a sociologist of Daoism, notes that the various religions, including Islam and Christianity, coexisted peacefully, as if governed by a concordat. From time immemorial, the faithful mingled freely in the towns and villages of China. There was never any segregation.

  Westerners often wonder if the Chinese know the meaning of individual freedom. Their religions provide the answer. There is a plethora of gods and cults, but all are based on the principle of inner freedom. Regardless of whether one is Daoist, Confucian, or Buddhist, one is answerable for one’s acts, the individual merit of which is rewarded. The reward is here on earth for the Daoists and Confucians, in the other world for the Buddhists. I hope this description demolishes the pseudo-cultural hypothesis that denies the Chinese free will and declares them unfit for democracy.

  No, communism is not Confucian

  Was communism not just another form of Confucianism, which was the religion of the state during the Empire? This is yet another hypothesis that the Party puts forth and that is currently in vogue in the West. It provides a certain mystique and allows the Party to mitigate its exactions. If the Party is part of a long tradition, it cannot be criticized for its misdemeanors. Tradition, after all, must be respected. The Party is also aware that Confucius retains a certain appeal in China, and even more so outside, whereas Karl Marx and Mao Zedong have lost their luster. It makes more strategic sense, then, to hide behind Confucius.

  To give credence to this semblance of cultural continuity, the Party has recently had some “temples of Confucius” restored. Some are not temples at all but old examination halls where learned contenders competed to become mandarins. They are museums. The real places of worship, where the sacrifices and rituals were performed, have been destroyed. This is the Party’s way of sanitizing Confucianism, presenting it as an abstract philosophy shorn of the divine. As part of the same firefighting exercise in the Year of the Rooster, the Party has rebuilt the walls of Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius in Shandong. It is thought that he was born there twenty-five centuries ago. All the inhabitants of the city are named Kong. Qufu has become an amusement park for Chinese and foreign tourists. In this way, an austere creed has been cleverly packaged and marketed, and Confucianism has become yet another commodity.

  To further obfuscate the real nature of Confucianism, the Party is falling back on rhetoric that ostensibly borrows from Confucian vocabulary or anything that sounds like it. The new feature in the Year of the Rooster is the liberal use of words such as “harmony”and “frugality,” vague terms that one can associate with any Oriental religion. Does one have to invoke Confucius and harmony to get children to respect their parents, students their teachers, and, most of all, subjects the Party?

  The leaders, starting from the head of the state, have gone one step further in this phony Confucianism, advocating moral lessons to inculcate “values” in students. In his New Year speech, Hu Jintao said the youth must receive “ethical” (read: Confucian) education and “ideological” (read: Marxist) education, suggesting that Confucianism and Marxism were complementary. This spirit of syncretism has prompted a spate of lectures by Confucian philosophers in the Party schools where the cadres are trained. The leaders hope that this return to values will result in greater probity among the apparatchiks and a decline in corruption. Whether the leaders really believe that their discourse on values is enough to change the behavior of the Party is a debatable point. We are entering an arcane domain, one that the uninitiated cannot hope to penetrate. It is as if the members of a sect had been hypnotized by the constant repetition of their own rituals.

  Such dubious discourse on values deserves to be trashed. The history of the relationship between the Party and Confucianism is proof of their total incompatibility. From the May 4 student movement of 1919 to the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76, every uprising in contemporary China has been against Confucianism. “Down with Master Kong!” was the slogan in 1919 and in 1966, two defining moments in China’s “progressive” march forward. The Party destroyed Confucianism on the ground that it was reactionary, harking back to a golden age. The Party itself worships a golden age, but one still to come. As Confucians held the very idea of progress in aversion, it was natural that the communists would vilify them, offering instead their own version of Confucian philosophy. True Confucianism was based on a specific set of rites and rituals, celebrations and sacrifices. Its liturgy has been forgotten and its priests eliminated. No one reads the texts of Confucius; perhaps no one even knows how. What remains is the selective incantation of those Confucian values that suit the Party. Even if they do know them, Chinese leaders are careful not to quote the writings of Confucius and Mencius against despotism. The power of the sovereign was limited, curtailed by the rights of his subjects. We must keep this in mind before giving any verdict on the cultural continuity of an eternal China and the reductionist view of communism as a continuation of the Empire in a new garb. Anticlericalism is, in point of fact, the only tradition the Party can claim to draw its inspiration from.

  How anticlericalism ravaged China

  Anticlericalism is not new to the Chinese. It is by no means a Communist invention. Close contact with the West convinced Chinese emperors of Europe’s technical superiority. If China wanted to catch up, moral reform was required. The Japanese, however, chose to reform the state, a task they began in 1868. This is an important date. It was then that China and Japan embarked on separate paths; ever since, they have differed in their approaches. The Japanese emperor got rid of the old elite to build a new one. In China, the educated aristocracy of Beijing found nothing wrong with the country’s institutions. It was traditions and superstitions that had caused the decline. So from 1898 onward, the state and the provinces took over Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian temples. In principle, they were to be converted into schools. Many places of worship were desecrated and destroyed, monasteries dispersed, and Daoist masters were liquidated. There were hardly any schools, but some universities, including the first universities of Beijing and Fuzhou, continued to be housed in old temples and their gardens. The Cultural Revolution, generally associated with the destruction of religious edifices, was an extension of the progressives’ iconoclastic outburst. The French Terror of 1793 and the 1917 Soviet Revolution are perhaps the only equivalents in history. In the immediate neighborhood, however, Korea and Japan successfully married religion and modernity.

  This hatred for popular gods is specifically Chinese. Why did the political elite dislike them so much? The contempt of Confucian bureaucrats for popular, Daoist, and Buddhist “superstitions” smacked of the same anticlericalism before they, too, came to be objects of contempt. Another reason was the humiliation of the Chinese elite when confronted with Western “superiority.” The ease with which Westerners subjugated the people with opium convinced the elite that all was not well with Chinese civilization. It had to be eradicated and replaced by something new. The obsession to destroy the old and build a modern Chinese individual rid of his superstitions and fears dates back to this period. We need to see the violence of the revolutions in this light. Anything old—temple, city, monument, archive—had to be destroyed. Foreigners look in vain for traces of old China. Beijing was leveled and rebuilt. The destruction of old China was a deliberate policy. Only the ashes remain, preserved as remembrances and not as places that once breathed life.

  The self-hatred responsible for the complete annihilation of religion and a large part of their heritage can be found neither in India nor
in Japan. Japan was never colonized, so it had no reason to reject tradition. India was colonized, but there was none of the humiliation that changed China into a nation of opium addicts. India boasts of as many religions as those of ancient China, yet no one in India suggests progress hinges on the extermination of religion.

  Sadly, state anticlericalism led to the opposite of what the progressives had hoped for. Certainly, religions were greatly weakened, especially Confucianism, more dependent on rites than on inner conviction. Daoist and Buddhist churches suffered. They lost their places of worship, liturgical books were destroyed, the clerics and the faithful scattered. In the name of progress, a rich and ancient legacy was wrecked; the destruction was comparable to the obliteration of pre-Columbian civilization in America. A social disaster was waiting to happen. Charity and solidarity existed only in Daoist and Buddhist associations. There was no institution to replace them, leaving the poor, the old, the infirm, and the unemployed with no place to go to. In the Year of the Rooster, the Chinese government urged Buddhists to rebuild old people’s homes and dispensaries. But perhaps it was too late. Economic disaster was to come as well. Daoist associations had acted as banks that financed enterprises in China and overseas. Their elimination deprived mainland China of time-tested practices on which a flourishing trade had been built in the past.

  Has all this led the Party to give up its policy of ridding China of its gods? No, it has only changed its methods. As in the case of the democrats, the repression is more subtle. People are free to believe, provided they do not organize themselves; if they do, it has to be under Party supervision. Religions are authorized only if they follow the instructions of the patriotic Daoist, Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim associations. Needless to say, these are branches of the Party in charge of organizational matters. They also meddle in theology when they think it is not sufficiently rational. The instruction booklet for monks brought out by the Daoist Association states: “Attaining immortality through inner refinement and alchemy is quite obviously impossible.” This may be a scientific claim, but it questions the truth of a belief that lies at the very heart of Daoism.

  Turning religions into museums is another way of doing away with them. Daoist temples were allowed to reopen in 1990 under the control of the tourist offices. What interests the Party is the tourist appeal of these picturesque temples and the income they rake in to the public coffers. Take the case of the famous Mount Wudang monastery in Hubei Province, which for five centuries welcomed hermits desirous of escaping the world. In the past, pilgrims had to cross the forest and climb thousands of stairs to reach the temple. Today, a cable car takes them up. The monks looking after the monastery sell postcards and religious trinkets. A few remaining pilgrims, recognizable by their yellow caps, try to pray to the gods, surrounded by hordes of noisy tourists armed with cameras. “Look, religion can once again be practiced freely in China!” Communist leaders tell us. Yet all that remains in Beijing of the 700 temples that existed before the Revolution is a single Daoist structure—the White Clouds temple—which has been sanctioned officially and is more like a museum than a place of worship. The government is doing exactly the same thing in Tibet: reducing places of national and religious importance to tourist spots. The lures of tourism are more likely to wipe out Tibetan Buddhism than the People’s Army.

  The gods are tired

  I visited old temples and saw new churches coming up, but when I looked closely, none seemed real. They were more like centers of the Communist Party and committees for the retired. Perhaps I hadn’t looked closely enough. There had to be a real Daoist monk somewhere, proof that the gods could stand up to anticlericalism and the attempts to ossify religion. A scholar advised me to head for the city of Fuzhou, where I was likely to find a monk who had mastered the cosmology and liturgy of Daoism, not just its magical signs.

  For many years, Fuzhou was the largest port in China. In the early twentieth century, Paul Claudel had been France’s counsel in “Fou-Tchéou,” and he sent his dispatches from there.

  The temple of the jade emperor is perched on top of a hill surrounded by graceless buildings in the city center. A monk in his thirties recited canonical texts for his own salvation and order in the world. Had I found the last of the Daoist monks? His long hair was in a bun tied at the top of his head, proof of his dedication. A Daoist monk never cuts his hair, in contrast to Buddhist monks, who shave their heads because the length of the hair measures the passage of time. Should a superior cut the hair of a Daoist monk, it is a sign that he has committed a very serious error.

  The monk in front of me did not attract any attention: new China does not set much store by material renunciation, asceticism, retreats in caves, sitting in meditative postures, studying paradoxical and cryptic texts, mastering complex liturgy, and the vegetarian diet. The psalms, chants in classical Chinese, evening recitation, and gong and drum did not draw the faithful. It was if they could not see or hear the long-haired man in the blue tunic. They moved around him to get close to the incense holder, pray hurriedly to the jade emperor, and light a stick of incense in the hope that their wish—for money, health, or love—would be gratified immediately. Daoists do not see anything wrong in this, because Daoism is a personal affair. I found that the devotees were either very young—they came to pray for love or success in exams—or very old: they obviously came to pray for good health. The generation in the middle, educated during the Cultural Revolution, has little or no interest in religion.

  The monk himself did not seem to care whether he had any disciples. It was as if he, too, was not looking at the crowds around him. Absorbed in his personal alchemy, he must have been praying for a long life and the immortality of the soul and the body. Who knows—at the end of his days he may even turn into a bird. In China, past and present, Daoist monks like him are perceived as a threat to the state, not because of what they do, but because they do nothing. Their inaction is an existential denial of what the state and the Party expect from their subjects.

  What are we to make of the monk in Fuzhou? His manner of renouncing the world to live in a monastery is more reflective of “new China” than “ancient China.” After his marathon three-hour chanting, he explained to me that, while watching television with his family, he saw a monk and thought it was his own reflection. That was the day he found his true vocation. We might interpret his example either as the renaissance of Daoism or proof that Daoism survives only as an archaeological vestige. The same can be said for popular traditions. In the New Year, effigies of the god of prosperity, common to both Buddhism and Daoism, decorate the doors. The god appears in a modern light, brandishing hundred-yuan notes. During the Festival of Light, it is customary for families to gather around tombs. Do they come to pray for the peace of the departed souls, or simply to enjoy an outing in the countryside?

  If they aren’t already dead, the gods of ancient China seem to me exhausted by their century-long struggle against anticlericalism and communism. The recent profusion of Protestant churches is perhaps the outcome. As we shall see later, Daoism is still going strong in Taiwan, the other China, ample proof that religion does not necessarily have to take a backseat to modernization; Taiwan is more modern than Communist China. It was anticlericalism that swept away the temples on the mainland. In Taiwan, the feeling was not so strong: even though the Kuomintang leaders, refugees from the mainland, had no love for Daoism, they did not set out to exterminate it as systematically as the communists did.

  The grand return of the sects

  Exterminate ancient gods, and new ones will appear. In all probability, the traditional faiths will not give rise to a religious renaissance; that will come from what the Party calls the sects. This is not a new phenomenon: in the history of China, every time the state has repressed religions, underground sects and secret societies have prospered. In 1898, anticlericalism gave rise to the sect of the Unique and Truthful Way, which counted millions of followers, even from within the Communist Party.
During the last ten years, 50 million Chinese have reportedly converted to the Falun Gong, the wheel of dharma. The real number is anybody’s guess. The only way to gauge its mass impact is by the number of followers who have been arrested.

  In Communist China, the Falun Gong is persecuted; its followers wind up imprisoned, tortured, and die “accidentally” in custody. Their only crime is to follow a religion and believe in the saintliness of their guide, Li Hongzhi, who is a refugee in the United States. For this reason alone, a democrat is duty-bound to hear what they have to say and support their cause. Solidarity for these martyrs does not come easy, though, as their discourse seems irrational, to say the least. Both in and out of China, the Falun Gong recruits members from among the educated. Its spokespersons are often academics and lawyers who are relatively easy to meet. They begin their argument by cataloging the ills that members of the sect have had to suffer, and one commiserates with them. Then they explain their creed: how each individual can master the karmic wheel that he carries at the level of the navel, thereby removing all evil. They tell you that just reading Li Hongzhi’s book can cure cancer. They talk of a third eye in the middle of the forehead. An economics professor at Taipei University explained to me in perfect English (Falun Gong, like all religions, enjoys freedom in Taiwan): “In the beginning, I had no belief except in ghosts, especially in the month of July.” His words did give me a start, but then I remembered this was Taiwan, where everybody believes in ghosts. He continued, “My wife had an incurable cancer, but after joining the Falun Gong, she was cured.” How? “She read Li Hongzhi’s book and practiced the physical exercises prescribed by the Master.” After his wife’s recovery, the professor joined the sect, and now initiates new adherents to its mysteries.