Title: Religion erodes
authority in China
Author: AP
Publication: The Times
of India
Date: January 17, 2000
Xu Yonghai has lost faith
in Communism and democracy -the last 20 years of living in China saw to
that. So, like countless other Chinese staring into a spiritual void,
Xu turned to religion.
"Life without faith is
unbearable," the 39-year-old doctor said. "But after I found God
in 1989, my life totally changed. I felt like a new person."
Xu is part of a religious
and spiritual upsurge in China that threatens to surpass political dissent
as a corrosive force on Communist Party authority. From western China's
deserts and Tibet's high plateaus to eastern China's teeming cities and
vast rural hinterlands, officials are beset by religious and spiritual
challenges.
'The last few months
in particular have produced dramatic indications that the officially atheist
communist government is losing ground. Among them is the flight of
the Karmapa to India.
While copies of Mao Tse-tung's
Little Red Book, China's Bible just 30 years ago, gather dust in antique
shops, some young Beijingers are reading the Dalai Lama's autobiography
and books on fortune telling and other traditional Chinese beliefs.
Some families are building
shrines to their ancestors. Millenarian sects have attracted thousands
of rural converts. Millions of Christians attend unsanctioned religious
gatherings, rather that government-registered churches, despite the risk
of harassment, fines and detention.
Even the state-run media
lends voice to a government besieged. For at least six months, since
the government banned Falun Gong as a threat to society and communist rule,
newspapers have railed against "superstitious practices" and reminded party
members they are meant to be atheists.
"Our country has more
than 100 million believers of different faiths," Prime Minister Zhu Rongji
said Tuesday at a meeting on religion. "Our religious work is concerned
with uniting these 100 million around the party and government, focusing
their will and strength on the cause of socialist modernisation."
But the violent excesses
of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and the crushing of democracy movements
and dissent since then have left many Chinese disillusioned or uninterested
in politics.
Communist ideals, meanwhile,
have been killed by rampant official corruption and market reforms that
have ripped open a gulf between rich and poor and thrown millions of workers
out of jobs they once thought would be theirs for life.
"The economy is bad,
so many people have been laid off, life is tough, with housing problems,
looking after the aged, schooling, medical care. It's problem after
problem pressing down on ordinary people," Xu, a doctor said.
"But after people believe
in God, after they accept the Gospel, they can escape this unsettling situation,
this pain. That's the main reason why there have been more and more
believers in the past few years."
Both official and unsanctioned
churches are growing, foreign experts said. Christians could number
30 million.
Jean-Pierre Cabestan,
a Hong Kong-based China researcher said, "What they fear the most are communities
or religious organisations which are organised enough to set up a national
network, like the Falun Gong."
Communist leaders were
stunned by the movement's ability to organise protests, including one by
more than 10,000 followers outside the government's Beijing headquarters
last April.
(This article was also
published in The Observer of Business and Politics, Mumbai edition, January
17, 2000)
