The Long Road to Confronting China’s War on Religion, Part I and Part II

By Carl M. Cannon and Susan Crabtree May 8, 2023

In 2016, when Chinese leader Xi Jinping delivered a speech calling for the “Sinicization of religion” in a nation of one billion, he was espousing a century-old impulse among his people while also inadvertently underscoring a persistent paradox that Chinese Communists brought with them when they took over the country in 1949—and have never shaken.

The impulse is that the major faiths observed in China are not indigenous to the world’s oldest civilization. Buddhism was imported from India and Tibet. Islam arrived in overland trading routes and human migration from the Middle East, while Christianity, another Abrahamic faith, came across the ocean from Europe and America. To Communist leaders, and many Han Chinese civilians, these traditions represent potentially destabilizing foreign influence.

The paradox, of course, is that Marxism was also a foreign import, one imposed on Chinese society—in Mao Zedong’s own words—from “the barrel of a gun.” It not only destabilized China’s existing social structures and spiritual traditions, but as Marxist-Leninism morphed into Maoism, also became a kind of national religion itself—with Mao Zedong in the role of savior.

This was not an accident. “Worshiping Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin is correct,” Mao said at a 1958 party conference, “because truth is in their hands.” In 1970, the “Great Helmsman” told Edgar Snow, an American journalist and Mao apologist, that the cult of personality was necessary strategy to “overcome the habits of 3,000 years of emperor-worshipping tradition.”..........To Read More....

The Long Road to Confronting China’s War on Religion, Part II

By Susan Crabtree May 10, 2023 

 

Falun Gong emerged in China in 1992, a time of a spiritual renewal in a land still under Communist rule, but one recovering from the horrors of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Drawing on Buddhist traditions, Falun Gong combined meditation and tai chi-style exercises with a moral philosophy centered on the tenets of “zhen,” “shan,” and “ren” (truth, compassion, tolerance.) The word, in both English and Chinese, to describe this contemplative mind and body approach to life is qigong.

Originating in the northeastern city of Changchun, the practice spread across the country. By the end of the decade, an estimated 70–100 million Chinese were following qigong spiritual meditation disciplines or had become devoted practitioners. But in the summer of 1999, after demonstrations on the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests by Falun Gong followers, China’s leaders responded with staggering cruelty. In June, Chinese leader Jiang Zemin set up an office specifically to persecute Falun Gong followers, and put Vice Premier Li Lanqing in charge of the effort. Falun Gong was not a benign new manifestation of ancient Chinese practices, the government decreed. Instead, the regime labeled it a dangerous “cult,” and proclaimed it a threat to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). And threats to the CCP must be eradicated...............To Read More....