Berkley Center

"Religion is poison. It has two great defects: it undermines the race...(and) retards the progress of the country."
-Mao Zedong

Although he has been dead for over 30 years, Mao Zedong remains a huge presence in the lives of Chinese citizens. Just as his giant portrait looms, omnipresent, in Tian’anmen Square, his beliefs and proclamations continue to permeate every level of Chinese society. The state, the press, the law, and everything in between changed drastically after the “liberation” of China in 1949, but perhaps no institution has been affected by Communism so dramatically as religion.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong made it his goal to eradicate religion in China, destroying temples and persecuting believers along the way. He viewed religion as a vestige of old superstitions, an impediment to progress, and, most importantly, a threat to Communism, which was to become a sort of new religion. Since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970’s, religion has slowly reemerged in parts of China, but people who identify with a religion are still few and far between, especially in the major cities. China is very much an atheist country, with believers often running into problems with the authorities. If a church is not authorized by the state, it must go underground or risk being shut down.

The religious struggles in China over the past few years have been highly publicized in the West; most people know about the tension and violence in Tibet and Xinjiang and the sometimes brutal suppression of the Falun Gong throughout China. I have tried to ask students at my university about their reactions to these clashes, but no one has anything to say about it. At first I thought that there must be an implicit understanding that no one discusses anything controversial, and I was amazed at how much students balked at talking about religion. However, after being here more than a month, the overall impression I get is one of apathy for these people's struggles. China is a vast country and, as the students see it, these events are taking place in a completely different world from the one in which they themselves live. They are overloaded with school work and don't have time to think about these issues. Moreover, they were raised as atheists and have little exposure to any kind of religion; many people even think that religion is an obstacle in the quest for China's modernization and eye it with suspicion.

And yet, I constantly ask myself whether students would still be so apathetic if freedom of the press existed in China. China's government has for years counted on the people happily trading liberty for prosperity, and for the most part the status quo has not been challenged. Until this changes, China will remain a totalitarian society in which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controls the news and censorship is rampant. Of course Chinese citizens know about the uprisings in Tibet and Xinjiang, but the government tells a very different version of the events, one in which the believers are always the bad guys. The CCP was not able to keep its citizens from learning about the recent violence in Xinjiang, but it seems that most of the students truly believe that the government is doing the right thing by harshly suppressing the protesters. Just today my tutor told me that Xinjiang is much safer now because it is essentially under marshal law; this way the “violent” Uighurs won't be able to stage any attacks on Han Chinese.

Before the age of information, however, the government simply denied that there was any violence at all. When we first arrived at the university we were given a Chinese history book (produced, of course, by the CCP). Flipping through it, I came across a sentence which shocked me: “Tibet was peacefully liberated in 1959.” Last year I wrote a research paper about the conflict in Tibet, so I knew that this statement was about as far from the truth as it could be. Nevertheless, I couldn't help but wonder, if I only had access to books like these, would I believe everything it stated? The answer, sadly, is yes; we never suspect that our textbooks would lie to us. The way I see it is that, until the government stops lying to its people and concealing information, religion will continue to die out in most places, and the religious uprisings will be largely ignored by the rest of China.