Iast week, Bitter winter published the first English translation of the new “Administrative Measures for Religious Clergy” of the Chinese Communist Party, which will come into force on May 1.
The first among the measures is the establishment of a comprehensive national database to register and track the clergy authorized by the state of the five authorized religions (Protestant Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Islam, Buddhism and Taoism). Any dissident members of the clergy not registered in this database will be in immediate violation of the law. As Nina Shea observes, to register first, the clergy will have to demonstrate that they “support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and support the socialist system”. Your loyalty to the CCP will then be assessed periodically in a manner similar to the country’s broader social credit system.
These measures are further evidence of the CCP leadership’s eagerness to avoid the tactical mistakes made by the Soviet Union in the past century. Chinese communists are not trying to root out all vestiges of theism, thus inviting total opposition from believers and religious institutions (as the Soviets did with John Paul II’s Vatican). Instead, they are trying to weaken religious opposition to the regime, taming and co-opting domestic religious belief, turning it into another avenue for the regime’s social control agenda. For this reason, President Xi prioritized the “sinicization” of religion in China, almost demanding the prominent presence of his own image in all houses of worship.
The CCP’s tactical approach to the Roman Catholic Church is particularly instructive on how the party’s policy on religion differs from that of communist regimes in the past (and even the present, if we consider the Kim in North Korea). Instead of trying to expel the Catholic Church from China altogether, the CCP seeks to increase its own influence over the Vatican. (They took exactly the same approach to many other things, like American sports leagues, international institutions and even capitalism itself.)
On September 22, 2018, the CCP signed an agreement with the Vatican – the text of which is still secret – according to which the two parties agreed to “cooperate” in the selection of Chinese bishops. In practice, this basically means that the Chinese present their approved candidates to the pope, who officially approves them, almost as a formality. The whole case reflects very poorly on Pope Francis and the Vatican hierarchy. The hope was to allow Chinese Catholics who worshiped underground to come out of hiding and live their faith in public; but this “liberation” was bought at the price of giving up all control over Chinese Catholicism to a militant cabal of atheist genocidal communists.
The Vatican’s naivety in agreeing to such an arrangement has been exposed to the full extent by these new “administrative measures”: Article 16 says that the bishops in China will be democratically elected through the state-controlled Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and consecrated by the Conference of Catholic Bishops of China. No reference is made to the pope or the Vatican, which have been completely removed from the process. The CCP consolidated its exclusive control over Chinese Catholicism with the formal support of the Catholic Church itself (the 2018 agreement was renewed last year), leaving Chinese Catholic dissidents in the Party without even the formal support of their own church.
In other words, this is not your grandfather’s evil empire. The CCP is smarter, more agile and more economically dominant than the Bolsheviks ever were. And now, they are managing to put Catholicism, along with the other great religions of the world, at the service of Marxism, something that even Marx himself did not think possible.
As the only serious geopolitical rival to China, the United States is also the most religious country in the developed world and the only country that sees religious freedom as the first and most precious jewel in its constitutional crown. If any nation on Earth with a geopolitical weight is going to be seriously offended by China’s war against religious freedom, it will probably be the United States. Still, there appears to be no appetite among the American public for a large-scale geostrategic conflict with China. Policy proposals for a new Marshall Plan to compete with the CCP Belt and Road Initiative are not available in our public talks. Worse than that, the United States has not even been able to muster the collective will to offer American visas to Hong Kong citizens. The Cold War conscience that sustained our enmity against the Soviets in the past century is simply not an encouraging force today, although Communist China undoubtedly poses an even greater challenge to the free world than the Soviets.
The most likely explanation for this has to do with the CCP’s characteristic tactic, as discussed above: they prefer to co-opt and manipulate people and forces rather than destroy them. During the past few decades, they have done just that with respect to free trade and global capitalism. Chinese producers have clawed at American consumers and made the Party an indispensable part of the American (and world) economy. The CCP is deeply involved in our daily lives as consumers in a way that the Soviets have never been. By making American consumers their economic vassals, the Chinese have neutralized any appetite for large-scale geopolitical conflict among the ruling elite of the United States, which is terribly aware of what a dissociation policy would likely mean for its own electoral prospects. If voters are given freedom from economic complicity in communist atrocities in exchange for higher prices, are we sure that they will follow the right path? It is even necessary to know whether the first Cold War would have ended the way it did or not if the Soviets had control of prices on the American market.
Chinese communists did not try to destroy capitalism. They have prioritized state ownership of the mind and soul over state ownership of the means of production, and are more than happy to use capitalism to achieve that end. We, in the free world, were convinced, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that economic and political freedoms were necessarily linked at the waist. Therefore, we seek the liberalization of the global economy in the belief that political freedom would follow. It never occurred to us that the communists of the future might not be interested in nationalizing railways or post offices, but in nationalizing childhood, love, death, sex and Jesus Christ – and in using the almighty dollar for that. We never considered the possibility that the 21st century could become the heinous love child of Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping.
Well, to use a phrase from Solzhenitsyn, the great truth has now emerged, especially for religious Americans. We, in the free world, have made the Chinese Communist Party the most powerful producer and consumer in a global capitalist economy. In one of the cruelest ironies and most perfidious paradoxes in human history, Xi Jinping now presents the world as a Marxist thief baron, a creature whose existence has escaped our categories of political thought in the past 200 years. With each new revelation of the CCP’s crackdown on religious believers, religious Americans are again faced with the fact that even an innocuous trip to Walmart can make a contribution in kind to the massacre of innocent saints; that the money we spend on our household goods is going into the pockets of modern Neros and Diocletians.
It has been said that as far as China is concerned, Americans will have to choose between free trade and the free market, since China’s policy is to make markets non-free. It is even more true that, with regard to China, religious Americans will have to choose between free trade and religious freedom, because from now on, American believers are involuntarily financing the martyrdom of their supporters. Christianity (and most of the world’s major religions) regards the faithful as an indivisible and supranational body. For this reason, religious Americans must lead the charge of separating economically from China. They know that America’s short-term national economic interests are worth nothing more than ashes and sand when compared to the integrity and fellowship of the faithful. If American believers persist in acquiescing to China’s domination of the American consumer, despite this knowledge, they shouldn’t be surprised to be greeted with a dazzling flash of heavenly light the next time they’re on their way to Costco, and with a voice crying out, “Saulo, Saulo, why are you persecuting me?”