China's Great Awakening

One afternoon while sitting in our living room shooting the breeze, a Chinese-American friend -- an aggressively atheistic friend -- assured us that Chinese are the most atheistic people on the planet. Really?

The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao by journalist Ian Johnson asserts that this is a Western misunderstanding. (Our friend can be forgiven; he's something like a fifth generation American who speaks little or no Chinese.) According to Johnson:

Until the past few decades, scholars thought Chinese religions were somewhat analogous to the Abrahamic faiths. Instead of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam, China had Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism. That was wrong. ... religion was "diffused" in Chinese society. It wasn't one pillar next to secular society and could not be defined as one particular thing you did once or twice a week, at a certain place, under the guidance of a certain holy book ... Chinese religion had little theology, almost no clergy, and few fixed places of worship. But this didn't mean that Chinese religion was weak. Instead, it spread over every aspect of life like a fine membrane that held society together.

... pollsters have a hard time figuring out if Chinese people are religious. ... They expect a clear cut answer like "I am a Buddhist" or "I am a Daoist." But for most of Chinese history, this sort of question would have been strange. Religion was part of belonging to your community. A village had its temples, its gods, and they honored certain holy days. Choice was not a factor. ...

The turmoil of the past century and a half has ... made people uncomfortable about expressing their religiosity. ... studies are absurdly flawed. Almost all try to get people to define their behavior based on the loaded Western vocabulary. ... Put this way, almost all Chinese will say no. [But] a 2005 survey by East China Normal University in Shanghai found that 31 percent of the country's population, or about 300 million people are religious: two-thirds are worshippers of Buddhism, Daoism, or folk practices in addition to 40 million Christians, with the rest divided among other faiths. The key reason for the high response rate was that the survey used the word xinyang, or faith, instead of zongjiao, or religion.

What Johnson calls "Chinese Religion" is simply how people live in their society. During long stays in China beginning in 1984, Johnson set out to understand through what I'd call respectful "participant research." (He'd never refer to his process in such ungainly pseudo-social science jargon, but I do.) The result is one of the most graceful, most fascinating, most mind-bending volumes I've read in many years.

As in everything in that ancient civilization, layer lies upon layer of history and consciousness. Johnson contends that, first, Western imperialism and Japanese invasion inflicted national humiliation. A long civil war was finally won by the Communist Party in 1949, definitively ending the moribund dynastic system. The subsequent famines and political upheaval which were the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution has left a people eager for the material plenty of Chinese capitalism -- but also often feeling something is missing.

Faith and values are returning to the center of a national discussion over how to organize Chinese life. ... hundreds of millions of Chinese are consumed with doubt about their society and turning to religion and faith for answers that they do not find in the radically secular world constructed around them. They wonder what more there is to life than materialism and what makes a good life. ... We have long known that China's ethnic minorities -- especially the Tibetans and Uighurs -- have valued religion, sometimes as a form of resistance against an oppressive state. But now we find a similar or even greater spiritual thirst among ethnic [Han] Chinese, who make up 91 percent of the country's population.

... For millennia, Chinese society was held together by the idea that laws alone cannot keep people together. Instead, philosophers like Confucius argued that society also needed shared values. Most Chinese still hold this view. For many, the answer is to engage in some form of spiritual practice: a religion, a way of life, a form of moral cultivation -- things what will make their lives more meaningful and help change society. All told, it is hardly an exaggeration to say China is undergoing a spiritual revival similar to the Great Awakening in the United States in the nineteenth century.

The fiercely atheist Chinese Communist Party has been intermittently actively hostile to religion, sometimes destroying ancient shrines and temples. But the CCP also is often warily tolerant of undercurrents in this enormous, unwieldy country.

Traditional values and practices are encouraged as a source of stability and morality. But faith is also feared as an uncontrollable force -- an alternative ideology to the government's vision of how society should be run. In the past, state and religion were united, forming a spiritual center of gravity for China. That old system is now gone, but nothing new has taken its place.

Johnson took part in, studied, and describes daily life in folk, Buddhist, Daoist, and Protestant Christian settings. For these rich descriptions, people who are interested should read for themselves; I will not dilute their granular descriptive power. But here's just one sample from Johnson's stint with a Daoist master:

One evening he stated that China was the last ancient culture still alive. How many Greeks or Egyptians, he said, could read their classical texts or draw on their ancient practices? In China, though, the language was still roughly the same. Learning classical Chinese is not easy, but it is still taught to all students in school and is much easier, say, than a Westerner learning Latin.

... "In the West, most of this kind of knowledge was lost or suppressed, " he said. "But in China, through Daoism, this prehistorical knowledge was transmitted."

... No one reads ancient Greek texts to re-create religious life in modern-day Athens, but in China precisely this is happening.

The book delves into Chinese speculations about what the ascent of the country's current authoritarian leader Xi Jinping may mean for Han Chinese religiosity. (Muslims are another matter.) He made a name for himself after the Cultural Revolution by reviving a provincial Buddhist center as a tourist attraction; whatever his personal sympathies, he knew what was good for a community he had power over -- and what was good for his Party prospects. Johnson interviewed an old woman who had known Xi Jinping in that period:

"He believed in Buddhist law," [she said.]

This probably was not literally true; as a Communist party official, and a savvy one at that, Xi would not have actively worshipped at the temple. I mentioned this to the woman.

"Well, of course he would not have lit incense," she said, "But when you look at what happened during his term, how this temple was rebuilt and how he kept coming back to see the old master, how else can I express it? Actions speak louder than words."

Folk superstition or perhaps insight? Johnson leaves this to his readers.

China's millions of evangelical Protestant Christians are under more state suspicion than other religiously inclined groups but even they find cracks in an edifice which claims absolute control. Beijing had send orders to provincial Chengdu to curb unauthorized congregations. But their leader, Peng Qiang, wasn't worried.

Yes, he agreed that that Xi Jinping's administration was making a concerted effort to strengthen state control over society by arresting dissidents and lawyers. It was also promoting Chinese traditional values and religions at the expense of Christianity. But Peng stayed positive, not out of naivete but because he saw the longer-term problems in the government's hard-line approach. One is the cost of "stability maintenance"...

Talking to Peng reminded me why it was so important to get out of the capital. There, the government's power seemed limitless; here it was tamed by distance. It would be naive to downplay the hard political power of an authoritarian leader like Xi but equally glib to ignore long-term trends beyond the government's control.

This is one many instances in this book which expose a Western reader from a hurried civilization to the very different sense of time Chinese society retains from its long history. The book is organized around religious practices as dictated by the older moon calendar. In 1929, modernizing rulers transitioned China to the western calendar, but underneath ancient sense of time and season remains.

Few practices are as important to a society as how it measures time.

At least one geneticist, much criticized by other scientists, has proposed we humans come with a "god gene," an inherited predisposition to spiritual experience. Now there's something I'm agnostic about. But Ian Johnson's account of the persistence of religious belief and practice in contemporary China makes me wonder ...