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ream of a Peaceful China

One night, I dreamed I saw a wide, dark and smooth river, gentle waves glistening under a full moon. The far bank of green was visible on the horizon, and ships of all types and sizes came and went, while an airliner passed overhead.

Silently a boat came steadily toward me, poled by a lovely woman in a slim and colorful long skirt. She seemed full of positive purpose, yet without anxiety or concern. Around her feet were piled luscious fruits, vegetables and sacks of grain.

I sighed contentedly, recognizing a vision of China at peace with itself -- its traditional past and its modern future -- and at peace with the rest of the world.

This entry from my journal twenty years ago, when I was visiting the new Special Economic Zones, reflected on China’s long struggle to reconcile its traditional culture and society with the requirements of modernity coming from the West. This dream seems timely today, given China’s stated official goal of creating a “harmonious society” and contributing to a “harmonious world,” partly in response to international worries about a threatening, rising China. I plan to explore this theme of China’s identity in 2008, with essays on related topics.

In traditional, pre-modern agrarian China, there was no identity crisis, at least among the 90% who were ethnic Han Chinese living in agricultural communities. In this highly homogenous society, to be Chinese was to speak Chinese, eat with chopsticks and follow common rituals centered on the ancestral cult. Non-Han cultures could assimilate, or even lead the nation as in the Mongol Yuan dynasty and the Manchu Qing dynasty, by adopting Chinese culture. As a leading anthropologist has noted, Chinese have always been more interested in “orthopraxy” (right behavior) than “orthodoxy” (right belief).

Confucian society was a hierarchy of patriarchal “families” from the grass-roots extended family (ideally, four generations under one roof), up through the single-clan village and even larger lineage organizations, linked by the Confucian civil service exam system to the centralized bureaucracy of “parent-officials” (fumu guan,) all under the rule of the father-Emperor, who as the Son of Heaven linked the people to the cosmos. The family analogy was used later in crafting a word for nation-state -- guojia, “national family.”

Only with the intrusion of the technologically superior West was this Confucian Chinese identity questioned and then repudiated by the educated elites saw it as the source of weakness and a barrier to national survival and revival. They turned to the West for new sources of identity, at different times exploring the options of Christianity, democratic liberalism, socialism and communism. From this comes the title In Search of Modern China, by Yale historian Jonathan Spence.

What will be the core character of tomorrow’s “rising China?” Sam Ling introduced some of its potential elements in his prologue to Chinese Intellectuals and the Gospel (edited with Stacey Bieler):

What ideas will truly guide the ‘search for modern China?’ Will China be an anti-foreign, militant, and nationalistic people in the twentieth century? Will nihilism, materialism, and atheism be the governing ideas for the worldview of the Chinese people? Will Buddhism and folk religions rise again to dominate their thinking? Will a new version of Confucianism find a hearing among China’s students and teachers? What is the place of the Christian gospel, the worldview based on the Old and New Testaments, in China’s search for an all-comprehensive national ideology?

These are all important questions, but to me the real issue facing China is how to manage the nation without an “all-comprehensive national ideology.” The central challenge is to restructure the political system to allow for a diversity of individual and community identities to flourish freely under the umbrella of a common patriotism to the nation, regardless of which political party may be in power at a given time. Only this will create a truly harmonious society.

The problem is more one of political loyalty than identity. The state, first monopolized by the Nationalists and then the Communists, has conflated patriotism with loyalty to the party-state, and exercised its sole prerogative in defining a national ideology to serve state interests. No other loyalties and interests are allowed to take precedence or even claim a legitimate share of citizen loyalties, whether to family, local community, special interest group, or supra-national entity.

The problem of conflicting loyalties has been central to the state-church relationship. As in Roman times, Christians in China are suspect for giving ultimate loyalty to God rather than the sovereign Lord of the day. The official “patriotic” church is required to “love country, love church” in that order. Whereas the unregistered Christians echo St. Paul in claiming, “our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” (Phil. 4.6). In recent years, one prominent academic expert on Christianity has openly challenged the concept of a “patriotic” national church as a dangerous anachronism in the global era. Chinese Christians increasingly identify with world Christianity.

The party-state’s “master narrative” has changed over time from Sun Yat-sen’s populist socialism to “proletarian internationalism” to the “revolutionary” culture that pitted the “people” (i.e., loyal followers of Chairman Mao) against the “enemies of the people.” Today, Deng Xiaoping’s more pragmatic “market Leninism” is morphing into Hu Jintao’s “Confucian socialism.”

When will the Chinese people acknowledge their ultimate loyalty is to God and His ways, and thus enter on His “highway of holiness”? (Is. 35.8)

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