In 2016, when President 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.”
But the ascendant faith in China when Mao and his troops embarked on “The Long March” that would put them in power wasn’t found in China’s ancient temples. It came from the Christian Bible, which was embraced by the western-educated modernists who’d helped overthrow the Qing dynasty in the early years of the 20th century.