Res Publica Newsletter

Cynics note that the Chinese Communists, even under Mao, have routinely offered more freedom to the practice of religion, if only to determine who is a threat to the state and who isn't. After such an assessment is made, repression returns.

But this time it may not be so easy to turn the clock back. More than a quarter of all Chinese, some researchers estimate, are religious believers of some sort. That comes to about 300 million people, which amounts to the total US population. The native traditions of Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam dominate, but Christianity - that once despised remnant of China's colonialist past when missionaries arrived with the gunboats - is rapidly moving toward parity.

Chinese officials recognize what much of the Western intelligentsia is slow to grasp - that globalization, economic development, political openness, and the revival of religion all go hand in hand. Just as Marxism fell into discredit and disrepair not quite a generation ago, the new "millennial" generation everywhere on the planet is turning its back on the older versions of dogmatic secularism that served as the mainstay of both socialist and liberal democratic agendas for development for three quarters of a century.

The traditional religion of China up until the revolution of 1949 was Confucianism. Confucianism has always stressed a principle known in Chinese as li, which is untranslatable, but generally speaking refers to the way in which a person combines respect for family and parents with a proper sense of how to behave responsibly for the greater good of the community. Confucianism emphasizes self-discipline, deferred gratification, and social stability over individual rights and the personal pursuit of happiness at all costs.

Though Mao condemned historic Confucian moral beliefs and rituals as decadent and inimicable to social progress, Chinese leaders nowadays have come around to the idea that a rehabilitation of that "old time religion" may be just the thing the nation needs to preserve its recent economic gains and stabilize it as a global economic powerhouse.

China is also taking modest steps to bring back the traditional performing arts, which always had a clear religious dimension, after Mao tried unsuccessfully to wipe out 5,000 years of what he derided as the "feudal past."

Not a few outside observers have remarked that China is frantically striving to balance Western materialism with its own indigenous spirituality in a campaign perhaps to create a post-Maoist "Confucianism" based on a postmodernized principle of li. If that's the case and such a program succeeds in the "new China", the challenge to America may be more than economic - it may be all those newly empowered "values voters" from the mainland who shame us into attesting that faith does indeed matter in public life.