Religion, Economics, and Politics in China

Third Quarter 2004 

More than 100 leaders of the China Gospel Fellowship were arrested on June 11 while on a retreat near the city of Wuhan in Hubei province, according to the China Aid Association, headquartered near Philadelphia. The arrests were part of the Chinese government's attempt to clamp down on unauthorized house church gatherings.

Religious gatherings are not the only illegitimate meetings. Students meeting privately in 2000 to discuss China's political future were reported by one among them to the Ministry of State Security. Today, four of those students are in prison. Philip P. Pan, writing in the Washington Post (4/23/04), says that "15 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre and 13 years since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in the largest and perhaps most successful experiment in authoritarianism in the world."

At the same time, China is now a highly regarded economic power, treated with respect by nations throughout the world, including the United States. Jacques deLisle, writing for the Foreign Policy Research Institute (6/4/04 "Fifteen Years After Tiananmen"), says, "China's international standing has escaped from the pariah status endured by the 'Butchers of Beijing' after June Fourth [1989] .... A decade and a half later, almost all nations' diplomacy toward the People's Republic gives little attention to the Chinese regime's suppression of the popular movement in 1989 .... Resolutions criticizing Beijing's human rights record gain little attention in Geneva."

How can we make sense of these developments, which include a growing economic market system in China coupled with repressive government action toward religious and political freedom? Can the apparent contradiction and inner tension long survive?

A new book (2004) from The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. can help us here. It is God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions, edited by Jason Kindopp and Carol Lee Hamrin. Kindopp was a Civitas Fellow at Brookings when he organized the conference that led to this book. Through Civitas and the Center for Public Justice, Kindopp met and teamed up with Hamrin, a veteran China expert at the State Department (now retired), who received the Center's Leadership Award in 2003. The book has three parts: (1) China's state policy to control religion, (2) church-state interaction, and (3) religion in U.S.-China relations. The nine contributors include both Chinese and western experts who reach widely and deeply into Chinese history and contemporary experience.

Kindopp explains in the introduction that the Chinese "policy framework established after 1978 provides limited space for religious believers to practice their faith but also calls for comprehensive control measures to prevent religion from emerging as an independent social force." This is the tension at the heart of authoritarian government. "Religious faith commands an allegiance that transcends political authority, whereas the Communist Party's enduring imperative is to eliminate social and ideological competition." House churches and resistance groups like Falungong appear to be growing, which leads in turn to the government's reaction with greater repression.

In the book's concluding chapter on advancing religious freedom in a global China, Hamrin presents a brief history of recent U.S.-Chinese relations and of how the two countries' perceptions of one another have changed, particularly with regard to the importance of religion in a society's development. Many American leaders and human rights experts are recognizing that religion cannot be treated as an irrelevant private matter off to the side of the more important and supposedly secular political and economic affairs. For their part, Chinese leaders are beginning to recognize that if they want a growing, competitive economy, they will have to be careful about their education and social policies so as not to discourage the best and the brightest, making it impossible to reverse the brain drain and to attract professionals from overseas. Religious freedom is a crucial ingredient here. China, says Hamrin, will also "need to spur the growth of its third sector, the nonprofit sector, including domestic and international faith-based organizations, to gain more resources for development."

Hamrin, who has studied lower levels of leadership in China, urges U.S. policy makers not to focus only on the top leadership, because change is not going to come from the top alone. "There is rapid change beneath China's surface appearance of rigid authoritarianism; younger officials and policy advisers are interested in new approaches to modern, accountable, and nonideological governance." Working at lower levels and with economic and nongovernment groups can have a big long-term impact. Americans need to develop a new consensus on how to deal with China, no longer segregating religious from economic and political concerns. By strengthening multiple levels of cultural, economic, and political engagement with the Chinese, Americans and others committed to religious freedom and human rights may be able to influence China in constructive ways that can help China to address its own tensions and not merely to react to outside demands.