Change “Personal Rule” to “Legal Rule”
Whether to recognize “human imperfectibility” or not is also the foundation determining whether a country or area can establish “legal rule.” The idea of legal rule is to establish the idea that laws are supreme; political parties, the government, enterprises, organizations, and individuals all have to obey the law without exception. . . . Not only the prosperity and stability of Hong Kong but that of the whole of China will depend on the constitution and laws guaranteeing the independent decision-making powers of each level of government, each enterprise, each organization, and each individual. Only in so doing can our society be full of vitality and efficiency and the initiative of each of us given full play.
Use the Market to Regulate the Movement of Resources
China’s prosperity has to rely not only on political and legal reforms but also on economic reforms. . . . The problem facing China’s economic reform is how, in an economy dominated by public ownership, to establish an economy where the market determines resource flow, enterprises have self-development abilities, and the industrial structure is continuously renewed. Today, in some areas on the Chinese mainland, some industrial departments will develop the private economy on a larger scale while using the stock and responsibility systems to reform the traditional public ownership system. I think all these measures are extremely useful explorations.
Using Law to Promote and Guarantee Reform
A major task facing China’s political and economic structural reforms is to improve the legal system and imbue reform with the spirit of the rule of law. Use the law to promote reform; use the law to guarantee reform. I believe, if we do so, then China’s prosperity will not be a very distant thing from us.
[From Bachman and Yang, Yan Jiaqi and China’s Struggle for Democracy, pp. 84–90]
1. “April Fifth Movement” refers to a gathering of townspeople in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to commemorate the recently deceased Zhou Enlai and support his protege Deng Xiaoping.
Chapter 38
TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA
In keeping with the pattern of wars and political turmoil, broken by brief moments of peace and stability, the twentieth century has been a time of growth, suppression, resurrection, and revival for the Christian religion in China. In this short account the focus is on how leading Chinese Christians—Catholic and Protestant—responded to the encounter between Chinese culture and Christianity, as well as to the repressions of the Communist regime.
Christianity came late to China and remains a minority religion in Communist China, bearing some stigma of Western imperialism. But its followers could be found even among the top political leaders like Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, and the wives of these two were sisters from a strong Methodist family. Madame Sun, nee Song Qingling (1893–1981), however, went on to hold high posts in the Communist Chinese government, and at her death the official press identified her posthumously as a member of the Chinese Communist Party.
To represent twentieth-century Chinese Christianity and the problem of cultural encounter between China and Christianity, we have two Catholics—Ma Xiangbo and John C. H. Wu (Jingxiong)—and three Protestants—Zhao Zichen (T. C. Chao), Wu Yaozong (Y. T. Wu), and Wang Mingdao, who held different views regarding cooperation with the government, as the Communist takeover in 1949 raised the burning issue of Christian collaboration with an atheistic regime.
The Protestants chosen, despite their own agreements and disagreements, were leaders of church institutions, whereas the Catholics selected here became known more for their own individual achievements than for their service to the institutional church. The Protestants sought to convert educated people, at a time when Catholic missionaries were working mainly with townspeople, peasants, and fisherfolk. Both, but especially the Protestants, gave special attention to the building up of new colleges and contributed significantly to the development of modern education, medical training, and studies in the humanities and social sciences.
Some Protestant leaders, like Wu Yaozong and Ding Guangxun (K. H. Ting), as individuals were already sympathetic to the Communist movement before 1949 and found it easier to collaborate with the new regime. Others were more reserved, like Zhao Zichen and Wang Mingdao, and they suffered for it, in a struggle that often found Christians pitted against one another. Catholics, on the other hand, loyal to Rome and unwilling to collaborate with the state, found themselves virtually silenced under the Communists. Eventually, however, some Catholic leaders decided to form a Patriotic Church in a move to consecrate more Chinese bishops with official approval. Others went underground or were condemned to long prison terms.
Among the individuals presented here, Ma made an impact, especially as an educator, during the twentieth-century part of his unusually long and fruitful life. His personal life as well as his public career mirrored the struggles of dedicated Chinese Christians in a society that often distrusted such religious dedication, while some in the Catholic Church were uncomfortable with his continued devotion to Chinese culture. Such struggles characterized the lives of many, if not most, Chinese Christian intellectuals in the contemporary period.
MA XIANGBO
Ma Xiangbo (Joseph Ma, 1840–1939) was born to a prominent scholar-official family from Jiangnan that traced its genealogy to a great Yuan-dynasty scholar, Ma Duanlin (c. 1254–1324) (see chapter 19). In the late Ming dynasty, his ancestors were converted to Catholicism by Jesuit missionaries, who also converted the heads of other big families, like Xu Guangqi (1562–1633) of Shanghai and Yang Tingyun (1557–1627) of Qiantang (see chapter 27). His father was a Confucian teacher who turned his attention to the study of medicine and business. From early childhood, Ma and his siblings received a Chinese classical education in a private school, while being suffused with a Christian family atmosphere. In 1852 he passed the county-level government examination and could have become a provincial scholar in the old Chinese sense, but instead he enrolled in the College St. Ignace (Xuhui Middle School) in Shanghai, to receive a Western education from the Jesuits there. His decision in 1862 to enter the Society of Jesus and become a priest led him to continue Western studies, although he never abandoned Chinese studies. Eventually he learned Greek, Latin, French, English, Japanese, and other foreign languages and studied Western philosophy and theology, as well as mathematics, astronomy, and geography.
Ma’s brilliance was early recognized by the Jesuits, who made him principal of College St. Ignace in 1871. However, the French Jesuits who started the school wanted to Westernize the curriculum further, whereas Ma maintained that students should continue to study Chinese subjects and to prepare for civil service examinations, in order to be able to serve their country. In 1876 he resigned from the Society of Jesus, hoping thereby to pursue other possibilities of service to society at large, but he discovered that while his broad-ranging knowledge equipped him for a wide range of activities, his close church connections tended to disqualify him for high government positions.
During the next twenty years, Ma served as an adviser or aide to Li Hongzhang, a top official of the Manchu government, and was sent on missions to Korea, Japan, Europe, and America. Frustrated in this career as well, he returned to live with the Jesuits in 1898, devoting his time to interpreting Catholic Christianity to Chinese society and helping his religion to become more rooted in Chinese culture. This led to his translating the New Testament into classical Chinese and to his founding in 1903 of Aurora (Zhendan) Academy, later a university, in Shanghai, “to place a priority on science, to emphasize liberal arts, and to avoid any religious dispute.” It was financed with a generous endowment from his own personal inheritance—a sign of Ma’s determination that Christianity in China should be self-supporting, as well as self-propagating and self-administered. Thus he became an early advocate of the church’s non-dependence on foreign support.
Nevertheless, Ma was unable to avoid disputes with the French Jesuits who staffed his academy and soug
ht also to transform it into a French university, and the school consequently closed. Ma then turned his attention in 1905 to the founding of another institution: the Fudan ("A Revived Aurora") Institute. Chinese intellectuals, including Yan Fu and others, rallied to this cause, obtained the grounds, and raised the necessary funds.
Confronted also with difficult political choices at a tumultuous time, Ma next went to Japan in 1906 to join Liang Qichao’s Society to Promote Constitutional Monarchy and became its general secretary. In 1911 he joined the republican cause and then became an adviser to the second president, Yuan Shikai, but he became disenchanted with Yuan’s efforts to make Confucianism the state religion and to become emperor. He also argued strongly in favor of a democratic system of government along Western lines. Philosophically, he had emphasized the human conscience, called liangxin, which he identified with Wang Yangming’s innate good knowing (liangzhi). Ma was briefly in charge of Beijing University and also helped in the founding of Furen Catholic University in Beijing, one of two prominent Catholic institutions of higher learning. He also championed the founding of a Chinese Academy of Humanities and Sciences, as a successor to the Hanlin, to be modeled on the French Academy. He gathered together in 1912 scholars like Liang Qichao, Yan Fu, and Zhang Binglin as founding members, with the aim of promoting classical learning and reviving traditional morality. Although it had little success in those turbulent times, the later Academia Sinica bears some marks of his vision.
In 1931, already advanced in age and living in Shanghai, he participated in the resistance movement against Japanese aggression. In 1937, at age ninety-eight, he was made a councilor of Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Nanjing. That same year, as the Japanese invaders moved south, he and his family retreated to the interior, and he died on November 4, 1939, in Lang Son, Vietnam, while en route to Chongqing.
“I am a dog, and only know how to bark,” Ma said of himself. “I’ve been barking for a hundred years, but I haven’t yet awakened China.”
RELIGION AND THE STATE
Should a Head of State Preside Over Religious Ceremonies?
In the Mencius, Wan Zheng asks, “Was it the case that Yao gave the empire to Shun?"1 Mencius believed that Yao could not give Shun the empire but could only make him the chief religious leader, so that the gods would benefit from his sacrifices, or make him the political leader, so that the people could live in peace. Clearly the empire was given to Shun by Heaven and by the people, not by Yao. In Zhu Xi’s notes on the Mencius, he comments on the point that it was not Yao who bestowed the empire, saying the empire means all-under-Heaven, and all-under-Heaven cannot become the private possession of one man. If Heaven can bestow this, it must belong to Heaven; if the people can bestow it, it must belong to the people. . . .
What I want to discuss today is as follows: First, if one makes a broad investigation in both China and the outside world, does the state ruler also have responsibility for heading up religion? Second, if we consult both past and present experience, including all social orders that have lasted for a long time, should the state leader also assume religious leadership? . . .
If we look through China’s classical records, from earliest times the state ruler did also undertake religious leadership. This cannot be denied. But if we investigate the situation in Europe and America [we see that] that was not the case. Even before the time that church and state were separated, religious ceremonies were presided over by someone other than the state ruler. If the state ruler wished to participate in religious ceremonies, he did so. If the people wished to participate, they did so. If we go back to the period before there was freedom of religious belief, even though the people were required to participate in religious ceremonies, still the state ruler did not have a primary responsibility for religious leadership. Even in countries that have a national church, this is mainly a matter of the state treasury’s subsidizing religious ceremonies and religious leadership. In the cases where financial subsidy means that the state ruler exercises some control and regulation over the church, as with the Anglican Church in England, the Eastern Orthodox Church in Russia, and Islam among the Muslims, the state ruler may head the church, but as head [he] does not actually preside over religious ceremonies. As for countries like France and Italy, that have a national church, the state ruler is never made head of the church, let alone president over religious ceremonies. No wonder contemporary scholars of politics and religion strongly advocate the division of state and church. . . .
Freedom of religious belief means that everyone makes [his] own free choice in religious belief and does not suffer from governmental interference. Even less [does he] suffer from interference from other religions. Thus state rulers of Europe and America can be an example. No matter what religion, they do not take on religious leadership.
[Adapted from Hayhoe, Ma Xiangbo, pp. 241–244]
RELIGION AND CULTURE
Today there are people who misunderstand the true nature of religion and say religion is a kind of fetter on human freedom or religion is a kind of narcotic for the masses. What in fact is the nature of religion? Let me give a clear explanation. Religion is the only solution to the problems of human life. . . .
What we call “religion” is nothing other than the problem of the relation between people and the Creator. The Western term religion has the meaning of “binding back together again.” This notion of binding is linked to nature (xing) and law (fa), and to the Confucian notion of ritual. . . . Thus religion imposes certain restrictions precisely in order to show people a standard so they support what is best in others rather than the opposite. This will enable people to enjoy the true freedom they ought to enjoy and prevent them [from] having illusions about a false freedom that they should not have. No person has control over his birth or his death. If this is not all in the hands of the Creator, then who is in control? The reason we are at present opposing the violent actions of the Japanese is because we object to the freedom of the enemy army to kill at will and to freely expropriate the land needed to keep our people alive. Since they think they can freely decide on the life or death of our 450 million people, we therefore have the natural right to refuse to allow ourselves to be exploited and so we have had to go to war. This provides us an example to explain the problem of freedom.
Let me now turn to the second view, that religion is a narcotic of the people. . . .
In our religion, we know that Jesus Christ, in accordance with the prophecies of the holy prophets of the Old Testament, came from the Creator into the world as its Savior. The Creator himself has spoken and he does not use human persons to speak. Those who believe in Him are saved, and those who do not believe will suffer eternal punishment. This Savior was once nailed to the cross, and after He rose from the dead and prepared to return to heaven, He commanded His disciples to preach the gospel and convert people, with no special privileges or power. They carried the message to Europe, Africa, India, and China. After going to all of the Old World, they took the message to the New World, wherever the sun rises, wherever the moon shines, wherever boat or road can reach; no matter what race, no matter what region, there are already some converts. So we have to ask—if this person who was nailed to the cross was only a saint, would it be possible that nineteen hundred years later 329,274,398 people would have become His disciples? Millions and millions of believers trust in the Creator, trust in the Savior. These people believe in Him, respect and adore Him, and praise Him. Thus the Holy Cross has brought salvation to the whole world. Many people have given up their lives and their homes, have even suffered death in order to bear witness to this indisputable truth.
You will remember how Chinese historians associate Fang Xiaoru with “orthodox scholarship” (zhengxue) (see chapter 24) since he swore that he would defend the truth and cut out his own tongue and wrote in blood the word usurper (chuan) as a rebuke to the emperor. He remained faithful to the truth and did not bend.2 Well, if we look at the history of the world, we can’t count how many Fang
Xiaorus there have been among Catholic believers, including men and women, old and young, noble and wealthy, distinguished and base, who have sacrificed themselves and shed their blood in order to be witness[es] to the principles of the church. . . .
To take another example, the national army is shedding its blood in resistance to Japan in order to show its loyalty to the country. It has won commendation for this. Then how can we say that these millions of believers, who have shown their loyalty and respect to the Creator, who have shown absolute and unwavering commitment, are simply drugged? To be honest, opium, morphine, and other narcotics certainly can drug the body. For people, however, religion transforms human life through the truth; it causes human hearts to submit themselves gladly, so that they worship the Creator and exercise self-restraint in order to be socially responsible (keji fuli). They take the mind of the Savior as their own, and they follow the commands of the Creator. They sacrifice all that they have and go to the original Source, and so fulfill their purpose. It is certainly clear that there is not a trace of the narcotic in this!
Sources of Chinese Tradition, Volume 2 Page 79