The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao by Ian Johnson, Allen Lane, £25
China has been through much in the past hundred years, discarding traditions and trying out new ideologies like suits of clothes, with warlordism, fascism and communism giving way to a hybrid authoritarian-capitalist system which, while bringing prosperity, has left people with an urgent question: with so much lost, what makes them Chinese?
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Johnson explores this in The Souls of China – an insightful, compelling and often moving study of the lives of a handful of spiritually aware Chinese families over the course of a year as they practise their faiths and consider the role of ancient rituals in today’s world, putting them at what the author suggests “might actually be the forefront of [a] worldwide search for values”.
A long-time resident with the deep trust of his subjects, Johnson eschews easy answers and brings to life the thrilling complexities of modern China through their small personal triumphs, worries and failures.
He deftly telescopes back to give historical context and imbue what could have been a dry and academic work with a compassion appropriate for the subject matter. One senses a personal investment in his quest to find meaning in a world hurtling into an unknown future, the author as much a seeker as those he is describing.
Tracing the tale of religion in the country back to the collapse of China’s traditional civilisation at the beginning of the 20th century, Johnson notes that historically, rather than being followers of any one belief system, people believed in an amalgam of Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism that is best described as “Chinese Religion”.
With the coming of the Nationalist Party in the 1930s, modernisers drew a distinction between “real religion” – such as Christianity – and indigenous “superstition”, setting the course for decades to come with their view that Chinese religion was “a social ill that needed to be radically reformed or destroyed in order to save China”.
By the 1960s, under Mao, religious activity of all denominations was suppressed. In Shanxi, the cathedral was turned into a “living exhibition” of how backward religion was, with priests and nuns put in cages for locals to inspect.
Maoism – especially for the young – became “an ersatz religion for a country that had destroyed its own”, and it wasn’t until 1982 that the government – sensing the stability faith could offer in the wake of Mao’s passing – decreed that, while still tightly controlled, places of worship could re-open and a new generation of clergy be trained. This, Johnson notes, marked the foundation of the country’s religious revival.
Today China has roughly 200 million Buddhists and Daoists, 50 to 60 million Protestants, 20 to 25 million Muslims, and about 10 million Catholics (the latter suffering as a result of the expulsion of foreign missionaries under Mao, leaving it leaderless and the least influential of the major faiths).
Another 175 million follow some sort of folk practice – “all told, a remarkable recovery, especially considering the destruction of religious infrastructure and knowledge, continued political suppression, and broader difficulties of defining one’s spirituality”.
Many practices survive with government endorsement but are strictly badged as culture rather than religion, curated for their heritage value but facing an uncertain future, at once an attractive counterweight to, and incompatible with, fast-paced urban living.
One of the most compelling characters we get to know is Li Bin, a ninth generation “yinyang man” – a cross between a geomancer, fortune teller and funeral director – who has relocated to the city to keep the family business alive.
Although respected and in demand, he explains that city dwellers no longer have time to spend days observing full mourning ceremonies and want everything condensed – the style without the substance or context of the past from which such traditions emerged. Having completed an arcane “ghost burial” one night – carefully repositioning the coffins of an elderly couple who had been interred without due care – he stands at the midnight graveside wondering whether anyone will have the knowledge to do the same for him.
Such uncertainty pervades the book, as the underlying sadness of deep tradition having survived lengthy state persecution only now to be threatened by social indifference and the allure of globalisation gives it much power. “There is a need for a spiritual life,” Johnson observes, drawing out the universality of such yearning, “but the question is what will coalesce out of the wreckage of the past to satisfy the future.”
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