China’s Religious Boom

In a National Interest review of Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition, Dan Bluemnthal writes that “neither money, nor nationalism is satisfying the Chinese urge for the good life.” He quotes Haruki Murakami’s observation that nationalism is like “cheap liquor” whose effects don’t last. 

Blumenthal suggests that “There is a spiritual and moral void in China. People do not trust the institutions around them: the Party is corrupt and hypocritical, business is corrupt and political patronage is rampant, and the media is censored or bought off.”

What Party and economy and nation don’t offer, religion does: “religion is booming. Daoism, Buddhism, and folk religions are making a comeback in the poorest and most rural parts of China; Christianity is roaring along everywhere. Osnos estimates that there are as many as 60-80 million Christians, rivaling Party membership. That statistic must be terrifying to a regime that views the organizing power of Amway with suspicion. Osnos makes his point about the frenetic spiritual searching in China by entertainingly describing the practice of ‘spiritual hedging.’ Chinese people may go to the Lama Temple to pray for good grades for the kids, then visit the Confucian temple midday, and end the day at the Catholic Church, just in case.”

He concludes, “For now various ‘guiding principles’ are in competition: religion, state-worshiping nationalism, justice and liberty. The big question is whether one will win out.”