The Chinese government doesn’t like religion. A quick glance at their recent history shows this hostility. Chinese communists targeted Tibetan Buddhists since 1950. China began crushing the Falun Gong spiritual movement at the turn of the century. In 2017, China began incarcerating hundreds of thousands of ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang province and placing them in re-education camps to destroy their Islamic faith. Today, China is demolishing thousands of Christian churches and confiscating bibles.
It’s more than Marxist ideology driving the CCP to annihilate religion, it’s China’s history, in particular the Taiping Rebellion.
China is one of the oldest civilizations on Earth but its leaders focus on the “Century of Humiliation,” it suffered between 1839 and 1949. So what happened?
Let’s back up to the 19th Century. The Qing dynasty, who were Manchurian, ran China. The Chinese exported tea, silk and porcelain, which UK merchants wanted to buy. As the Europeans didn’t have much the Chinese wanted, silver flowed into China through the only city the Chinese permitted the Europeans to trade in – Canton. The British East India Company found something that sold well in China – opium from India. Within a few years, this resulted in a large Chinese trade deficit and lots of junkies. The emperor found this intolerable and banned the sale of opium. The Royal Navy responded by shelling Chinese cities, forcing the emperor to sue for peace and ceding Hong Kong to the British.
The Chinese state’s weakness lead to an economic and security breakdown. Rents and taxes skyrocketed. Resentment against the emperor’s Manchu ethnic group rose. European and American merchants, mercenaries and missionaries streamed into the Middle Kingdom. In 1847, a fellow name Hong Xiuquan, who had repeatedly failed the civil service exam, read an American missionary pamphlet and decided he was Jesus Christ’s little brother. Hong founded a new religion called the God Worshipping Society and began preaching to the Hakka ethnic group.
Hong’s version of Christianity was violent and nationalist. In 1850 the emperor cracked down on this new religion. In 1851, the God Worshipping Society called for rebellion against the emperor and labelled the emperor’s followers demons who must be destroyed. On Hong’s birthday they declared themselves the Taping Heavenly Kingdom and the bloodiest civil war in human history began.
The Taiping raised an army to fight Chinese imperial forces and for over a decade rampaged across the fertile and productive Yangtze river valley, seizing cities and laying waste to their enemies. American and European mercenaries joined and even led imperial Chinese forces in suppressing the rebellion. By 1864, the empire retook Nanjing, the Taiping capital, but the rebellion continued for another seven years in remote provinces until it was crushed. Conservative estimates put the death toll at a minimum of 20 million, although some claim more than double that number perished in the conflict.
The rebellion devastated the Chinese economy, led to the rise of private armies and forced a decentralization of the Chinese empire, further weakening it to foreign exploitation. The widespread destruction burned itself into Chinese memory.
We often say that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. The lesson the Chinese government draws from their own history is that religion can declare war on the central government. The CCP’s heavy-handed approach to faith is because they do not want history repeated. Religion will not prosper in China so long as the central government sees it as competition, which could be a very long time indeed.
Wes Clark Jr. 