GEORGE JOCHNOWITZ
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viduality was outlawed, individuals themselves were considered worth–
less. Countries as different as Russia, Ethiopia, and China all developed
the same architecture, the same "neighborhood committees," the same
fear of thought. What is even worse, they pursued policies that led to
starvation on a catastrophic scale. Such a famine is currently taking
place in North Korea.
It
is no accident, comrade.
What is a religion? Each religion defines the word "religion" in a dif–
ferent way. Confucianism teaches a way of life and accepts an order in
the world, but Confucius was vague about the nature of the gods. Is
Confucianism a religion? This is not an easy question. Taoism is gener–
ally recognized as China's indigenous religion. Yet the philosophy of
Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, is independent of belief in deities. Bud–
dhism was China's major religion before r949, yet among the Han peo–
ple, the ethnic Chinese, Buddhism seemed to lack a connection between
ritual and ethics. All societies have religious traditions, but one might
argue that China was the least religious of traditional societies.
Perhaps this fact makes China a country whose citizens are likely to
get swept up by new systems of belief. There isn't enough old religion to
form an alternative to the rapid rise of a new faith . In r836, a man liv–
ing in Guangdong Province named Hong Xiuquan became a Christian.
After having many visions, he concluded that he was the son of God and
therefore the younger brother of Jesus Christ. He founded the Taiping
Movement. Taiping means "very peaceful" and is the Chinese name for
the Pacific, or "peaceful" ocean . The Taiping Movement was both reli–
gious and political, and between r850 and r864 a bloody civil war was
fought between the Taipings and the government of China.
Marxism too is a system of belief, although an explicitly atheistic
one.
In
the days of Chairman Mao, faith in Marxism was absolute.
Marxists believe that there are inevitable stages of history: primitive
communism, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and the final stage of
Communism. When this final stage comes, there will be no economic
inequality and therefore no conflict of interest, since the only cause of
disagreement is money. The state will then wither away.
Chinese people today say they no longer have any interest in Marx.
They simply want to get rich . Yet their acceptance of money as the sole
source of happiness shows that Marxism has conditioned their patterns
of thought. Other habits of thinking introduced by Marxism remain.
Love of money hasn't necessarily changed the view that the poor are
good and the rich bad. Marxism, ironically, has prepared China to
accept some of the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount:
