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"No! I cannot, but, I believe that God can transform China."
Robert Morrison (1782-1834)
"With one crack of a gun, the October Revolution brought Marxism to China."
Mao Zedong (1893-1976)
THE FORMATION of the recent contemporary Chinese ideology has had as its prelude the introduction of three major western trends of thought, namely, Christianity, Euro-American Liberalism and Marxism—the latter two being derivatives of Christianity. Compared with modern Euro-American Liberalism, Marxism has a much greater "affinity" for Christianity (Paul Tillich). It is therefore not difficult to understand why, in his work The End of History and the Last Man, which once aroused extensive discussions, Francis Fukuyama, the Japanese American political scientist, criticised both Christianity and Marxism.(1) In fact, these two trends of thought have successively entered China and, in shaping modern Chinese ideology, both have played a common role in coping with the trend of liberalism. Besides between the two exist several comparable common points: for instance, the translation of classical texts, the instauration of organisations,(2) the political objectives, the social ideals, the moral conceptions, the human characteristics, the relationships with “external forces”, etc.
I consider that when we examine the history of modern Chinese thought, examining in particular the twentieth century history of Chinese political thought, and straightening out the logic intrinsic to societal topics of public nature that have all along been extended to current related issues, such as “reform”, “societal pattern change”, “reflection and enlightenment”, “freedom and democracy”, “cultural reconstruction”, “individual liberation”, “harmonious society”, etc., we cannot but have recourse to the history of the propagation of Christianity and of Marxism in modern China and make a deep reflection on the “affinity” between the two and their manifestations down to the present. There is no doubt that the propagation of Christianity and of Marxism in China has already formed a “world of life” and the cultural traditions that we live in.(3) It is also precisely Christianity and Marxism, with their respective doctrines, value systems and forms of expression, that have prolonged the “redemption drama” of the myth of early humankind;(4) still more, with their respective spiritual ideas, these two trends of thought have expressed their positive concerns for the social future of humankind and the ultimate values embedded therein in ways that are different from other religious and political trends of thought—the former says it is to accept the “eschatological redemption” of the Gospel; the latter says it is through revolution to obtain the “final liberation”. Therefore here with “Gospel and Revolution” as the topic, I would like to make a kind of preliminary reflection on the propagation of Christianity and Marxism in China and their future orientations, which should not be work of insignificance.
History
Christianity resumed again its propagation in China in the nineteenth century, not long before Marxism was propagated in China in the twentieth century, i.e. just about one century later. However, the successive introduction of both in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries caused it to be fatally unavoidable anymore to amend the history of the ancient Chinese empire.
In 1807, an English missionary of the Christian London Missionary Society, Robert Morrison, arrived in Guangzhou (then Canton) for missionary activities. It is said that someone had once asked Morrison sarcastically: “Do you think you can really change the bad custom of idolatry of that ancient and big empire?” Morrison immediately replied: “No! I cannot, but I believe that God can transform China.” Indeed, two hundred years before Morrison's arrival in China for missionary activities, the political regime, the social structure, the economic system and the ideological conditions of China were essentially still quite the same as the situation was for the past two thousand years. Its political regime was a dynasty ruled by the imperial household; the economy was basically a self-subsistence small peasant economy; society had as its core the gentry's class; usurping the position of a leading ideology was the Confucian doctrine. This traditional setup however would very soon be modified, making Morrison's words exactly prove true—“God can transform China.” In what followed, first Christianity, then a product of the secularisation of Christianity— Marxism—entered the China of old which started to undergo radical change.(5)
As a matter of fact, the meeting of Chinese history and Western history had started as early as the sixteenth century. But the influence of...
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1. He said that “both Christianity and Communism are of slave
ideologies (the latter was beyond the expectation of Hegel), and
both contain only part of the truth. However, the irrationality
and self-contradiction of both can be seen clearly with the lapse
of time… The collapse of the Marxist ideology in the end of 1980s
reflects in a sense the result of a much higher degree of rationality of
people living in that kind of society, because they knew clearly that universal understanding of rationality can be possible only in a free
social order.” (The End of History and the Last Man, London, Hamish
Hamilton, 1992, p. 205.)
2. This is particularly evident in the forms of organisation of both
Catholicism and the early Communism; for instance, both have
their respective supreme organisation authorities, “red-headed
documents”, and both emphasise the strict organisational discipline
and sacrifice of their members, etc.
3. For quite a number of contemporary sinologists, “red China” has
already become the mirror of their reflections on the relationship
between the European Christianity and Marxism. The Swedish
sinologist Torbjorn Lden said that, when he was studying Chinese
in the 1970s, he liked his teacher to teach him more of articles from
the Red Flag magazine rather than from the ancient and traditional
classics. The famous Chinese scholar Gan Yang also proposed
his “tri-tradition theory” and considered the Chinese Communist
represented by Mao Zedong as just one kind of tradition.
4. I came up with this opinion after reading The Symbolism of Evil, a
work authored by the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.
5. Mr. Xu Zhongyue, a Chinese American professor and research
expert of the modern Chinese history, boils down the dynamism of
the formation of “modern China” to three points: first, the policy
formulated by the Qing government for maintenance of its own
rule; second, the nationalist revolution formed with the influence of
the Western countries; and lastly, the search for the path of survival
of “making the people rich and the country strong” under the
new international environment. See Prof. Xu's masterpiece Chinese
Modern History (Vol. I), translated by Ji Qiufeng, Zhu Qingbao, Hong
Kong Chinese University Press, 2001, pp. 5-7.
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