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Xu Yonghai has lost faith in Communism and democracy -the last 20 years of living in China saw to that. So, like countless other Chinese staring into a spiritual void, Xu turned to religion.
"Life without faith is unbearable," the 39-year-old doctor said. "But after I found God in 1989, my life totally changed. I felt like a new person."
Xu is part of a religious and spiritual upsurge in China that threatens to surpass political dissent as a corrosive force on Communist Party authority. From western China's deserts and Tibet's high plateaus to eastern China's teeming cities and vast rural hinterlands, officials are beset by religious and spiritual challenges.
'The last few months in particular have produced dramatic indications that the officially atheist communist government is losing ground. Among them is the flight of the Karmapa to India.
While copies of Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book, China's Bible just 30 years ago, gather dust in antique shops, some young Beijingers are reading the Dalai Lama's autobiography and books on fortune telling and other traditional Chinese beliefs.
Some families are building shrines to their ancestors. Millenarian sects have attracted thousands of rural converts. Millions of Christians attend unsanctioned religious gatherings, rather that government-registered churches, despite the risk of harassment, fines and detention.
Even the state-run media lends voice to a government besieged. For at least six months, since the government banned Falun Gong as a threat to society and communist rule, newspapers have railed against "superstitious practices" and reminded party members they are meant to be atheists.
"Our country has more than 100 million believers of different faiths," Prime Minister Zhu Rongji said Tuesday at a meeting on religion. "Our religious work is concerned with uniting these 100 million around the party and government, focusing their will and strength on the cause of socialist modernisation."
But the violent excesses of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and the crushing of democracy movements and dissent since then have left many Chinese disillusioned or uninterested in politics.
Communist ideals, meanwhile, have been killed by rampant official corruption and market reforms that have ripped open a gulf between rich and poor and thrown millions of workers out of jobs they once thought would be theirs for life.
"The economy is bad, so many people have been laid off, life is tough, with housing problems, looking after the aged, schooling, medical care. It's problem after problem pressing down on ordinary people," Xu, a doctor said.
"But after people believe in God, after they accept the Gospel, they can escape this unsettling situation, this pain. That's the main reason why there have been more and more believers in the past few years."
Both official and unsanctioned churches are growing, foreign experts said. Christians could number 30 million.
Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a Hong Kong-based China researcher said, "What they fear the most are communities or religious organisations which are organised enough to set up a national network, like the Falun Gong."
Communist leaders were stunned by the movement's ability to organise protests, including one by more than 10,000 followers outside the government's Beijing headquarters last April.
(This article was also
published in The Observer of Business and Politics, Mumbai edition, January
17, 2000)
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