The Chinese Communist Party later referred to simply as “the Party,” had the task of turning a war-torn country into the kind of utopian Communist society it had promised its followers.
Following are excerpts adapted from the author's book, China Unbound: A New World Disorder, published by Hurst Publishers.
by Joanna Chiu
I learned about the underground church from a member of a basketball group I joined after moving to Beijing in late 2014. The gym we rented was in a large public school complex tucked in the hutongs, a maze of ancient alleyways in the old walled city that now only exists in a few central neighbourhoods.
Every Tuesday, if the air quality was decent, I pedalled my bicycle to the gym after work. With my phone poking precariously out of my purse so I could hear directions from Baidu Maps, I careened around parked scooters and food vendors. Out of tiny metal pushcarts, the vendors sold delicious jianbing egg crepes or bright red skewers of candied hawthorn fruit, or strawberries if they were in season. The voice of the Baidu lady called out quick twists and turns and the unfamiliar alley names in Mandarin.
I had to use a Chinese app because, nearly five years earlier, in 2010, Google products had been blocked. The American technology giant had refused to self-censor its search results and elected instead to shut down its China search engine. Thousands of international websites are now only accessible in the country through a VPN, software that allows people to surf the internet as if they were in another country, but that doesn’t always work well. I had lived in Hong Kong previously, and though freedom of expression was under constant threat, at least the semi-autonomous city had fast and unfettered internet.
Our basketball group was made up of young male professionals, a few female university students, a youth basketball coach from Serbia, and me. There were plenty of bars and entertainment options in the city, but these tended to be raucous, and it was much easier to meet my first local friends while playing the most popular sport in China. The NBA was probably the most beloved American institution in the country.
After our game one night, one of my new friends — a particularly tall and athletic man in his late twenties — asked me what I was working on.
I bit my tongue. I had just received a freelance assignment from the Economist to investigate state suppression of religion in China — not really a subject for polite conversation in an authoritarian country. And I didn’t know this man well enough to guess how he would react.
So I told him I was researching Christianity. You know, in general.
His face brightened, and he immediately invited me to visit his Protestant church.
“Oh, is it an official one?” I asked, trying to be subtle.
“No,” he said, nonchalantly admitting to a subversive act against the state.
My mind was swimming with questions, but I didn’t get the chance to probe further; our time slot at the gym was up. So he sent me the church’s address over the ubiquitous social media app WeChat and said he would introduce me to his congregation’s leaders at the very next Sunday service.
Christianity first appeared in China in the seventh century, but it didn’t gain a significant presence until Jesuit missionaries arrived some nine hundred years later, late in the Ming dynasty, in the sixteenth century. The Jesuits played a key role not only in spreading the religion but in acting as intermediaries between Western and Chinese elites. Later, as relations with the West deteriorated, Christianity became associated with the aggression of Western imperial powers, and hostility in China grew against missionaries. In 1812, the Qing dynasty banned Europeans from spreading Christianity and later made violations of the new prohibition punishable by death. Chinese subjects who refused to reverse their conversions were given as slaves to Muslim leaders in the country, who at the time enjoyed better social standing in China than Christians did.
The role of missionaries in China grew when first Britain and then Britain and France defeated the Qing during the First and Second Opium Wars (1839–1842 and 1856–1860, respectively) and forced the dynasty to sign treaties that made Hong Kong a British colony and gave Westerners special privileges at various other ports. It was also during this time that Hong Xiuquan, an ambitious schoolteacher who failed the notoriously difficult national imperial examination several times and was therefore unable to become a civil servant, was exposed to missionary tracts.
Hong turned his frustration into an anti-imperial movement, initially preaching to friends and relatives who had also failed the civil service examinations. He soon mobilized millions of similarly disgruntled people in southern China and led the massive Taiping Rebellion against the Qing dynasty from 1850 to 1864. The religious insurgents called for a complete shift in the political and social system and rejected traditional Confucian values, so they wanted to do more than simply topple the dynasty and replace the Qing emperor with Hong. They also wanted to convert the masses to a new kind of Christianity that included elements of Chinese folk religion. The uprising was the bloodiest civil war of the nineteenth century, in any part of the world, with an estimated twenty to seventy million casualties. The conflict also drove millions of civilians to flee to other parts of China or to emigrate abroad. Twentieth-century revolutionaries would later consider “God’s Chinese Son” a hero for trying to rid China of its rigid and feudal structures, though historians have noted that, in practice, Hong and other Taiping leaders took on many of the trappings of traditional power holders and often behaved similarly in the areas they controlled.
To this day, because of its associations with Western imperialism and civil uprising, Christianity continues to be one of the most restricted religions in the country. The government vets the appointment of all pastors in official churches, and no church is allowed to declare allegiance to any particular branch of Christianity. The Chinese Communist Party is officially atheist, and it prohibits its ninety million party members from holding any religious beliefs. And while the nation’s constitution purports to protect citizens’ religious freedoms, religious activity is in reality tightly monitored. China has one of the world’s largest populations of prisoners persecuted in relation to their religion. Some groups, such as the quasi-Christian Church of Almighty God and the Falun Gong spiritual movement, are outright banned, and their followers are subject to arrest. A relentless crackdown on Falun Gong began in 1999 after the group organized a peaceful demonstration outside CCP headquarters to push for greater freedom to practise.
In short, Beijing seems highly suspicious of anything that involves large numbers of people pledging loyalty to a higher power than the Chinese Communist Party.
For years, police have been harassing and intimidating members of Christian “house churches,” unofficial congregations that refuse to register with authorities to operate under government oversight. Since mid-2014, authorities in the coastal province of Zhejiang have been tearing down the crosses that adorned the roofs of many such independent churches, including makeshift converted apartments and office buildings; protesting pastors were arrested and sentenced to as much as fourteen years in prison. In the winter of 2015, Christians around the country were wondering if this might portend a broader crackdown.
I took a cab to my friend’s church, which was out on the “fourth ring” expressway, a route that runs in a loop around the megacity. It was hard to find, because all I could see were identical rows of towering Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings. Eventually, I found a narrow unmarked entranceway next to a convenience store, which led into the courtyard of one of the apartment blocks.
Underground it may have been, but once you knew where to look, the church was far from clandestine. A large red cross plastered to a ground-level window advertised its presence. Posters of Bible verses with cartoon illustrations inside the building were also visible from the courtyard. Down a flight of stairs, I saw that its rooms included a high-ceilinged hall with neat rows of folding chairs and a much smaller space that doubled as a nursery and cloakroom.
In his sermon, the young pastor focused on analyzing passages of the Bible and avoided commentary on Chinese society. Afterwards, he asked me to stand and introduce myself. No one blinked an eye when I said I wasn’t religious but wanted to learn about their church. I didn’t want to announce to the group the fact that I was a journalist, in case undercover police were present, but I might not have needed to be so circumspect.
“We are not exactly lying low,” a church leader assured me in an interview following the service. “We sing hymns so loudly, people in the community get curious and come down to see what’s going on. Anyone is welcome.”
He also explained that with only a couple hundred members, their unregistered church was relatively small. At least in Beijing, congregations of their size didn’t normally attract official scrutiny. Still, he asked me not to name the church if I wrote about it.
As my unfailingly polite friend drove me back to my apartment in a central neighbourhood, I asked why he had converted to Christianity even though organized religion held such a precarious place in society.
“It gives me some meaning in life,” he said simply. “China has changed so quickly, and young people are under a lot of pressure. I want to figure out how to live well.”
. . .
To understand Beijing’s quest for global power, I first had to understand the lengths to which the CCP tries to maintain control over its 1.4 billion citizens. The modern Chinese state was founded on revolution, so its leaders know all too well the power of the masses. In order to maintain control of such a huge population, instead of rule of law in China, there is rule by law, and it’s aided by high-tech surveillance.
Laws and regulations govern virtually every aspect of a person’s life, controlling who you can marry, whether you can give birth, whether you can relocate within the country, whether you can post a satirical meme on the internet, and even your beliefs about the afterlife.
An extensive framework of legislation supports Beijing’s ability to censor, punish, or restrict all forms of expression, including on the internet, in print publishing, and many types of speech. In 2000, China’s State Council (the chief administrative authority of the People’s Republic) made internet companies legally liable if they failed to ensure adequate compliance with censorship rules on their platforms.
In 2013, the government launched a campaign against the spreading of “false rumours.” Hundreds of bloggers and journalists, as well as many prominent social media users who spoke on political matters, were arrested that year. Even if they used online aliases, they were tracked down by police through their IP addresses or the information they used to register for social media accounts. Research from Canada’s Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity and human rights watchdog, has shown that popular Chinese-owned platforms like WeChat are able to read and instantaneously censor messages even in private conversations between two people.
At the Deutsche Presse-Agentur newsroom in Beijing, working for Germany’s largest multilingual news agency, I reported on the jailing of teenage bloggers, forced abortions, and illegal land grabs. Terms such as daibu (arrest), Guo’an (secret police), and bigong (forced confession) formed part of my daily lexicon. My Mandarin was still a work in progress, but I focused on improving my vocabulary on the most politically sensitive subjects, since I feared asking my Chinese colleagues for translation help could put them in danger.
In China’s surreal legal system, lawyers receive rigorous training and judges cite legal precedent in their judgements, but the Chinese Communist Party is above the law. There is no watchdog to monitor the country’s leaders. While the constitution enshrines liberal values like freedom of speech and freedom of demonstration and property rights, the document does not limit the Party’s power — a vital detail that renders it meaningless.
Amnesty International estimates that more people in China receive death sentences than in the rest of the world combined. The exact number of executions is unknown, because the government considers them “state secrets.” And Chinese courts have an astounding 99.9 percent conviction rate.
Since virtually everyone charged with a crime ends up being found guilty, the only variable is the magnitude of the prison sentence or fine. This has been the norm for decades. In 2003, the People’s Daily, the Party’s mouthpiece newspaper, reported that a court in Anhui province sentenced two men to prison terms of nine and seven years for “unlawful operation of a business.” Their crime? Publishing love poems without government authorization.
I have tried and failed several times to make it inside a Chinese courtroom. Once, in the northern city of Tianjin, I spotted a row of unmarked cars with surveillance cameras on their roofs parked outside the Tianjin First Intermediate People’s Court, where a government official was being tried for corruption. The sidewalk was clear, and I thought I could make it close enough to the courthouse to at least observe the atmosphere outside.
Seemingly out of nowhere, a motley group of men appeared, wearing tracksuits or ill-fitting shirts tucked into khakis, and surrounded me. There was nothing to indicate I was a journalist; my phone and notebook were stashed in a pocket of my bag.
“I’m just trying to walk down the street,” I said innocently, but a thug with a buzz cut roughly pushed me back. They didn’t stop yelling and jostling me until I managed to break away to call my editor. The men stepped back when they heard me speaking English.
Something about my demeanour could have aroused their suspicion, despite my appearance as an ordinary Chinese woman. Or they could have been tracking my movements. My colleagues have been stopped trying to do things like boarding a train out of Beijing to report on polluting factories, or even jogging near Tiananmen Square around the yearly anniversary of the 1989 massacre.
Security cameras with facial scanning technology — installed in busy public areas by government authorities as well as by private companies in premises such as banks — are ubiquitous in the country. Some police officers even sport high-tech sunglasses that can scan crowds to identify suspects through facial recognition. There are no national laws governing the collection of biometric data, including fingerprints, facial characteristics, and voice characteristics, creating an environment where people don’t expect much privacy.
It wasn’t healthy to be worried all the time, but in fields such as media, law, and NGO work, it was generally accepted good practice among foreigners and Chinese citizens alike to assume we were being surveilled at all times — through hacking of personal laptops and phones, or by people following us while we were travelling for work.
The Tianjin police let me go after a uniformed officer inspected my foreign press credentials, but a few plainclothesmen tailed me as I hurried toward a subway station. I jumped into a taxi instead and hollered at the driver to go quickly in any direction. It felt like a getaway scene in a movie, and I shudder to think what might have happened if they hadn’t believed I was a foreign citizen.
I was glad the police hadn’t asked to see my passport. Though it bore Canada’s coat of arms on the cover, it listed my birthplace as Hong Kong. They might have suspected that I was actually a Chinese citizen, since the Chinese government doesn’t recognize dual citizenship. In reality, I had renounced my Hong Kong citizenship-by-birthright years earlier as a precaution.
Historians say the Party’s obsession with control has roots in the traditions of Confucianism and Legalism. According to the philosopher Confucius, who lived more than 2,500 years ago, proper behaviour is dictated by one’s position within hierarchies of superior and subordinate relationships. Therefore, children must obey their parents, younger adults must heed their elders, and every citizen must be loyal to the emperor.
Legalism, which emerged in China around 400 BCE, was compatible with the Confucian world view because it empowered the emperor to rule effectively over a vast empire containing people of different ethnicities and cultures through sets of codified laws and edicts. It was a kind of absolute power through bureaucracy. This philosophy has been compared to Machiavellianism in the Western world, since it champions the rightful consolidation of autocratic power to achieve stability and security.
Within both traditions, there is little support for a pluralism of ideas or an individual’s inalienable rights.
Since assuming power of the CCP in 2012, Chinese president Xi Jinping has declared his admiration for the Chinese classics and is particularly fond of quoting ancient Legalist scholars to justify why it is in his citizens’ best interests to submit to a strong leader.
“When those who uphold the law are strong, the state is strong,” Xi told a leadership forum in 2014, quoting Legalist scholar Han Fei (280–233 BCE) on monarchs taming social disorder. “When they are weak, the state is weak.” In doing so, Xi compared himself to an emperor.
Born in 1953 as the son of Communist revolutionary-in-arms Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping is part of an elite cohort of “princelings”: descendants of prominent senior Chinese Communist Party leaders. In recent years, this pedigree has afforded princelings advantages similar to those enjoyed by members of prominent American political families like the Kennedys, and the cohort tends to feel it has a special duty to safeguard CCP rule.
During the tumult of the tail end of the Cultural Revolution, in the mid-twentieth century, however, Xi’s father fell out of political favour, and Xi was among the thousands of urban youth forced to spend years in the countryside to learn from the peasants. He would likely have ended up among the legions of “sent-down youth” regardless of his father’s actions anyway, since it was such a blanket policy. By all reports, however, Xi unexpectedly thrived, and his kinship with Chinese commoners has since become part of his lore.
In his youth and middle age, Xi worked his way up the Party ranks, serving first as governor of the prosperous Fujian province, from 1999 to 2002, before becoming Party secretary of neighbouring Zhejiang province. In 2012, at the age of fifty-nine, he was elected general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party. The term “president” isn’t commonly used in China, but in the English-speaking world, the leader of the People’s Republic of China is widely referred to as “president,” even though some experts think that using the title makes the role sound democratically elected.
Though he rarely expressed emotion, by all accounts Xi was a force to be reckoned with. Soon after he took the top job, he delivered a speech to party members on the “deeply profound” lessons the CCP should take from the breakup of the Soviet Union.
“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse? An important reason was that their ideals and convictions wavered,” Xi said, according to a summary of his comments that circulated among Chinese officials and was published by the New York Times. He also cited political rot, ideological heresy, and military disloyalty as factors that the CCP strongly guarded against.
Within a few years, he oversaw the rapid modernization of the country’s armed forces and placed himself at their very top as both chairman of the Central Military Commission and commander in chief of its joint battle command center, which was a new title. He reshuffled the military as well as other nodes of the CCP leadership structure to minimize the decision-making power of bureaucrats, making himself the central figure in virtually all governance matters.
Beijing’s preoccupation with social order is deeply informed by “Chinese imperial histories of turbulence, collapse, and implosion, going back two millennia,” according to Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. “No wonder Chinese leaders today place such a premium on order at any cost. But those outside engaging with this concept need to be clear — fear sits right beside it. It is an order predicated more on avoiding negative things happening, rather than outlining some bold, positive vision of how things can be different, and better.”
China’s leaders certainly act as if they greatly fear another mass social upheaval, but many ordinary citizens remember the chaos of recent decades as well. Among average Chinese citizens, a widespread wariness of history repeating itself plays a role in maintaining the Party’s authoritarian rule.
Many people who were born before the 1970s have known civil war, famine, and waves of CCP attempts to “reform” and “re-educate” the masses in the name of socialist revolution. If the Mao era or the Cultural Revolution comes up in conversation, older people often sum up those decades with one word before changing the subject: luan, a state of confusion and turmoil bordering on chaos.The decades following the Second World War were tumultuous, to say the least.
After Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist revolutionary forces managed to topple the Qing dynasty in 1912, marking the end of monarchical rule in China, the new Republic of China soon faced a new challenger. The proletarian Russian Revolution and the principles of Marxism and Leninism had gained ardent admirers among some Chinese left-wing intellectuals, some of whom had spent formative youthful years in Moscow. The Chinese Communist Party was soon established by fifty intellectuals in Shanghai in 1921, led mostly by Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao. The group was passionate about finding ways to adapt the tenets of Marxism-Leninism to forge a strong and modern new China. At first, the privileged scholars had no intention to seize control of the country by force.
What began as a subtle rivalry developed into an armed conflict after the Nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek unexpectedly ordered the massacre of five thousand Communists in Shanghai in 1927. The fact that the Communists were able to recover from the killing spree had a lot to do with the actions of a relatively junior party member at the time. Mao Zedong was the son of a rich farmer in Shaoshan, central Hunan province. Throughout his life, and especially over two decades of civil war between the Nationalists and the CCP, he relied on the support of the peasant class to survive and rise to power.
As a teenager, Mao had read widely on politics, taking a keen interest in the military campaigns of George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1917, while studying to become a teacher at the First Normal School of Changsha, he commanded the students’ volunteer army. Later that year, Mao moved to Beijing and got a job as an assistant to the university librarian Li Dazhao. Mao’s time in Beijing and tutelage under intellectuals like Li and Chen had turned him into a staunch Marxist and believer in the Communist cause.
After the massacre of Communist Party members, which forced survivors to flee to other parts of the country, Mao rallied support among the commoners and co-founded the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army. His insistence on the adoption of guerrilla military tactics proved to be a boon for the ragtag force, and he was chosen as the leader of the CCP during the Long March of 1934 to 1935, when various Communist armies narrowly escaped Nationalist strongholds to establish a new base in Yan’an, Shaanxi province.
During the Second Sino-Japanese War, from 1937 to 1945, coinciding with the Second World War, the Red Army agreed to a truce and allied with the Nationalists to resist the Japanese. But the Communists largely left the hard fighting work to the Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek. The Chinese Civil War resumed immediately after Japan’s surrender, and the Red Army was able to defeat the weakened Nationalists, driving them to Taiwan, a southern island previously controlled by Japan.
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established on October 1, 1949, and Mao served as the paramount leader of the country until his death in 1976.
The Chinese Communist Party, later referred to simply as “the Party,” had the task of turning a war-torn country into the kind of utopian Communist society it had promised its followers. Chairman Mao may have been a shrewd guerrilla military leader, but he proved a far less competent statesman. He thought that grouping previously separate farms together into massive agricultural communes would help drive China’s transformation from an agrarian economy into a modern industrialized nation. Overnight, traditional farming practices were upended, and local officials came under pressure to quickly increase crop yields. The disastrous “Great Leap Forward” agricultural collectivization project (from 1958 to 1962) led fearful officials to compete to ship unrealistic quotas of grain to the cities, leaving farmers to starve. Many higher officials did not dare to report the failures of Mao’s scheme, and by the time it became obvious that the countryside was starving, it was too late.
An estimated thirty million people died in the countryside, making it the worst famine in history.
In cities, however, the Party’s policy guaranteed that urbanites in the military, civil service, or state-owned enterprises could enjoy job security and social benefits for life. The system became known as the “iron rice bowl.” The term came from a story about a beautiful housemaid who kept breaking her squire’s rice bowls. Because of her beauty, she wasn’t punished, and the squire eventually replaced his ceramic bowls with iron ones. Even though the maid wasn’t doing her job well, she was still rewarded.
But people paid for “iron rice bowl” security by having little control over their career paths and personal lives. The Party enabled work unit managers to decide who could marry and when, and whether they were allowed to have children. They also shuttled people from job to job with no accounting for personal preferences.
In 1966, facing internal criticism and seeing his status as leader diminishing, Mao mobilized his youthful supporters to stamp out “bourgeois” elements that had infiltrated government and society. He called them the “Red Guards,” and across the country, paramilitary gangs embarked on unspeakable acts of violence against people they deemed “class enemies,” such as intellectuals and landowners. This was the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, which would last a decade.
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Joanna Chiu is an internationally recognised authority on China, whose work has appeared in The Guardian, Foreign Policy, BBC World, The Atlantic, Newsweek, Quartz, Al Jazeera, GlobalPost, CBC and NPR. For seven years she was based in China as a foreign correspondent, reporting for top news agencies such as AFP and Deutsche Presse-Agentur; in Hong Kong, she reported for the South China Morning Post, The Economist, and AP. In 2012 her story on refugees in Hong Kong won a Human Rights Press Award, and in 2018 her report on #MeToo cases in Asia was named one of the best Foreign Policy long-form stories. She is the founder and chair of the NüVoices editorial collective, which celebrates the creative and academic work of women working on the subject of China.
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