It's a Chinese tradition to worship the moon on Mid-Autumn Day. Cao Jianxiong/Zuma Press/PA Images
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One of UnHerd’s main themes is religion – specifically the idea that “religion matters, even if you don’t believe.” That’s true even in the most secular societies. For instance, the People’s Republic of China has an officially atheist government – and it has by the far the largest number of non-believers of any nation.
And yet, as the China-expert Ian Johnson says in a Five Books interview, “we can’t understand China without understanding religion in China.”
Indeed, it can be argued that religion is more important in China than in the West, because the country’s government has shut off so many secular sources of meaning:
“There are people in China who are looking for values and answers to basic moral questions. Some find it in humanism or in democracy or in human rights, but the government has largely made these taboo topics.”
Interviewed by Alec Ash, Johnson provides a number of valuable insights. Here’s one example:
“Chinese hate it when people say that China is the factory of the world – they view it as an insult. With thousands of years of civilization, they say we’re more than a factory for Apple products, we have a lot of culture and values to contribute to world civilization.”
And yet that heritage has been subject to successive campaigns of destruction that Westerners can barely imagine. In the late 19th century, there were a million temples in China. A hundred years later they were almost all gone:
“By the end of the Cultural Revolution, more or less all places of worship in China had been either destroyed, closed or repurposed, so that there was no functioning temple, church or mosque in all of China.”
Communism was responsible for much of the destruction, but half the temples had already been destroyed before the Communists took over – victims of earlier spasms of revolutionary modernisation and military conflict.
In the West, we see the more recent liberalisation of China mostly in economic terms. But there’s another story to tell about the last forty years of reform, which is China’s recovery from a civilisational apocalypse.
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