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Why Did Christianity Not Work Out With the Chinese People?The cultural shock |
By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor
5th of May 2007, 11:04 GMT
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The religious eclecticism of China defeated all religions, putting them in a common cultural pouch. There is no
other country that based its culture so little on religion and so much on ethics and on a profound comprehension of the variety of human nature. It is against this wall that Christianity crashed.
Christianity reached China in the 7th century with Nestorian monks from the Middle Orient and Central Asia. Its arrival was well received by the Tang emperors (618-907), but after that its adepts were persecuted by the emperors converted to Buddhism and thus, Christianity vanished.
"If you want to reach the end, start with China" said 400 years ago San Francisco Javier to the missionaries of the Company of Jesus from Japan.
The idea was that if they could make proselytism in China, other places would be a piece of cake. It was not so and from the point of view of propagation and implantation, the history of Christianity in China was one of defeat.
The first Jesuits arrived in China in the 16th century. During more than two centuries, many generations of these missionaries, amongst whom some with remarkable personalities, intended to become consolidated in the empire of the Extreme Orient and to extend Christianity but they bumped into the Chinese civilization, with its eclectic thinking and the Confucianist school.
Confucianism was the millenary "ideological weave" over which all the other spiritual and intellectual currents of the Chinese history interposed and weighed more than each one of them. It seemed that the tolerance towards the cults was an ideal field for a missionary, but in reality the fundamental differences on the mental structure and the hierarchy of the values of the Chinese civilization provoked a lot of puzzlements.
Many of the "converted" approached the missionaries more for advantages, material and touchable, which could rather be achieved in this life than for the promises oriented towards the "after life".
However, the simplest accepted Christianity as another cult and religion, besides others already existent, which was completely inadmissible for a religion essentially conceived as "unique and truthful" and which lost all its sense when put equal to others and dominated by a general eclecticism.
After receiving a lot of defeats, the Jesuits tried "a conquest from above": capturing the elites. Some of the brightest minds reached fame and recognition in the highest spheres.
Matteo Ricci reached Beijing in 1601.He invented and fabricated musical clocks and astronomical instruments, he went into the Chinese civilization in depth and created an adapted catechism, the "Tianzhu shiyi" which had some success.
Ricci was considered a "shengren" (a holly wise man) and when he died, the emperor gave him a tomb,a great honor.
Other Portuguese Jesuits, like Pereira, had come to act like real functionaries of the Chinese Empire, negotiating the establishment of the relationships with the Russian Empire and making the maps and frontier lines of the common border, from which many documents remained on the archives of Irkutsk.
All the efforts of those missionaries from the 17th and 18th centuries, to penetrate their faith, were in vain. For the Chinese learned people, the censure of the adorations to the deceased and ancestors was "the limit of the uncivilization". All these misunderstandings, with its incidents, expulsions and comebacks, came out into the interruption of the missionary activities. They had to wait till the middle of the 19th century when a new generation of Christian missionaries, of different branches would be launched again.
In 1937, there were 3 million Catholics in China and the missionaries conducted many cultural institutions in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. But all that staggered with the Communist revolution, and in 1949 foreign missionaries and Chinese believers were expelled or arrested. Till 1978, the religious practice was limited and persecuted, especially during the political radicalism known as the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
Chinese Catholics like archbishop Tang Yiming, which refused to give up his links with the Vatican and to affiliate to the Patriotic Association of Catholics (PAC), suffered years of persecution and prison. From 1958, PAC named bishops without being consecrated by Rome. For the Chinese authorities, the Vatican link, the submission to a foreign western power, was an intolerable violation of the sovereignty.
All the Chinese history of the 19th and 20th centuries related to the westerners credited this rejection attitude. But even after 1978, there were still restrictions and repression.
Today there are 12-14 million of Catholic Chinese, out of a population 1,265 million.
Due to the relationship with the Communist regime, the church is divided into "official" and "clandestine". The clandestine oppose any compromise with the Communist regime and PAC, and are faithful to Rome.
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