The Longbow Papers

When opium can be benign

China's Communist Party, reconsidering Marx's words, is starting to wonder whether there might not be a use for religion after all


"DEVELOP the dragon spirit; establish a dragon culture," urge large green characters at the high school in Hongliutan, a poor village at the foot of a range of bleak loess hills. Though dragon can be a synonym for China, it is a god known as the Black Dragon that is being invoked here. Without funds from the Black Dragon's hillside temple, in a gully behind the village, the school would not exist. Nor, most likely, would the adjacent primary school and the irrigation system that brings water from the nearby Wuding River to the village's maize and cabbage fields.

Many local governments in rural China are mired in debt. Recent central government efforts to keep peasants happy by abolishing centuries-old taxes have not made life any easier for these bureaucracies. With their revenues cut, rural authorities have found it ever more difficult to scrape together money for health care and education. So they are only too happy to allow others to share the burden of providing these services--even the Black Dragon, whose 500-year-old temple was demolished by Maoist radicals during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s. Now officials in Yulin, the prefecture to which Hongliutan belongs, give the temple their blessing.

The revival of the Black Dragon Temple's fortunes is part of a resurgence of religious or quasi-religious activity across China that--notwithstanding occasional crackdowns--is transforming the social and political landscape of many parts of the countryside. Religion is also attracting many people in the cities, where the party's atheist ideology has traditionally held stronger sway.

The resurgence encompasses ancient folk religions and ancestor worship, along with the organised religions of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam (among ethnic minorities) and, most strikingly, given its foreign origins and relatively short history in China, Christianity. In the face of this onslaught, the party is beginning to rethink its approach to religion. It now acknowledges that it may even have its uses.

In Hongliutan the party appears in retreat. It is not the party secretary Zhang Tieniu who holds sway. Mr Zhang was the youngest party chief in the prefecture when he was appointed last year at the age of 32. But in a culture that reveres age, some villagers refer to him dismissively as a "lad". The man in charge in Hongliutan is 64-year-old Wang Kehua. Mr Wang happens to belong to the village's main clan. He is also the village's elected chief (a post which in most villages is subordinate to that of party secretary). More to the point, he controls the temple and its money.