BOOK REVIEWS

China’s Catholics — Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society,by Richard Madsen

Richard Madsen lectures in sociology at Harvard and specialises in issues of morality and society in Chinese villages (1). His book China’s Catholics deals with the countryside around Tianjin and asks the question of the role of the Catholics in contemporary Chinese society.

In 1949 there were three million Catholics on the mainland. Today there could be between eight or ten million. But what do we know about them? Occasionally articles appear in the international press, but they mostly announce the arrest of members of clandestine communities. Further information has to be sought in the bulletins of UCAN, the Asian Catholic press agency based in Hong Kong and Bangkok, and in the journal Eglises d’Asie (Asian Churches), published in Paris by Missions Etrangères. These publications allow the reader to follow the process of the rebuilding of Catholic institutions (such as places of worship, parishes, seminaries and diocesan congregations of religious women), but they throw little light on the attitudes and practices of the believers. Madsen stresses the point that readers from pluralist Western societies find it difficult to grasp that the Church in China is “sociologically different” and has “different practical understandings of the meaning of faith, the nature of authority, and the constitution of moral order”.

The difficulty is compounded by the fact that most Chinese Catholics live in the countryside and frequently in almost exclusively Catholic villages closed to foreign researchers. Madsen’s own book was part of a project conducted jointly with the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences. Even so, he was refused permission to make contact with the Catholic villagers. In the event, a Chinese woman working in the team took over those interviews, while Madsen set up meetings for himself with people from the countryside currently residing in Tianjin.

Do Chinese Catholics play a positive social role?

Madsen’s reply to this question is mostly negative. Instead of providing a source of civic values and co-operation, the Church in China often seems to encourage a spirit of “mistrust, vertical relations, parochialism and factionalism”. Madsen views these characteristics as the outcome of an interaction between a conception of the Church from before the Second Vatican Council on the one hand, and “Chinese social structure and the communist state” on the other. In China, membership of the Catholic Church has taken on a “quasi-ethnic” form, and believers traditionally aspire to live in exclusively Catholic villages. They display a high degree of solidarity, but this is often narrow-minded with a strong tendency to be “belligerent, built on resentment of outsiders”. Even when Catholic villagers actually do find good theological reasons for co-operation with their non-Catholic neighbours, the supreme virtue still remains “loyalty to family and community”. This morality based on loyalty easily gives rise to a factional outlook centred on “martyrs” who heroically maintained the faith at the time of persecution but who do not have the necessary qualities to lead their community nowadays. Madsen also stresses that Catholics are often very mistrustful of the new economic developments, and that those with the strongest faith “tend to be the ones most opposed to all forms of modernisation”.

The author is careful not to generalise, pointing out that his study deals mainly with the regions of northern China, where there are heavy concentrations of Catholics. Moreover, in the more modernised regions such as Guangdong province, the Catholics are more able to collaborate with non-Catholics. Nonetheless, the thirty years of persecution from 1949 to 1979 goes a long way towards explaining the factionalism and closed outlook of Chinese Catholicism. There is little doubt that the situation has greatly improved since 1979, but still the Communist Party’s arbitrary rule and heavy-handed methods remain a major obstacle to community development. In addition, “civil society” is still in a parlous embryonic state. Its development is strictly controlled by the government and, in the absence of a clearly defined legal status, all non-governmental bodies depend for their survival on very ambiguous relations with the corrupt bureaucracy. In such a situation, Madsen observes, even a more open (or more “civil”) Church would be very unlikely to be able to play a substantial role in the overall development of Chinese society.

Yet Madsen also suggests that in the cities another kind of Catholic is beginning to emerge. The young adults attending Sunday evening mass in Chinese at the cathedral in Tianjin are no longer satisfied with the theology of many of their priests. They are looking for a spirituality in tune with the values and the ambiguities of modernisation. This quest provides the theme for Longqi: The Dragon’s Prayer, by the Catholic writer Yang Ni. The hero of this short story, having grown up in a traditional Catholic village, leaves to go to university in Beijing, and then to gain a Master’s degree in religious studies abroad. Finally he decides to become a priest and return to China to carry out his ministry. This path leads him through “a (sometimes painful) refiguring of his faith”, and to reflect and interact with a wide variety of people—while still maintaining “his loyalty to those primary ties of family and community”, that is, to the past ‘that nurtured that faith in the first place”.

China’s Catholics abounds in similar anecdotes and case studies: moral dilemmas, examples of Marian devotions, vocation stories, miracles, apparitions and burials, discussions of limbo, and conflicts between wives and mothers-in-law. All of these swift vignettes constantly give a flexibility to the sociological analysis. Thanks to this movements between his attention to detail and his overall interpretation, Madsen is largely successful in unravelling the codes of this “quasi-ethnic” group encamped on the margins of China’s dominant culture.

Translated from French original by Jonathan Hall