(RNS) When I was an Air Force chaplain stationed in Japan, I discovered that many U.S. Christians in the military had difficulty living in a country where they were a distinct religious minority. They were accustomed to “being in charge,” dominant in shaping cultural and spiritual values.
“Welcome to membership in the minority club,” I’d tell them.
“Jews and others long ago adapted to majority Christian societies. Now it’s your turn to adapt to someone else’s religion and culture. Get used to it. Deal with it.”
My wife and I recently visited China, and the trip confirmed my earlier experience in Japan. There are 56 “official” ethnic and religious minorities among China’s 1.4 billion people, yet more than 92 percent of the population belongs to the majority Han group. Their religion is a pragmatic combination of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism, buttressed by a series of basic teachings that emphasize family, longevity, and success in life.
China’s huge population means that one of every five human beings on earth is part of a Chinese spiritual mix that’s free of traditional Judeo-Christian religious concepts with their emphasis on sin, atonement, and guilt.
Today China is already the world’s No. 2 economy and the planet’s largest consumer of energy. It takes an enormous amount of coal, oil, water, and nuclear power to drive the Chinese juggernaut.
We were told China is no longer a “communist” nation as we know the term, but it is, however, an authoritarian, tightly controlled society. The government deals harshly with a restive Buddhist population in Tibet and Uighur Muslims, and has a sometimes tense relationship with neighboring Russia.
Make no mistake, China is on the move everywhere in the world. The days of France, Britain and the U.S. carving out spheres of influence in Shanghai are long gone, as are Western Christian missionaries who were free to proselytize inside a weak China. Gone, too, is an era when rapacious Westerners removed — the Chinese would say “stole” — numerous cultural treasures and precious pieces of art.
Western powers that were victorious over the Chinese in the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion made the country an economic goodie bag, a cultural treasure house to be pillaged. Japan, too, brutally occupied much of China in the 1930s and ’40s.
No longer.
No one today loots China’s cultural treasures, and hostile armies no longer occupy her territory. In fact, the opposite is true. In recent years, China “recovered” Hong Kong from Great Britain and in return granted the city special economic status. Ultimately, Beijing hopes to weave Taiwan’s 23 million people into the People’s Republic of China that was established in 1949. China already claims the South China Sea as totally its own.
The sheer energy level of the Chinese people, the nation’s massive building campaign, the fierce commitment to become a major (if not the major) economic and military power in the world, are all unassailable facts.
China is a nation where having more than one child in an urban area is punishable by a large fine for the parents, where abortion is a common medical procedure and not a dirty word and where cremation is the law of the land — all in stark contrast to many Western nations, including the United States.
I’m not sure whether today’s China, or tomorrow’s China, is America’s friend or adversary. Yet I am certain our relations with its people, culture, religious traditions and history are not the stuff of offbeat university studies. Dealing realistically with a strong and assertive China is an absolute necessity.
“Some scholars believe the earlier imperial dynasties represent our `Golden Age,”‘ one tour guide told us. “Not true. Today, right now, is really our `Golden Age.'”
Get used to the new China. And deal with it.
(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the forthcoming “Christians & Jews, Faith to Faith: Tragic History, Promising Present, Fragile Future.”)
