Hu Jintao in Italy: More on

[Spengler]

Hu Jintao in Italy: More on "China's Catholic Moment" on the Spengler Blog

An Asia Times dispatch today from Francesco Sisci, author of the essay "China's Catholic Moment" in the June-June issue of First Things, observes that Chinese premiere Hu Jintao next week embarks on a state visit to Italy, the first for a Chinese leader in a decade. The visit, Sisci argues, may portend a breakthrough in relations between China and the Vatican:
Hu will come as close as possible to breathing the air around one of the pillars of Western civilization - the Papacy, the Holy See, the Vatican, the headquarters of the largest unitary religion in the world. For centuries, the Vatican has been part of the very way of thinking in the West. The idea of balancing powers came from the Roman republican tradition of two consuls, the democracy of the Greek city-states, preventing a concentration of power; it continued with the balancing of clashes and friction between the emperor and senate during the Roman Empire, and for centuries it was embodied in the talks and dialogue between European kings and the popes - the political and religious powers of the Western world.

During all that time, China had only the idea of concentration of power in the hands of the emperor. If the emperor failed to hold on to power, the empire would break up (as happened many times in the past 22 centuries) or the dynasty would fall. Religious leaders simply had to obey to the emperor, in one way or another. But since the beginning of Deng Xiaoping's reforms, China has forfeited the idea of an emperor, a single paramount leader. China's decision-making process is developing fast and learning from the West, and China is looking around for inspiration. As the Vatican is part of this Western tradition of balancing powers, it is inescapable for the Chinese leaders.

Jiang, at the turn of the 21st century, started the process of normalizing ties with the Vatican, a process that stalled for a few years after the Holy See decided to canonize 120 Chinese martyrs on October 1, 2001, the PRC's 51st National Day, the first PRC's National Day in the new millennium.

After a few years, the process restarted. Two years ago the pope issued a groundbreaking letter to Chinese Catholics that, for the first time since the beginning of the Cold War, recognized the legitimacy of the PRC and thrashed the old hostility between Catholic believers and the officially communist Chinese government. It said that a good Chinese Catholic ought to also be a good Chinese citizen.

 
Comments on Sisci's "Catholic Moment" essay were overwhelmingly negative, even hostile; a number of posters accused Sisci of parroting the Chinese Communist line and acting as an apologist for a murderous regime. My own view is that such outbursts betray a sort of cultural illiteracy that is sadly typical of Americans, who assume that if the rest of the world simply acted as they do, all would be well. They forget that America called out from among the nations a tiny percentage of individuals who wished to make a new start at the price of abandoning their own ethnicity.

Many of my conservative friends seem to think that if we jump up and down on the table and scream about China's lack of democracy, we would improve the situation. I can't decide if ignorance or petulance dominates in this attitude. China always has been a empire, never a nation state. It holds together a welter of difference ethnicities speaking different languages through a common system of ideograms and a common culture, and always has opposed a centralizing power to centifugal tendencies. It is an inherently unstable system. Communism erased China's traditional culture, the Confucian system that linked the "little emperor" at the head of an extended family to the "big emperor" in Beijing through a set of analogous filial obligations.

In the midst of the greatest social upheaval in modern history, the largest popular migration in all of history, Chinese leaders are painfully aware that a great empire cannot survive merely on the impetus of consumerism. That is why China's leaders are looking to the West for more than methods of business administration. It is impossible to predict, of course, how this will proceed, but potentially it could be one of the most momentous developments of our time.

Those in the United States who want China to fail should be careful what they wish for. Iraq, Iran, or Belarus could sink into the ground without a trace and the world would carry on regardless; an unstable China would make the world security situation unmanageable, not to mention the world economy.

 

My mystical intuition tells me that Hu's decision to visit Italy implie something more than the Chinese passion for Italian cuisine (the regional cuisine of Shanghai is Italian, judging from the number of restauarants operating their from Pizza Hut to haute cuisine, and the city's signature dish is osso buco alla gremolata). My mystical intuition thinks that Hu's presence in Italy has something to do wtih the fact that the Vatican is located in Italy. We will see; my mystical intuition gets it wrong a good deal of the time.

[dpence]

I just returned from 3 weeks in Vietnam and found the streets full of entrepeneurs, the museums and billboards full of heavyhanded Marxist art and sloganeering and the Catholic churches filled with respectful and reverent worshippers.
It reminded me of the efforts of President Diem to forge a synthesis of Catholic and Vietnamese mandarin sensibilities. For this he was villified by the NY times David Halbestram and the disastrous Brahmin Protestant US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.
Hopefuly the Catholic Church can extract its recently inserted feminist implant and stop apologizing and diluting the patriarchal consonance of China Japan and Vietnam with Catholic worship and culture. Catholic culture brings to these deeply patriarchal cultures the communal corollary of patriarchy--apostolic fraternity as the basis for civic public life. This attempt to reinvigorate local public life based on masculine military duty was the miltia and strategic hamlet strategy of Diem who understood the defect of a Confuician social order in which the country was considered simply the family unit writ large. (This defect is the great scouge of public life and subverter of wide social trust--family and kin loyalties with no horizontal sense of terrritorial local and national citizenship ties.)
Catholics also present Marain feminity which is a a palpable realtiy throughout the Vietnamese Church. This is another part of the church's symphonic sexual iconography so much more compatible with revtializing ancient cultures than the modernist conflict driven feminism as sexual marxism rhetoric.
Whenever the Vatican speaks as an international European State proposing "solutions" to state conflicts it diminsihes Her real authority to speak as the transmitter of the Gospel. It is in preaching the gospel and offering the sacrifice of the Mass that the church best organixes men into communities with sacred centers of worship, prayer and public thanksgiving. Let good and strong laymen of the nations speak of how many and what kind of states should crowd together west of the Jordan. Let there be no Church comment on the legitimacy of the Chinese govenrment and land claims. The Chinese know (like the vietnamese) that Soviet style billboards of white intellectuals soldiers and workers with a woman on the side cannot feed their nations' souls. These are lands with ancient traditions burning incense in every other home to remember their dead, express filial piety and affirm there is a post death moral judgement for earthly actions. The Chinese and Vietnamese know their people need a bigger story than marxism in which their nation can play some role. The church as the Church of the gospel is what they cry for--someone tell the human rights activists, CNN reporters and Vatican Eurodiplomats that the real role of the Church is to stretch out the materialist playing field on a bigger canvas where the angels and demons still contest.

[capitalisttool]

I'm not fully up on the situation in China, but my instinct says that China would much prefer a religion with a leader, such as Catholicism, to the fractured Protestant system. China can reach an agreement with the Pope, it's unlikely they could do so with hundreds or thousands of Protestant leaders. In that vein, history also presents the example of Emperor Kangxi, who engaged the Catholics, whereas the Taiping Rebellion was led by a Protestant convert.

[Josef K.]

But on the ground, it is Protestantism which is proving more appealing.