Word: nationalisms
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Everywhere in China you hear talk of a spiritual vacuum, an echoing nihilism that quiets this hyperkinetic nation. This week, as China celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mao's October revolution, high-tech military jets will scream over Beijing, foreigners will arrive in search of new investment opportunities, and the government will celebrate a nation transformed. But what will be missing is faith. Fifty years ago, on an overcast fall day, Mao and his cadres gathered in Tiananmen and stared at a nothing future--no food, no remnants of a healthy economy, no allies. All they had was faith...
...Lenin would be mortified by modern China. Think things over? The place is changing so fast that the Chinese like to say, "He who thinks is lost." In China it's all about reaction. At the nation's heart is a tentatively beating, market-based economy, and keeping it alive puts every other goal--even mass atheism--in distant second place. That's why there's such a complex struggle with religion. China's leaders think a little faith can help the country grow--by serving as a bulwark against social unrest and the ennui Chinese call huise wenhua...
China's ideological Brahmins have cut a deal with the nation's spiritual leaders--as long as your religions support the regime, we'll let you exist. But there's a flip side: Step off that narrow path, and you'll go to jail. "Prison," Chinese priests and nuns still say, "is our seminary." In 1982 China's constitution was amended to permit freedom of religion. But that's not the same as freedom of belief or freedom from government interference. Thus while China has officially produced 1,000 Catholic clerics in the past 18 years, all government-certified Catholics...
...Guards dug up Confucius' grave, the most sacred spot in the forest, to show the Chinese that it was empty, that their Confucian faith was misplaced. But today the shrine is one of the holiest in China. Confucius may not inhabit the crypt, but he still haunts the nation's heart...
...Rebellion at the turn of the century. Even Mao's militant idealism can be seen in this light. But China's long history is also filled with moments when faith and pragmatism merged to create miracles. What scares China's leaders is that the very first miracle of the nation's new faith may be their disappearance...