Word: states
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...more powerful than the Pope of Catholicism). As director of the Research Institute of Marxism-Leninism at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Fu Qingyuan ministers to everyone from government officials to the nation's academics. At his fingertips is the apparatus of one of the most powerful state information machines in the world, and it can all be harnessed to send one simple message to each of those 1.3 billion people: There is no God. When you die, you're dead. The only finger on your fate is your own. "Many people in China are facing a crisis...
...rich is glorious," has replaced Mao's aphorisms in the same way that the tabloid Shopper's Guide has supplanted his Little Red Book. But the Chinese are discovering that while getting rich is marvelous, it can also be numbing. Communism and its concordant atheism remain the state religion. Indeed, Hu Jintao, a contender to succeed President Jiang, built his career partly on suppressing Tibetan Buddhist followers of the Dalai Lama and, it is believed, supported the crackdown on Falun Gong, the mystic sect that claims millions of members in China. As a sign of his ascendancy, Hu, a civilian...
...This year's winner was Sima Nan, a 43-year-old ex-journalist who debunks the "superhuman" feats of local shamans on his TV show.) "The sincere advocacy of freedom of religious belief is based on our understanding of the dialectical materialistic theory," says Ye Xiaowen, director of the State Council's Religious Affairs Bureau. "It is our concept of God." God, therefore, is subject to "sensible, cautious and scientific choice." As Ye wrote in 1996, "We must definitely adopt Lenin's attitude on such questions: 'Be especially cautious,' 'Be most rigorous,' and 'Think things over...
...underground, ministered to by fugitive priests. Beijing has little patience with those who say the Kingdom of Heaven has precedence over the rulers of the Middle Kingdom. Peter Xu Yongze, an underground Protestant minister, has been arrested three times for suggesting that God might be more enduring than the state. (His other transgressions include pushing a kind of Christianity that requires new converts to weep for three straight days as a way to cleanse themselves...
...weaves its way through every element of Chinese life. The new Shanghai stock exchange is built in the shape of a hollowed square to help trap positive energy, a nod to the ancient geomantic rituals of feng shui. And members of China's new middle class are embracing both state-of-the-art technology to transform their economy and 5,000-year-old superstitions to support their lives. "It turns out that the majority of businesspeople in China believe in the god of fortune," sighs Fu, the Marxist leader. "And one-sixth of the people believe in the existence...