Inside China's Search For Its Soul

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come to visit the Pope of Marxism-Leninism up a long and rickety elevator. It is in the process of being refurbished, but instead of being shut down, the elevator continues to run, half alive. The claw-hammer handle that the elevator operators once used has been replaced by gleaming new push buttons, but typically for China, the elevator operator has not been replaced. She still sits there, complete with a little one-foot-square desk and a bottle of green tea, carrying the nation's top Marxists up and down for eight hours a day. The pope has his office on the 13th floor. The ride takes several minutes.

In his office, wireless telephones sit next to socialist reviews. Six green leather chairs (the luxurious, deep kind that Mao always preferred) rest on yellowed linoleum floors, backed by off-blue walls. On his bookshelf, sandwiched between Chinese works on Marx, are two slim English volumes on Business Cycles. The pope wears gray polyester pants and a blue-and-white-checked shirt--short-sleeved and semitransparent so you can see his T shirt. He sips tea from an extra-large mug. Everyone else in the room drinks from a small white one, each stamped with a large red number--144, 78, 33--which gives the room the feel of a lottery. He is 63 years old and tan. It is easy to picture him dispensing gentle ideological wisdom to President Jiang Zemin or Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, providing them with Marxist cover for their very non-Marxist policies.

He radiates intelligence. Even through a translator, he makes Marxism-Leninism seem a living, exciting thing. He is responsible for the spiritual and ideological well-being of 1.3 billion Chinese (a flock that, in status-obsessed China, would make him 30% 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 of faith," he admits. "But I still believe that the majority of the Chinese people believe in dialectical materialism. As Deng Xiaoping predicted: As long as China survives, socialism will survive."

But strangely, if you take a step out of his office, you can find a woman selling Taoist trinkets. A hundred steps away is a small Beijing park that is packed most mornings with dozens of Chinese practicing the slo-mo robotics of Tai Chi, which while secular is deeply Taoist. A mile away is a Protestant church that draws 3,000 souls to its weekend services. Within a hundred miles are scores of monasteries, seminaries and altars. Despite 50 years of the most violent scrubbing, religion still coats China with an ancient varnish. And as the nation's core ideology of Marxism-Leninism cracks under the weight of the 20th century, the pope of Marxism is no longer a man controlling a monopoly. China's rickety economy and its opaque, chilly leaders have left most Chinese looking for something, someone, to believe in. "People have lost their beliefs," explains Xu Haoyuan, a U.S.-trained Beijing psychiatrist. "They do not know what will happen to them the next day, the next year. They could lose their job, their business. They wonder what will happen to the country."

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. And it will be the only thing missing from this week's party.

Viewed against China's 5,000-year history, Mao's revolution already looks like a tiny, violent, unmatchably murderous moment. But no more than a moment. China is remaking itself at warp speed. Deng Xiaoping's immortal slogan, "To get 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, was elevated last week to the vice chairmanship of the critical Central Military Commission.