Inside China's Search For Its Soul

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The conflict can sometimes be amusing. The nation's schools, for instance, are stocked with American-missionary English teachers--cheap labor. They're not allowed to preach, and principals always warn students that they are being taught by Christians. But now the policy backfires. "It made it easier for us," laughs a missionary who converted students as he taught, "because anyone interested in religion made a beeline for us."

It's hard to get an exact count of believers in China. The government's sharply edited numbers say there are 100 million, but outsiders suggest it could be more than double that. Beijing does say that since the 1980s, more than 600 Protestant churches have opened each year in China. More than 18 million Bibles have been printed, some on the presses of the People's Liberation Army. And the official Chinese Catholic Church is opening youth summer camps in parts of China. The world's religious leaders see this liberation of China's 1.3 billion souls as epochal. Says Candelin: "The revival of the Christian church in China is by far the biggest and most significant in the history of Christianity."

Outside the mainstream religions--and outside the supervision of the government--are hundreds of independent Chinese religions that gird China like a rural electric network, illuminating lives house by house. In Fujian province each spring, tens of thousands of the faithful parade from town to town in religious "long marches" celebrating localized Taoist gods. Tai Shan, a holy mountain south of Beijing, is one of the country's most popular tourist sites--especially among would-be grandmothers, who trudge to the top, drape red strings over trees and then return home to wait for the grandson this ritual is supposed to guarantee. The searching need for faith is written on the faces of the Chinese who pace each day, by the thousands, through the "Confucian forest" in Qufu. There, among the 600-year-old birch trees, are buried 77 generations of Confucius' descendants. Their graves, trashed and looted during the Cultural Revolution, have been rebuilt and remade in this decade. During the Cultural Revolution, in the 1960s, angry adolescent Red 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.

Religious vacations may sound unusual, particularly for a communist country, but some form of faith or superstition 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 of gods or demons. One-twelfth believe they have seen ghosts or demons." He sighs again. "Is it any wonder that 80% of Chinese visit fortune-tellers?"