[Repost] Do We Need a Revival of Faith? (Xu Youyu)

http://vip.bokee.com/20070924389448.html
I happened upon this article quite by chance, and several passages are quite interesting. I might as well repost it here, and in passing introduce Xu Youyu’s blog as well—Xu Youyu’s blog was also discovered by me in a very accidental way, in a very accidental place, though now I only go there once in a great while… The blog column on “Blog China” really is a mess; not to mention all the clutter on the right side of the page, the articles themselves are full of all kinds of inexplicable automatic links that one has to check. The comments are also far too chaotic; in this state, it would be more peaceful if there were no comments at all.
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Do We Need a Revival of Faith? (Xu Youyu)
Compared with other peoples in the world, the Chinese may be the least faithful. Of course, rituals are not necessarily few in number; Chinese people have long been the most diligent worshippers of Marshal Zhao and the most frequent bowers before Guan Gong, but does that count as faith? In fact, no matter how many heterodox dabblers there are, what is believed in is money, and what is revered is profit, that is all.

Today, the state of faith among the Chinese is quite abnormal. The Frenchman Clemenceau once said the famous line: “If a man does not believe in socialism before the age of 30, it means he has no heart; if he still believes in socialism after the age of 30, it means he has no head.” Here, those who believe in socialism are mostly far older than 30—often seventy or eighty years old, especially those known as “old comrades”—while those under 30 not only do not believe in socialism, they believe in no -ism at all. It can be seen that people nowadays have neither heart nor head.

But the lack of faith seems to be a feature only of our own era, and an unsettling one at that. For the Chinese only recently experienced a time of extreme faith, of faith gone mad. We can call 1966 to 1976 the “age of faith,” an age in which faith was so fanatical that it had neither heart nor head. The slogans of that era already reveal the degree and ubiquity of that faith: “We will lay down our heads and spill our blood, vowing to defend XXX to the death,” “Let revolution burst forth deep in the soul,” “Harshly struggle against even a passing thought of self-interest.” In fact, the contemporary lack of faith is nothing more than a backlash against that age of faith; the falsehood, blindness, and frenzy of 1966 to 1976 overdraw the Chinese people’s supply of faith for a long time to come.

A foreign scholar of the Cultural Revolution, Martin Singer, said: “For most Chinese young students, the Cultural Revolution represented a hurtful loss of political innocence. This innocence—and the optimism and dedication that went with it—was a valuable resource for a nation striving to bid farewell to the past and establish its place among modern nations. This innocence can only be lost once… That innocence was lost, and this is the real tragedy of the Cultural Revolution.”
Another sinologist, Anne F. Thurston, summarized the consequences of the Cultural Revolution by saying: “Behind the various responses to the consequences of the Cultural Revolution lies a profound sense of loss—loss of cultural and spiritual values; loss of status and honor; loss of prospects and dignity; loss of hope and ideals; loss of time, truth, and life; in short, the loss of nearly everything that makes life worthwhile.”

Is the loss of the old faith a good thing or a bad thing? People disagree, each seeing the matter from a different angle. Some value the hypocrisy and coercion in the old faith, the side of “using reason to kill people,” and sincerely praise “avoiding the sublime”; others hold high the banner of faith and loudly call for resistance to moral collapse and for standing firm on the high ground of ideals. The former deeply understand historical experience, but they cannot answer this question: can the hoodlum mentality of “better be a true villain than a false gentleman” become the mainstream belief and mainstream value of a society? The latter care only whether faith and ideals exist at all, not about their specific content; one has reason to suspect that for them, the unified will and unified marching step of the fascist era is also some kind of ideal state.

Throughout history, faith has merely been a normal expression of the spiritual, cultural, and psychological condition of an age or a society. But because we have come through an abnormal era, the matter becomes a bit more complicated when we speak of faith. We once had an excessively illusory faith, so now we have a worrisome nihilism; we once had an extreme contempt for material enjoyment and economic interests, which has led to the present backlash toward the other extreme. People probably will not forget that the highest leader’s directive during the Cultural Revolution was: “I approve of this slogan: namely, not fearing hardship first, and not fearing death second.” After the Cultural Revolution ended, the question debated most fervently among young people was: do personal interests and personal prospects have legitimacy? When the march toward China’s modernization began again, we indeed needed to set right the traditional notion that “the gentleman understands righteousness, the petty man understands profit.” But we should not forever take that abnormal era as our reference point, nor should we believe that “to correct excess, one must go beyond the proper limit.”

Whether one compares horizontally or vertically, it is not excessive to say that commercial power is expanding and material desire is swelling in China today. In personal life and social life, it is hard to see the role of faith as something that can counterbalance such power and such desire. More and more people feel this and issue appeals: we should recover the lost faith and return to the lost spiritual home; we cannot be satisfied with human relations that are now merely bound together by interest!

The problem is, what kind of faith did we have in the past, and what kind of human relations? That imagined Eden born of dissatisfaction with the status quo—where exactly did it exist, and in which era? In the faith era we have experienced over the past half century, it was a no-holds-barred era of “politics in command” and “class struggle,” an era in which students struggled against teachers and principals, and children informed on their parents. Granted, that era advocated the spirit of Lei Feng, “be as warm to comrades as spring,” but what later generations may not know is that there was also “be as ruthless and merciless to enemies as the severe winter.”

We should also soberly recognize that a blanket opposition to material desire is one-sided. Those who have already made a fortune and only want to make even more are certainly vulgar, but the stubborn pursuit of material things by those burdened with the problem of food and clothing is sympathetic. For the latter, the pursuit of material things is not a matter of faith, but a matter of rights. In China there are still many such people; before they solve the problem of faith, they must solve the problem of survival.

What is worth noting and heartening is that among people engaged in business and industry, and among those who have the conditions to indulge in material enjoyment, many already place faith first in their personal lives. I have seen some sociological survey reports and know that at present in different parts of China there are some bosses or white-collar workers who are Christians, Buddhists, or believers in Daoism, Confucianism, as well as other religions less familiar to us; these sociological survey reports also point out that people with religious faith often have a higher degree of integrity in business operations or at work than ordinary people.

We cannot hope for a revival movement of faith in China, but we can expect people spontaneously to seek and uphold faith. Such believers will only be a minority in present-day Chinese society, but like isolated islands in the sea of commerce, like tiny oases in the desert of material desire, they are where the life of our nation lies, and where our hope lies.

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Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.