“Communism’s position with respect to theistic religions is that of one belief meeting another belief. Since faith is always radical, the relationship between different faiths implies a reciprocal exclusion. Between mutually exclusive bodies, there can be no reciprocal tolerance, only conflict.”[1]
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Mao Zedong instituted Communism in China in 1949. On February 21, 1951, the Central People’s Government promulgated the “People’s Republic of China (PRC) Regulations on Punishing Counter-Revolutionaries.” Included in a multitude of punishable activities is the following: “Any collusion with imperialism…”[2]
This was a coded reference to papal Rome, courtesy of Chairman Mao who repeatedly accused the Vatican of imperialism. The PRC’s penalty for “Any collusion with imperialism” was life imprisonment or execution. Since there was no specific definition of “collusion”, criminality was in the eye of the beholder. If the eyes belonged to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), even the slightest acts of fealty towards Rome could be (mis)interpreted as sinister collusion and land a Catholic in jail at best, or cost his life at worst.
Take the case of Jimmy Lai, a Chinese-born businessman who since 1995 ran a newspaper out of Hong Kong called Apple Daily. In recent years Lai and other journalists wrote editorials advocating democracy and criticizing the “Chinese regime.” In 2021 Lai, a seventy-eight year old Roman Catholic, was arrested, tried, and convicted of – wait for it - “conspiracy to commit collusion with foreign countries.”
In this case Lai was not colluding with the Vatican. He did, however, have influential friends and networks outside of Hong Kong. It was enough of a pretext for the three judge panel to sentence Lai to 20 years of solitary confinement in Hong Kong’s Stanley Prison.
Lai will not be allowed the Holy Eucharist while in prison. His family is very concerned for his health, given his advanced age, and medical conditions of diabetes and high blood pressure. It is likely Lai was given a death sentence, just like so many other Catholics who languished and eventually died in prison, a punishment that rarely fit the “crime,” but served the Communist government’s goal of stifling dissent. The CCP’s Chef’s Kiss came when it froze Apple Daily’s assets, forcing it to close on June 24, 2021.
For being such a small percentage (less than five percent) of the population, Chinese Catholics were a very unlikely threat to anyone. Their status as prime targets of the PRC’s anti-imperialist watchdogs was overrated., causing sociologist C.K. Yang to observe: “The only organized religion by which the Chinese communist regime feels threatened is Christianity, and more particularly the Catholic Church, because of its links with Western powers.”[3]
Those “Western powers” created an 8 country armada to stop the persecution of their missionaries in China during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The armada invaded China, humiliated the Qing dynasty, financially bankrupted Chinese rulers, and ended China’s tradition of dynasty (until Mao, anyway).
Yet there was another reason the PRC and the CCP (and any other communist acronym you can hide an atheist under) feared the Church. It was because the Roman Catholic Church embodied fearless truth. Communist China was a lie from the beginning, built on the fundamental falsehood of atheistic materialism. The simple fact God exists refutes Communism. Consequently, religion is repellent to them: they break out in hives, then attack.
Between Catholicism and Communism, only one can survive. The Church preceded Communism in China, and the Church will outlive Chinese Communism just as it outlived perhaps the largest mass murderer in human history: Chairman Mao Zedong.
The Great Leap Forward
Chairman Mao was fond of initiatives. He didn’t seem to notice that most of the programs he started during his twenty seven year rule failed. The Great Leap Forward was an ill conceived disaster that caused tens of millions of Chinese to starve to death.
In 1958 China was one of the poorest countries in the world. It had a massive rural population that relied primarily on wheat for food energy. Mao’s brainstorm was to mobilize China’s immense population to thoroughly transform the nation’s agriculture and industry in a way most countries took decades to accomplish.
Mao sought to emulate Stalin’s economic reliance on heavy industry by focusing Chinese manpower on steel production. He left out the part where the Russian government subsidized the manufacturing of steel until a profit was realized. Mao took tens of millions of peasants used to working on farms, and instead made them:
“Cut trees for charcoal, mine deposits of iron ore and limestone, build clay furnaces, and smelt metal. This frenzied enterprise did not produce steel but mostly lumps of brittle cast iron unfit for even simple tools.”[4]
Peasants good at gathering wheat proved deficient in creating urban industry – at least not without extensive training, which was not provided. In turn, their farms were populated by “agricultural communes” who likewise received little training. Consequently, the communes didn’t plant enough new grain to feed China’s vast population. Worse, the communes enforced another Mao program: the Sparrow Elimination campaign.
Since sparrows eat wheat, Mao thought eliminating them would increase China’s annual wheat production. Millions of sparrows were killed to further Mao’s vision. Too late was it discovered that sparrows also eat lots of locusts. In the bird’s absence locusts multiplied excessively and ravaged China’s grain worse than the sparrows had.
By the spring of 1959 there was famine in a third of China’s provinces. The disaster was hidden for a time behind fabricated reports of record wheat growth, proving - to Mao at least - that his agricultural commune idea was a stroke of genius.
In fact, the numbers were inflated by subordinates afraid of punishment for telling the truth: communes didn’t plant enough wheat, and what they planted was devoured by locusts freed from the wrath of sparrows. Consequently, China continued to export wheat, leaving peasants to eat grass.
Instead of a great leap forward, Mao’s awful ideas and their inept implementation created a great famine.
