Religion can be a powerful weapon in preventing an environmental crisis
UCA News.com
Michael Sainsbury, Bangkok
China
September 7, 2015
View of smog-covered Changsha city in China’s Hunan province. (CWIS / Shutterstock.com)
The last place that Pope Francis would expect to find an echo of his landmark encyclical, Laudato si’, is in deepest, darkest Communist China.
Yet a long and impassioned essay on the importance of Chinese religion and philosophy, penned 14 years ago by a brave cadre named Pan Yue, places an emphasis on the balance between man and nature in building a better future for China’s dramatically troubled environment.
“Whether it is the Confucian idea of [humanity] and nature becoming one, the Daoist view of the Dao reflecting nature, or the Buddhist belief that all living things are equal,” Pan has written, “Chinese philosophy has helped our culture to survive for thousands of years.
“It can be a powerful weapon in preventing an environmental crisis and building a harmonious society.”
Famed also for more aggressive serves at the damaging effects of China’s go-go growth such as: “This [economic] miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace.”
Pan, who began his career as an environmental journalist, has at times seemed like a lone voice for the environment in the Chinese government/party apparatus.
Despite holding the position of first vice minister in the Ministry of Environmental Protection — China’s answer to an environmental protection agency — he was effectively silenced in 2009. In recent weeks Pan has made a dramatic return being placed in charge of environmental approvals.
Pan has also been a leading voice for ideological reform inside the party. To advance his views, now part of a growing movement of “ecological Marxism”, Pan has written that Marxist theory needs to “keep up with times” and consider a rethink on religion.
The party’s official attitude has been one of having no room for religion, and it has hewed closely to the famous line from Marx that “religion is the opium with which the bourgeoisie [the ruling class] anesthetises the people”
Pan said “this has become our standard understanding of Marxism’s world view of religion; it has also become the basis on which we have formulated our religious policy. Religion is seen as a ‘poison’, as a relic of the old society and a ghost which is utterly incompatible with an advanced class, an advanced political party or an advanced system, and as an ideology which is diametrically opposed to Marxism.”
But he believes this was always misunderstood with the result that “our national policy on religion has always been skewed, for which we are now paying the price”.
He says that “religion includes people who are taking a stand against the reality of suffering as well as people who are seeking true goodness and beauty, it affords comfort to men’s hearts, gives them the courage to get on with their lives, and compensates them spiritually for the enormous deficiencies in the reality of their lives”.
Like many party members who stick their necks out too far for the comfort of the vast economic interests that swirl around the party, Pan was sidelined in 2009 after making it as far as vice minister. While he retained the role, he has been effectively silenced for most of the past six years — in the official Communist Party way his removal as a spokesman was blamed on “ill health”. Well, if that indeed was the case Chinese people should be thankful that he appears to have made a full recovery.
And it seems unlikely to be a coincidence that his surprise rehabilitation comes only weeks after the devastating accident in Tianjin that spread poison throughout the bustling port city close by Beijing.
China is being forced, incident-by-incident, at last to reckon with the environmental destruction that has been caused during its unfettered and largely unregulated growth.
Make no mistake, the Tianjin disaster is now seared on the minds of regular Chinese people. A pivotal moment, there have been other signs that Pan Yue’s ideas are gaining traction in just the places he wanted them to in the middle kingdom.
In recent years the Chinese Daoist Association has embarked upon an ambitious agenda to promote Daoism as China’s green religion, according to James Miller, professor of Chinese Studies in the School of Religion at Queen’s University, Canada.
This new construction of a green Daoism differs, however, from both traditional Chinese and modern Western interpretations of the affinity between Daoism and nature. Miller says, “In promoting Daoism as a green religion, the Chinese Daoist Association is not aiming to restore some mythical utopia of humans living in harmony with nature, but instead to support a nationalist agenda of patriotism and scientific development.”
Pope Francis, then, is hardly alone and perhaps, in another way, Pan Yue’s rehabilitation — and the Daoist push — could provide another path for the Communist Party and the Holy See to find a way through their long-held differences and the bitter split between Vatican loyalists and the party-sanctioned Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association.
Senior officials on both sides are at present seeking to find a suitable time for their next round of talks, following resumption of discussions started last June, that are aimed at the possibility of reaching a deal after a 75-year standoff.
As a first step, recognition of the importance of the environment and mankind’s stewardship of the Earth, could be a worthy place to start.
Michael Sainsbury is deputy editor for East Asia for ucanews.com and a regular contributor to Global Pulse Magazine.
This article first appeared in Global Pulse Magazine on Sept. 3.
