In Mao’s Country: Fear of Words
For several months, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been implementing the systematic censorship of words or concepts suggestive of Christianity. The aim is to dissuade the Chinese—especially the youngest ones—from joining the Christian religion.
The news was published by AsiaNews on August 1, 2019: the words “God,” “Bible,” or “Christ” were removed from the new version of a textbook for primary school use.
Moreover, at the beginning of 2019, the Ministry of Education published a manual containing four excerpts from foreign authors, censoring everything that is remotely connected to the Christian religion.
Thus, in Andersen’s well known story, “The Little Match Girl,” the passage where the dead grandmother of the child appears to her and tells her “when a star falls, a soul ascends to God,” was replaced by “when a star falls, a person leaves this world.”
Robinson Crusoe also does not escape the consequences of Chinese censorship: wrecked on a desert island, Robinson manages to find three copies of the Bible in the remains of the wreck. The new modified version eliminates the word “Bible” and says that Crusoe found “some books” that survived the shipwreck.
Likewise, Vanka –in Chekhov’s eponymous short story of the same name—no longer prays in a church, nor does he pronounce the name of Christ in the redacted version of the CCP.
More generally, the classics such as Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris and The Count of Monte-Cristo, as well as Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection, have been removed from libraries and bookstores because of their too-strong Christian connotation.
This policy is fully in line with President Xi Jinping’s 2015 orders. In his eyes, any religion can exist in China so long as it assimilates to Chinese culture and submits to the CCP.
This campaign against Christianity, which shows the true face of intrinsically perverse and persecutorial Communism, can be analyzed however as an admission of weakness. Some Chinese leaders fear that the Middle Kingdom will become “the most Christian country in the world” by 2030, as predicted by several sociologists, like Fenggang Yang, a professor at Purdue University in the United States.