And it ain’t Karl Marx.
China warns party members to stick to Marx, not ‘ghosts and spirits’
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-politics-idUSKCN1QG1FY
By Ben Blanchard, 27 February 2019
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s ruling Communist Party warned party members to stick to Marx and Lenin and not believe in “ghosts and spirits” or practice .liberalism., in the latest effort to root out superstitious practices and further tighten party control.
“China officially guarantees freedom of religion for major belief systems such as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam, but party members are meant to be atheists and are especially banned from participating in what China calls superstitious practices such as visiting soothsayers.
We nullifed the Uighurs and wrote God out of the Bible but dammit, people just won’t stop believing in the supernatural! You have a new God, the State! It is much superior to your old deity. You can see the State and hear it and touch it and be led by it! Why do you go back to pagan ways?
There have been numerous scandals in recent years where senior party members have been accused of involvement in superstition.
A lengthy statement on how best to strengthen the party’s role and its leadership, issued on the official Xinhua news agency on Wednesday, said Marxism was the guiding thought for China and the party. .Resolutely prevent not believing in Marx and Lenin and believing in ghosts and spirits, not believing in the truth and believing in money,. the party statement said.
I guess the Chicomms believing in money as God was more fun before Trump renegotiated some trade agreements.
.Resolutely oppose all forms of mistaken thought that distorts, misrepresents or negates Marxism,. it said.
President Xi Jinping said last year the party’s decision to stick with the political theories of Karl Marx remained “totally correct.” He was marking the 200th anniversary of the German philosopher’s birth.
There is no god but Karl and Engels is his prophet! Return to the fold, O faithless believers! Or is that faithful believers? Oops.
Chinese people, especially the country’s leaders, have a long tradition of putting their faith in soothsaying and geomancy, looking for answers in times of doubt, need and chaos.
The practice has grown more risky amid a sweeping crackdown on deep-seated corruption launched by Xi upon assuming power in late 2012, in which dozens of senior officials have been imprisoned.
The founder of modern China, Mao Zedong, banned fortune telling and superstition in puritan, communist China after the 1949 revolution, but the occult has made a comeback since the still officially atheist country embraced economic reforms and began opening up in the late 1970s.
Interesting tidbit, Chinese physiognomy (Siang Mien in Chinese) was one of the fortunetelling superstitions that Mao attempted to exterminate. Unlike the Western schools, the Chinese school of face-reading focused mainly upon fertility, happy families, skill at business and luck. The luck indicators can be assumed to be all facial features that indicate an abundance of food.
In one of the most famous recent cases, China’s powerful former security chief Zhou Yongkang was jailed for life in part due to accusations he leaked undisclosed state secrets to a fortune teller and healer called Cao Yongzheng, known as the “Xinjiang sage” after the far western region where he grew up.
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Also by Ben Blanchard.
A court in central China on Friday jailed for seven years [GQ: and $10m] on corruption charges a man identified by Chinese media as a fortune teller and healer connected to China’s disgraced former public security chief Zhou Yongkang. …
Cao said he accepted the judgment and would not appeal, the court said, without elaborating.
It was not possible to reach Cao or a lawyer for him for comment.
Yep, that sounds like Communism.
Dubbed the “Xinjiang sage” by Chinese media, after the far Western region where he grew up, Cao garnered a following in celebrity and official circles in the 1990s for his purported knack for fortune telling and curing untreatable ailments.
Cao’s talents allowed him to cultivate contacts that reached into the upper echelons of the country’s ruling elite, respected business magazine Caixin has previously reported.
China’s officially atheist Communist Party brooks no challenge to its rule and is obsessed with social stability. It has particularly taken aim at cults, which have multiplied across the country in recent years. Demonstrations have been put down with force and some sect leaders executed.
I can’t complain about the Chicomms harshly punishing the giving of state secrets to the equivalent of a celebrity Voodoo priest. But if they’re truly interested in social stability then Christianity is a very useful and practical religion. All that inherent goodness that the Chicomms, and Marx before them, assumed was normal human nature? Nope, that was Christian goodness specifically. Free my Christian brothers and they’ll make the best citizens you can hope for.
But the price is not having total control over their lives.
I hope they arrested the shirt, too. Are all Chinese dissidents careful to put “last seen” timestamps on photos of their leaders?
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Xi has also sought to tighten party control more generally, and the statement also warned against .individualism, decentralism and liberalism. and the forming of cliques. It also said party members must not deviate from the party line.
.It is absolutely not permitted to agree outwardly but disagree inwardly with the party center and be a two-faced person and a double-dealer, or to fake loyalty,. it said.
But Xi, atheism gives them no reason to obey you so long as they can get away with it.
The party’s anti-graft campaign has focused increasingly on those whose political loyalty is found lacking or who express doubt in public or private about party policies.
That didn’t work the previous ten million times but hey, you’re special, Xi. You’re nothing like those other Commies who did exactly what you’re doing. And Wednesday is a lucky day to try something new! *Gunner Q ducks a sniper shot*
The party’s top graft buster has said it would target “political deviation” this year, which is marked by a series of sensitive anniversaries that include 30 years since the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square.
The harder they try to crush devotion for the supernatural out of the human soul, the more it finds expression. God wired us to believe in Him. Atheism is only ever a waypoint between God and “so, who should we believe in now?”
And like America, the Chinese answer is multimillionaire celebrity cultists. I’m so depressed.
Marx wrote that religion was a sign that the people were being crushed, dispossessed and/or atomized. What are we to make of the CCP who turns to Christianity? It becomes clear that if Marx were alive, he’d take it as an indictment of the party itself, and he’d surely work to overthrow it.