Friday, September 28, 2018

Vatican surrender threatens Chinese faithful


Military strategist Sun Tzu once said the supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without fighting.

The warrior would have approved of the tactics used by Beijing in its decades-long confrontation with the Vatican over the appointment of Christian bishops in China.

No actual conflict was involved but victory has been gained and the spoils of war are being reaped from the thousands of Christian churches across the country.

Pope Francis essentially hoisted the white flag when he agreed to accept Government approved bishops he had no role in appointing.

In a statement, the Vatican said the accord was “not political but pastoral” and hoped it would lead to the full communion of all Chinese Catholics.

Instead, the atheist Chinese leadership has launched a crackdown against its Christian community, burning crosses, withdrawing bibles from sale, banning children from churches and demanding images of President Xi Jinping and former Community Party Chairman Mao Zedong join those of Christ on or near altars.

Many genuine Christian leaders in China feel they have been betrayed.

The founder of the Christian human rights organisation, ChinaAid, Bob Fu, said millions of persecuted Christians in China had been let down by their Pope, while Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong said the deal only empowered the authorities in Beijing.

“The Government can tell Catholics: ‘Obey us. We are in agreement with your Pope’,” the Cardinal said.

Much was hoped of Francis when he succeeded to the papacy in 2013 with a reformist agenda aimed at bringing the clergy in closer touch with their flocks.

However, in recent times his reign has been dogged by a seemingly endless round of sex abuse scandals and cover-ups that reach into the highest levels of the Vatican. Francis himself has been widely criticised for not doing enough to make amends.

Faced with a crisis of confidence in the Church and his own waning popularity, Francis might have decided that rapprochement with China would remove one other troubling problem from his plate.

Initial outcomes suggest this may have been the biggest miscalculation of his papacy.   

Other faiths have already suffered under the Xi regime. Islamic crescents and domes have been stripped from mosques and many thousands of China’s Uighur Muslim community are reported to be in‘re-education’ camps.

Similar crackdowns have been launched against Buddhist temples in Tibet.

The size of the underground Christian community, and the support for it voiced by powerful interests in the West, has given Beijing pause in the past. Now it could easily become open season.

In an amazing admission, Francis said his deal will cause suffering among orthodox Christians in China.

“It’s true, they will suffer. There is always suffering in an agreement,” he said.

For the sake of those Christians his agreement has placed in the firing line, it is to be hoped the suffering will not be severe.

Thursday, September 13, 2018

Cynicism draining democracy’s lifeblood


When former United States President Barack Obama spoke to students at the University of Illinois a few days ago, the last third of his hour-long address was devoted to a single message – vote.

“Don’t tell me your vote doesn’t matter,” he said at one point in his address. “Don’t boo, vote.”

“Vote not just for Senators and Representative, but for Mayors and Sheriffs and State Legislators.”

“You’ve got to vote”, repeated over and over.

Australians, with a compulsory voting system that goes back for almost a century, have to remind themselves that in most other countries of the world, not voting is an option that large chunks of the electorates regularly take.

Those who choose to sit on their hands on election day can have just as much effect on the result — and be just as responsible for it — as those who perform their democratic responsibilities.

In countries that hold voluntary elections (leaving aside the rigged polls of various authoritarian states) a good turnout is 80 per cent. In the United States it can slip to around 50 per cent.

Elections for the European Parliament in Strasbourg are notorious for low turnouts — less than 30 per cent in some constituencies.

In his speech Obama listed two dangers to democracy — indifference and cynicism.

Indifference is well known and to a great extent understandable. People have other priorities: Looking after the family, worrying about mortgage payments, saving up for that first overseas holiday.

They get so bound up in these issues they forget it is the activities of government that so often affect them, but celebrity gossip and televised sport are easier on the mind than politics and politicians.

Cynicism is different.

It is the drain down which idealism pours. It destroys hope and belief that things can be changed. It is the cancer of those who think about and passionately want things to be different.

As Obama so clearly put it:

“The more cynical people are about government and the angrier and more dispirited they are about the prospects for change, the more likely the powerful are able to maintain their power.

“The biggest threat to our democracy is cynicism — a cynicism that's led too many people to turn away from politics and stay home on election day.”

Ironically, idealism can be the fertile ground in which cynicism grows because  devotion to a leader, or a system, often disappoints when that leader falls short, or the system fails to provide exactly what the idealist wanted.

The hardest thing to accept is that history is long; human life is short and the best that any one of us can hope for is to move a few steps along the road towards our ideals before handing on for someone else to take the next few steps, and so on.

It is so natural to want it all, to grow impatient with individuals and governments that don’t quite match up, and so switch off. 

But as Obama says, that is surrendering to those who have no ideals, except self- interest. It plays into the hands of populists with their simple answers to complex questions, which in the end always prove to be no answers at all.

So vote — for men and women who don’t claim to have all the answers, but who promise to do their best to find them.

It is a vote that will never be wasted.

Friday, September 7, 2018

Asia’s new elite — wealth without wisdom


Forbes has noted that Asia is now home to the world’s highest number of billionaires, with two new ones being created in China every week.

In addition, Chinese billionaires tend to be younger (average age 55 years while their American equivalents are firmly in their 60s) and are overwhelmingly first generation, rather than obtaining their wealth though inheritance.

The information is not new, and the changes have been under way for some time, but the effects are now filtering through to the collective consciousness of the West and are contributing to the wave of populist sentiment infecting many countries there.

The rich, like the poor, have always been with us. From the earliest times they based their wealth on land and the number of labourers or slaves that could be coerced into producing wealth from it.

Every society in recorded history had its ruling elite, who mostly savagely exploited those below them in order to stay on the top of the heap.

Changes began to happen in the late middle ages with the introduction of the printing press and got a great kick-along in the 19th century as literacy spread though the labouring classes.

For the first time in history people who did not have much money could learn the details about the activities of those who appeared to have a surfeit of it — and began to question why this was so.

Philosophers, social reformers and agitators pointed out that it was the toiling workers who produced the means by which the wealthy could live in comfort, and questioned why there should not be a more even distribution of wealth.  

After the spread of communism and the savagery of the Russian revolution, the response of many of the elite was to keep their heads down — to separate themselves from the toiling masses as far as possible.

They retreated to their country estates and their city clubs, mixing only with their own kind, mentioned fleetingly in the social pages of newspapers and often seeking to link this publicity with some act of philanthropy – a hospital wing endowed here, a series of scholarships there.

Even so their numbers gradually decreased as heavy taxation forced many back into the middle classes, which were also being fuelled from below as increased education and opportunity allowed the industrious to rise.

It was this unwritten and informal social contract that allowed the two groups to tolerate each other and, according to some utopian thinking, would eventually result in a single large class living together in harmony.

It was never going to happen, but for several generations, the possibility that it could — to you if not the guy next door — kept social pressures at a manageable level.

The remarkable rise to wealth of elites in Asia, and especially China, and the ubiquity of social media have changed this comfortable equation.

A new class of fabulously wealthy Chinese (in a country that is still generally poor) have the means to show off to the world without the restraint that long acquaintance with the responsibilities of money might provide.

Suddenly the internet is laden with their pictures sporting designer clothing and accessories, riding in luxury cars and sipping the most expensive (though not necessarily the best) French Champaign.

Realising the dangers this presented, the Chinese Government has sought to curb their excesses, so far with little effect.

Authorities in Beijing rightly fear that this brazen flaunting of wealth will stir up trouble among the less fortunate in China, but this new look glitterati’s jet-setting lifestyle is also sparking resentment around the world as they parade themselves at the best hotels, buy up luxury apartments and swamp high-end resorts.

With countries in the West still struggling with the after-effects of the global financial crisis and austerity still the norm in many of them, coupled with constant media references to the ‘Asian Century’ and the ‘Rise of China’ is bringing about a growing resentment among their populations that they are being left behind.

While terrorism and refugee movements are still front of mind among most Westerners, there is also a realisation of growing inequality and a feeling that their own leaders have failed them.

Asia’s ultra-wealthy are a tiny fraction of the continent’s overall population, but their addiction to flaunting their wildly extravagant lifestyle is storing up trouble, both for them at home, and the countries they visit.