For the American pope, China is the center of problems affecting the Vatican, the US, and future centuries. The PRC can worsen internal splits. It remains one of the Holy See’s biggest challenges.
Many American Catholics oppose and are hostile to the dialogue between the Holy See and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). They believe that the Pope, an icon of justice and purity, shouldn’t speak with “demonic communists.” It is easy to respond: if the Church doesn’t speak with men tempted by the devil, whom should it speak to?
This is especially relevant today. The first Pope Leo stopped Attila and his Asian Huns, armed only with a cross and his words, from sacking Rome. Will his 14th successor be able to stop the Chinese challenge from “sacking” the world as we know it?
Ultimately, the Chinese challenge is subtler and more profound than the one posed by the Huns 14 centuries ago. And a Pope coming from the lingering superpower, the US, bears special responsibility.
So far, the dialogue between the Holy See and China has focused on religious issues. The concern in Rome was that a schism might develop along two lines. The first was that followers of the official church might increasingly detach themselves from the rest of the Catholic Church to follow Beijing, creating a new Chinese church under the shadow of communism—somewhat like what some Eastern Orthodox churches had done with various kings and emperors in past centuries.
The other possible schism came from the underground church. Historically, after three generations of isolation, without theological teaching or connection to the rest of the global church, underground churches turn inward, become self-referential, and, in their loyalty to a hidden faith, effectively cut themselves off not only from the hostile government but also from the universal church. Rome’s dialogue with Beijing has thus sought to reclaim space to limit the damage from these two threats.
The Church and the PRC paradigm
However, something else is looming over the church, and it is highly controversial. China’s global economic, political, and strategic growth represents the most significant test for the world that has formed over the past half-millennium through a process. That process, led by Europe, involved exploration, regional integration, and modernization.
This process is now rightly considered extremely divisive for all the harm it caused. Yet despite the damage, it has created better living conditions for everyone than ever before in human history. The planet’s population has increased tenfold in just over a century—a feat that previously took over four millennia. Average life expectancy has tripled, and living conditions have improved as never before in the million-year record of Homo sapiens.
And yet, despite these achievements, China today does not accept everything from the West. It demands a change in approach and a shift in the global order. The trials posed by fascism and communism in the last century were different. They were about ideologies born, after all, within Western culture.
China is something else. China poses a challenge that is ideological, certainly, but also cultural. China thinks about the world in a radically different way than the West, with all its ideological variations. Moreover, it presents an inescapable reality.
For the past 500 years, the engine of global change has centered on the transatlantic relationship, which has since expanded globally. China’s confrontation, however, arises in a transpacific context. Asia, in fact, is home to 60% of the world’s population and accounts for an equally large share of global economic growth.
Here, the threat becomes twofold. The risks are not only on the Western, European, or American side, or among those who still adhere to the project of “Western-style” modernization, but they also exist for China. China has already made serious mistakes twice in its attempts to engage with the rest of the world, guided by a Western approach.
China’s past mistakes with the West
The first encounter occurred during the Ming Dynasty (16th-17th centuries), when it faced Spanish-Portuguese power. The Chinese economy at that time received a significant boost from trade with Spain, which sought Chinese luxury goods such as silk and porcelain. This led to an enormous inflow of Mexican silver into the Ming Emperor’s treasury. However, when Spain entered the Thirty Years’ War and gradually reduced Chinese purchases to spend Mexican silver on the European conflict, the Ming Dynasty collapsed.
Wealthy Chinese hoarded silver, removing it from circulation. The Chinese economy was bimetallic, with both silver and copper coins in circulation. Silver was used to pay imperial taxes, while copper circulated in peasant markets. The scarcity of silver caused silver’s relative price to copper to rise by about 1000% over 10 years. Farmers were reduced to starvation, then to banditry, and eventually joined a great rebellion that overthrew the dynasty.
A similar process occurred 200 years later. The Chinese economy under the Qing Dynasty was the largest in the world. In 1792, the famous British Macartney Mission asked the emperor to open his markets to trade. China was accumulating almost all the world’s silver. This time, the precious export commodity was tea, the trade in which had sparked the American War of Independence just years earlier. Tea was an essential good because, with rapid urbanization and industrialization, city water was undrinkable. It was dirty, needed to be boiled, and required a pleasant flavor from tea leaves from distant China. Faced with these essential needs in England or America, Emperor Qianlong, however, responded that China did not need any Western goods. In reality, the Chinese market demanded something the British had and the emperor reasonably prohibited: opium.
In the following years, those imbalances grew amid the global Napoleonic Wars and the disintegration of the old Spanish Empire in the Americas, creating new commercial and political tensions, including with China.
By around 1830, China may have controlled perhaps 70% of global silver, the international currency of exchange at the time, and was not putting it back into circulation. As a result, the global trading system was collapsing.
In those years, China’s image changed rapidly. From the late 16th century onward, thanks to the translation and presentation work of Catholics, mainly Jesuits, China and its culture became a model and an inspiration for cultural transformation that convinced all of Christian Europe, then divided between Catholicism and Protestantism. Beginning around 1830, however, the Chinese, who had until then been a beacon of civilization for Westerners to emulate, began to be seen as barbarians. In 1840, a brief but violent war forced China to open the opium trade.
The defeat in that war and growing Russian pressure along the northern Siberian border triggered another economic crisis, which in 1854 sparked a new uprising, the Taiping. By its end, it coincided with a second Opium War, which devastated China’s economy and politics. The two crises were different, but in hindsight, they shared a common denominator: China’s difficulty and failure to integrate with the global commercial economic system.
There were significant differences between the two crises. For example, the Ming defeated the Portuguese at the Battle of Tunmen in 1521, and the Spaniards planned to invade China at the end of the 1500s, as if the Ming were the Aztecs in Mexico or the Incas in Peru. The plan was impossible and was thus abandoned, but Catholic missionaries, protected by Spain, long remained suspected of being Spanish spies. By contrast, the English had no plan to invade China, which they considered too vast. During the Taiping Rebellion, they assisted the imperial troops against the rebels.
But there are also alarming constants. The crises emerged in the 1620s and 1820s, erupted in the 1630s and 1830s, and devastated China in the 1640s and 1840s.
The new 200-year crisis
The crisis has indeed emerged in the 2020s. China and the world face a third such crisis. The core issue of the conflict is not ideological, cultural, strategic, or geopolitical. These elements certainly exist, but the spark is commercial. China has a non-fully convertible currency, a largely closed market, and a growing trade surplus that is becoming increasingly intolerable for the global economic system. Commerce was also the problem in the two previous crises over the past 200 years.
A facile, seemingly superficial comparison with history suggests that, once again, China’s way out of these difficulties will be through a major internal or international war. Can China, aware of its history, avoid its third fatal trap?
However, the question is also on the Church’s table. Catholics, following Matteo Ricci, who died in Beijing in 1610, sought to connect China with the world. They presented Chinese thought in Europe and European thought in China. The Jesuits’ work in Europe was transformative and likely contributed essential building blocks to modernity. The Taoist concept of non-action, wu wei, likely inspired Adam Smith’s invisible hand. The introduction of a bureaucracy selected solely on merit, today an essential structure of every state, comes from China.
The very idea of an abstract and personal state, not simply centered on and owned by a sovereign, is again Chinese. In hindsight, the Industrial Revolution and modernity received a decisive impulse from China. Western influences in China, however, were not equally decisive. Euclidean geometry, translated and presented by Ricci, and perspective and anatomy, introduced for the first time in the paintings of Giuseppe Castiglione, were not equally transformative for the Ming or Qing court. The Emperor did not convert to Christianity, nor did he transform his government into a system more like the European one.
Again, something similar happened two centuries later. This time, Christianity inspired the Taiping Rebellion. They adapted the Bible to their own inclinations, much as some groups in America, such as the Mormons, had done. Yet even then, the Christian experience, albeit adapted, failed to transform the country. Today, as then, what fruits will the Church’s inspiration, embodied by the emotional Pope Francis, bear for believers and non-believers in China?
Today, the primary challenger to China is not Spain or England but the United States. The constant element across the three passages is Christianity. Although most Chinese are not Christian, Christianity has a special appeal to them after decades of systematic religious desertification, driven by subsequent assaults on traditional religions by atheist communism and purely materialistic capitalism. In the past, traditional beliefs and practices, Buddhism, and Confucianism were well entrenched and opposed to Catholicism or neo-Christian Taiping. Now tradition has been wiped out, and ordinary Chinese are lost in a spiritual void where sensible and sensitive faith could help.
On top of that, China is integrated into global markets and has a virtual monopoly on the supply of Rare Earth Elements (REE), which are essential to virtually all industrial production.
China stepping into the Western world
The combination of these elements shakes the world economy to its foundations, more than communism ever did. Communism posed an ideological threat and offered an alternative to liberal democracies, and its system was deliberately removed from capitalist markets. The collapse of the Soviet empire didn’t move a leaf in the non-Soviet world. China is very different. Its collapse would rattle the world and could bring down half of the global economy.
De facto, it was almost nonexistent for the US and its allies, and, for commercial reasons, it could be ignored. China is also an ideological test because it is communist. Its foreign policies and geopolitical goals in Asia and around the world are assertive and often run counter to the interests and wishes of the US and its allies.
It’s committed to a new kind of arms race across the security space’s new territories, including cyber and AI. It doesn’t hide the fact that it wants to achieve technological dominance, not to improve its economy and the well-being of its people, but as a form of deterrence against the US and its allies and to counter global encroachment.
The future of humanity is at stake more than ever before. There is not merely the threat of nuclear annihilation, as during the Cold War. There is a whole gamut of risks that China poses, whether it succeeds or fails. It could shut down global telecommunications, take control of all space infrastructure, lead the next technological revolution, and put it at the party’s service. It could simply stop supplying REEs, grinding the global economy to a halt. Or if it goes on like this, it could import all industrial jobs, leaving the rest of the world with nothing to do but provide negligible services to China.
The Chinese know this and understand the risk that their challenges pose to the world and to themselves, but they are trapped in a paranoid, hyperrealistic system and do not want to, and are afraid to, change course.
Pope Francis, for the first time in the Church’s history, found a voice that broke through Chinese sensitivity and sensibility. It was like a bandwidth that registered with Chinese ears and the beat of their hearts, perhaps as Ricci and his fellow Jesuits did three or four centuries ago. He didn’t go too far; he didn’t travel to Beijing as he wished, but he made a crucial first dent. Ricci never met the emperor of China, but his efforts paved the way for his followers, such as Schall and Verbiest, to work directly for the emperor.
Pope Leo, the first American Pope, faces an even more challenging task. As an American, he is close to the incumbent power and its interests; as the successor to Francis, he may want to continue his mission with China. He has to find the right voice and the right bandwidth to speak to both ends of the world. He has to do so in a more complicated context. Francis opened a dialogue with China during a time of peace. Pope Leo has to do so while a brutal war in Ukraine rages. He needs all our support and prayers to help him find a subtle yet crucial path to peace for China, the USA, and the world.
Can he help China and the world peacefully unravel the thousand knots they face today? In this, perhaps the American Catholic Church has a greater task than other national churches. It must accompany the Pope and the universal Church, and perhaps also China and the world, through this unprecedented transition.
