Thought for the Day, 12 July 2006

Rhidian Brook

At the entrance to the Forbidden City the image of Mao Tse-tung stares out towards Tiannemen Square, over the crowds who have come to see one of China's prized treasures. My son wanted to know why there was still a picture of this man hanging in such pride of place. I said maybe the people still revere him. Or perhaps they don't know what he did and are not ready to face up to it. China is moving so fast towards its new future there seems to be no time for assessing the past; which is interesting as the former Chairman himself said... 'I don't know about the past; I don't know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self.'

My son's observation made me think: who or what creed is this great nation looking to for inspiration now that the old beliefs have been tried. What a man - or a nation -believes determines the fruit they bear. Mao offers a proof of this; he once wrote 'the country must first of all be destroyed and then reformed' - a belief that led to a peace time death toll of 70 million and a people once famed for their creativity being coerced into a period of intellectual and spiritual shutdown.

There are startling signs that this creativity is being reborn. Only this time the spark isn't Marx or Lenin. If anything the new creed is that same one most of us seem to worship - The Market. Right now, China is a country moving so fast it takes your breath away - literally in the case of Beijing, a city building at breakneck speed, with traffic so thick it made me nostalgic for the M25.

This suped-up development is happening in every city from Guangzhou to Shanghai. But out in the country, we came across a different kind of power at work. In the ancient, central province of Henan, we visited an area that had been devastated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic that broke out 15 years ago when impoverished farmers sold blood for money; blood that was never properly screened and led to an estimated 25,000 infections.

Because of the political sensitivities, it was a rare privilege to even be allowed to meet these people. The villages we saw were poor - as poor as anything we have seen on this journey. But the people we met were generous and open, inviting us in to their homes and showing us how they had found a will to live. After a few of these visits I began to notice a pattern: instead of being decorated with pictures of Mao, nearly every house we visited had a cross or a picture of Jesus hanging in pride of place.

Mao's wife - Jiang Qing- once pronounced that Christianity in China had been consigned to the museum. She obviously hadn't counted on the underground church. Henan is the epicentre of China's house church movement and conservative estimates put the number of Christians in China at 90 million. It was in villages that we met people whose lives had clearly been transformed; but not by the government slogans, or by political maxims, nor even the burgeoning market; they had been given new hope because of faith.

Mao had once written 'People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.' These Christians in China seem to have other ideas.