The disappearance of a bishop is an object lesson in interacting with Beijing.<\/b>
\nAs China\u2019s economic and military power has expanded over the past decade, Beijing has shown a proclivity to renege on agreements and to make access to its markets conditional on acceding to its shifting demands. Countries, companies, and international organizations have found it difficult to push back.
The Vatican, as both a state and the spiritual head of a major international institution, is now grappling with this challenge. In September, the Holy See inked a provisional agreement with Beijing in an attempt to mend an almost 70-year-old schism. Vatican leaders argued that the deal would promote unity. They insisted it would enable them to better minister to their Catholic flock in China. They dismissed concerns that it constituted \u201cselling out\u201d to a repressive government.
Then a Chinese bishop disappeared. The suspected arbitrary detention of a Vatican-appointed priest last month has reinforced worries that Beijing won\u2019t ease its pressure on the Church but will instead use the deal to push for even more control.
The implications stretch well beyond the religious sphere\u2014in fact, the Vatican deal is a broader object lesson in the costs of doing business with Beijing. If China is willing to backtrack on its agreement with the Vatican, that bodes poorly for foreign governments, international companies, and other organizations involved in dealmaking with the country.
Since the Vatican and Beijing broke diplomatic ties in 1951, the Church in China has been divided into official state-sanctioned Catholic places of worship with bishops appointed by Beijing, and underground churches whose leaders are secretly appointed by the Vatican but not officially recognized by the Chinese Communist Party. CCP authorities have harassed and detained underground clergy, and the dueling bishoprics have caused confusion and division among the laity. The pope has not been allowed to visit China or even, until recently, to enter its airspace.
Vatican leadership suspects that the schism is one reason for Catholicism\u2019s stagnant growth in China. There are about 10 million Chinese Catholics (though estimates vary), a number that has remained relatively steady in recent decades while the number of Protestant Christians has risen dramatically, reaching up to 100 million by some counts. That was a major motivation for the deal, which has been under discussion since 2014.
Under the terms of the agreement, which has not yet been fully made public, Pope Francis has recognized seven party-appointed bishops, while Beijing has in turn recognized a portion of the formerly underground Vatican-appointed ones. In the future, the Holy See is expected to reach a compromise with Beijing over new appointments, in an arrangement that gives the CCP some amount of control over who is selected.
But then last month, Shao Zhumin, a Vatican-appointed bishop of the eastern city of Wenzhou who remains unrecognized by Beijing, disappeared. It was the latest in a string of detentions that Shao has faced in recent years. Some Chinese Catholics had hoped that such arbitrary arrests, a relatively common occurrence for underground priests, would end after the agreement was reached.
\u201cThe government has not given up its hope for control. They want the Church to be another tool of the state,\u201d Paul Mariani, who studies Chinese religious policy at Santa Clara University, told me. \u201cThat\u2019s common in China, across labor unions or NGOs\u2014they all have to fall under the party at some level.\u201d
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Shao\u2019s disappearance has, so far at least, seemed to vindicate the deal\u2019s naysayers. Critics have accused the Vatican of giving in to an atheist, communist government with a long history of persecuting the faithful. Joseph Zen, the retired cardinal of Hong Kong and a fierce critic of the CCP, called the agreement \u201can incredible betrayal,\u201d accusing the Holy See of \u201cgiving the flock into the mouths of the wolves.\u201d
Sophie Richardson, the China director at Human Rights Watch, told me that \u201cwatching a major world faith come to an agreement with an authoritarian government that\u2019s notorious for repressing religious freedom and to effectively cede some authority to that government sets a very worrying precedent.\u201d
The deal comes as the religious-freedom environment in China has reached its worst level in years, as the government has detained an estimated one million Muslim citizens in illegal detention camps, banned online Bible sales, increased control over churches and temples, and sought to incorporate party ideology directly into religious doctrine.
\u201cThe pope has effectively given Xi Jinping a stamp of approval when the latter\u2019s hostility to religious freedom couldn\u2019t be clearer,\u201d Richardson said, referring to the Chinese president.
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It\u2019s not just domestic and religious groups that have felt the tightening grip of the Communist Party. International companies are often forced to hand over their proprietary technology in order to do business in China. The Chinese government blocks the websites of businesses that do not abide by its tough online censorship laws, leading major companies like Apple and LinkedIn to comply with official demands to remove certain content. In April, Beijing demanded that international air carriers change their website language regarding Taiwan to bring it in line with the Chinese government\u2019s position that the self-governing island democracy is a Chinese province, threatening consequences for airlines who did not comply by a given deadline (to date, almost all airlines have complied).
\u201cIt\u2019s hard to imagine China putting as much pressure on those organizations 20 years ago,\u201d said Rush Doshi, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in China at the Brookings Institute. \u201cIt was afraid of the commercial and international backlash. Now there is less concern about the backlash because China is bigger and more powerful. They couldn\u2019t afford to adopt that attitude when their economy was far smaller than that of the United States.\u201d
In recent years, the CCP has also applied similar pressure to major international institutions such as the United Nations, seeking in some cases to change the very nature of liberal bodies to more closely resemble its own illiberal preferences. China has sought to erode human rights enforcement at the United Nations by packing hearings with pro-Beijing participants, offering generous investment deals to countries in exchange for their support, and blocking activists from entering UN grounds.
\u201cEveryone is being forced to play by Chinese government rules,\u201d said Shanthi Kalathil, who directs the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy. \u201cIncreasingly, we see the Chinese government trying to impose its own definition and its own rules on international institutions and other governments. And that extends to governments such as the Vatican, it extends to arenas such as the UN, and to Chinese government bilateral relations with other countries.\u201d
And in some cases, even when an equitable deal has been reached, the party has demonstrated a growing willingness to backtrack on commitments.
In 2015, for example, Xi reached two agreements with U. S. President Barack Obama\u2014to reduce cyber-hacking attempts and to cease China\u2019s militarization in the South China Sea. Despite these high-profile deals, however, the Chinese navy continued to build military facilities in contested waters in the South China Sea. And in October, the U. S. government revealed that Chinese-sponsored cyber hacking attempts on U. S. targets had once again surged.
\u201cIf China can renege on a deal with a superpower\u2014over hacking and over the South China Sea\u2014then it can renege on deals with middle powers or small countries without fear of consequence,\u201d said Doshi.
Xi has spent his six years as president strengthening the party\u2019s grip over every aspect of Chinese society and cracking down harshly on any organization that could potentially compete for the loyalty of Chinese citizens, particularly targeting religious groups.
From that perspective, the agreement with the Vatican seems more like the party\u2019s attempt to finally eliminate the gray area in which underground churches have long operated, rather than a desire to cede partial control over bishop appointments to a foreign head of state thousands of miles away.
\u201cHow many times have we seen this movie?\u201d said Richardson. \u201cI\u2019m not sure why the pope and the Vatican will succeed when many others have not.\u201d<\/p>\n