China's Church Divided

China is one of the 21st century's most consequential nations. It has never been more important to understand how the country is governed and what its leaders and its people actually want and believe. Welcome to Pekingology, the podcast that unpacks China's evolving political system and the trajectory of China's domestic and foreign policy. I'm your host, Henrietta Levin, Senior Fellow with the Freeman Chair in China Studies at CSIS. This is Pekingology. I am very pleased to be joined today by Paul Mariani, a professor at Santa Clara University and author of the new book, China's Church Divided, Bishop Louis Jin and the Post-Mao Catholic Revival. Paul is a widely respected scholar of religion in modern China. He's also a Jesuit priest and carries a particular depth of expertise on Catholicism in China. Paul, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Henrietta. It's great to be here. We like to start all of our episodes with a question about how our guests developed their China expertise. What did that look like for you? Well, you know, I turned 60. That's kind of an auspicious year in a lot of Asian cultures. So that was exciting. But that brings me to my birth year of 1965. So basically, I was very young during the Vietnam War era. And my father was also an academic. So in our area of Massachusetts, you had people, you know, protesting the Vietnam. And we also had local students being drafted. So I guess it gave me a point of reference that places far away matter greatly in the United States. And so by about 1979, Deng Xiaoping made that trip to the United States. And I'm 13 and I'm watching that. I think he made it twice, but that year for sure, a time so-called a man of the year. And I was very intrigued. I knew about China, but it seemed so distant, far away. And now it was here coming to the United States. So for my 14th birthday, I asked my mother, how about some Chinese lessons at the local university? And I was with mostly with Chinese American students. It didn't last a long time, but it made a big impression on me. So my first year as an undergraduate at Harvard, I took another year. And then finally I said, I have to do something about this. So after college, I went to Taiwan. There were certain events going on in 1989 in the spring and summer. And I thought, I'd go to Taiwan. which was good in a way because many other people were there from different programs studying at Dongha University. So I lived with a family. I spent a year and a half and kind of fortuitously spent my last year and a half there. And then I entered religious life. I entered the Jesuits from there, thinking that maybe they would advance my interest in China. I might become a China missionary or whatever they wanted to do with it. But they actually encouraged me. So it was a long route, a long path. I'd go to China every few years and then finally ordained in 2002 and went on for my PhD. So that's kind of the long arc. And I would say all along, you know, people in my circles were very interested in the older history, right? The Matteo Ricci or the 19th century. And I was just very drawn to the 20th century. I said, this is really important and consequential. And so I stayed with it. So that's kind of my own historical arc. Well, turning to the new book, you focus on Catholicism in Shanghai in the 80s. So to start broad, can you tell us at this time coming out of the Cultural Revolution, what is the Chinese Communist Party's view of religion? Well, someone I've been in dialogue with is my friend Joseph Terijian, who's also on this program, then looked at Xi Zhongshun. And in some ways, it's like the 80s, I think, is finally getting some good scholarly scrutiny as kind of a special time, right? And yet it was never great, right? It was never completely liberalized, completely open, but they were kind of taking steps in that direction. So religion, the same thing. There were many possibilities things were opening up, and yet the party state was still interested very much in controlling and managing religion. And I think they might have been a little surprised by this whole religious revival that was not just true in Christianity, but other religious faiths, Buddhism, et cetera, in China. So that might have caught them a little bit off guard. But yes, a period of possibility. And I mentioned in my book, when we look at elite politics, usually, you know there's the grassroots phenomenon and they're undeniable and real, but you also have to look at what estate thinking, and they come up with that directive or that document, the 1982 document, document number 19, where they admit some errors and they want to rehabilitate religion. And you get the sense they want to put it at the service of the for modernization. So I guess it's a bit of a utilitarian view, but the good news for religious believers is the kind of weight that was on them will be slowly lifted and there will be at least some return to some normalcy. Could you just tell us a little bit more about the significance of document 19 and are the principles in that policy still operative today? It's the highest level document of religion that I can think of in China that sets a policy. Now we have just loads and loads of regulations. In fact, they kind of make my head spin sometimes of all the different rules and regulations. But I would say that 1982 document was important. And it basically set the tone probably right up until 2012, where, you know, things change once again. It's still, I think, operative. I still think people refer to it, but I have the feeling that it had a good long run, but I think we're just in a different place now. So in this period coming out of the Cultural Revolution, you know, of course you see religious communities across China trying to rebuild after experiencing such brutal persecution, along with much of Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution. But I think one of the really interesting points that your book illustrates is that the party is itself trying to rebuild religion, as you mentioned, kind of sees possibility in utilizing religion kind of for its own state building projects, or at least sees the benefit of trying to co-opt religion. And so how does the party go about governing religion and setting up kind of the bureaucracy of managing religious communities? Exactly. So I think what happened was one of the key takeaways in my research, and it makes sense, was you have this kind of, in a sense, dark ages, right? After 1960, 63, 64, there were just these endless political campaigns and religion doesn't fare well. And those people who managed and control religion did not fare well during that period as well. So suddenly there's this new policy of openness and liberalization. So who do they turn to? The same people. So sometimes it's like they were going in one direction, it was frozen in time, and then they're brought back into service. So some of the key people who managed and controlled religion in Shanghai, or even at the national level, were brought back. They revived the United Front Work Department, at least in those areas. They revived the Religious Affairs Bureau. So in some places, they were the same people. I had done an earlier book called Church Militant about a much more kind of black and white clash between the church and the party in Shanghai specifically. And one of the neat things about this more recent research was to see, I'm familiar. I know these people. They may have changed, but they did not change too much. I recognize them. I know their names, I know their trajectory, and that helped a great deal. You spent so much time with these characters. And just before we get into the main characters in the Catholic community, for those people in the religious bureaucracy, in the party, what kind of person becomes a communist cadre managing the rebuilding of religion within a nominally kind of atheist state. Like, who are those people? As we know, often these things are really a black box or, you know, to mix my metaphors, you also have to be doing a lot of reading of the tea leaves. But in time, pictures would emerge. And so one thing that helped me, there was a great efflorescence in the early 80s where even people inside the party are writing memoirs or stories and they're getting published or printed about, here's what it was really like, here's what really happened. Now, maybe you can't count them entirely. They're trying to justify their position, but they do yield a lot of information. So one particular person was a Chun-Yi Ming who was in Shanghai, and by 2013 or 14, his daughters had published his memoirs. So Chun-Yi Ming was definitely a veteran revolutionary in the students' movement in 1937 to speak out, protest the Japanese invasion of China He was in the United States He really was a underground party agent the best I can tell during the Red Scare I mean so we might not always like his politics but he was someone who was very committed to the cause And I think he didn necessarily want to go into the religious sphere. His father was a famous educationalist. He might've preferred more cultural sphere, but I think he had a Protestant background. So he was brought into that. So when you see that, it helps humanize the people. And I would say to be a bit clearer, they were not always the top people that were put in charge of religion. Sometimes they were middle or lower ranking, but they were important because things like the United Front or gaining the goodwill of religious believers and such was actually a pretty important part of what the party was trying to achieve as a minority party. So I think these were the kind of people, real flesh and blood people, party members committed to the cause, but maybe always in danger of being kind of contaminated or corrupted in a sense by those they're dealing with, as we saw by how they were attacked in the Cultural Revolution. So maybe a little bit more dangerous game than they thought. One more table-setting question. So the party manages religion in part through these five patriotic associations, one associated with each of the five religions that the CCP formally recognizes, which are Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Can you just Tell us how these patriotic associations work and how they correspond to the religious community to which they're assigned. Yeah, that's a $10,000 question, right? Because that's one thing I ran into time and again. People, you know, they would say the patriotic association is not a church. So there's one church in China. But when you have two bishops, one recognized by Rome, one not, there are two churches. You know, how do you slice it otherwise? So basically, the Patriotic Association, I think in many ways, should be seen as an organ or an adjunct of the United Front Work Department. And then sometimes that was under the state, sometimes it was under the party. So they use these, I guess it would be considered a mass organization in many ways, in order to help the state mobilize religious believers in line with whatever the state's or the party's objectives are. And so there really is a thing called the Aiguohui, the Patriotic Association, but it really should be seen as controlled by the government, not some sort of grassroots group of activist Catholics or something like that, or activist Buddhists. Now, let's dive into the situation of Catholicism in China. Before we get to kind of the starting line of your book, though, you mentioned in the book that the party often talks about the importance of sinicization of religion. And you make the point, though, that Catholicism was effectively sinicized long before the PRC's birth in 1949. So can you help us understand how Catholicism evolved in China up through the starting line of your book, which is effectively the death of Mao? Right. So the arc of Catholicism in China, basically, it had a long history. China's a big place. And we know that there were Christians even in the Silk Road in Xi'an in the 7th century coming over land. So there were different iterations. Sometimes they died out. But by the time the Jesuits came to China in the late 1500s, they started making converts. They usually had a top-down approach, but not always. So basically, to take Shanghai as an example, it had already had 400 plus years of Catholicism in that Delta region. So a long history, and it had suffered, you know, I tried not to use this word too much in the book, but persecution in a sense that they were seen as outsiders. Yet this particular time from the 1600 or so on, it survived. It could not be destroyed. It had sent down a firm roots and some of those ancient kind of family lineages in the Shanghai region could trace their early ancestors. And I think once you work your way into the genealogy, then so-called foreign faith, although they would not see it that way, set down such deep roots that to renounce your religion would be also seen as renouncing your faith, but also seen as renouncing your heritage or family. So it became quite tenacious and quite strong. And truth be told, it received a second impetus or boost after the opium wars, which is kind of a complicated piece of history, but I did want to acknowledge how a Chinese nationalist might see it versus how a Catholic Chinese might see it might be different. But basically, it kind of opened the doors to a lot of foreign, I would say, largesse, money, and priests. So in some ways, the church, it kind of indigenized in many ways, but now had to deal with an influx, the good, the bad, and the ugly, A large influx of foreign priests. Sometimes they did not necessarily speak Chinese and such. So I would say it was sort of an institutional boom from 1840 to 1950 that churches, schools, the institutional footprint specifically of the Catholic Church in Shanghai was decent and large. And I would say, I don't know if it's too much, but some people said in the central city, the church might have had 10% of the real estate. It seems high to me, but it was true that, and not just for Shanghai, but it was a center for Catholicism throughout China, that there were seminaries at least for the southern or middle part of China. There were very modern things, right? There was a radio station. In fact, if you go to the Shanghai archives today, that meteorological tower right outside the window, I think that goes back to the Jesuits. So there was a lot of institutional works and a big institutional footprint. And of course, all of that kind of came to a grinding halt in 1949, but not entirely, right? I mean, a lot of things were taken by the state. In fact, to this day, some of the old seminaries and such are owned by the government, our government offices, churches have been returned. So a lot of it was stripped away. Foreign missionaries were kind of invited to leave, but the church kind of still stuck around. So my first book, Church Militant, was in 1950s, that process of how the party gained more and more control over the church. And then this book, 1980s, is about how the church came back to life after what you would have to call, I guess, one of the most virulent anti-religion movements in history, and it affected all religions. So I thought it was kind of a perfect case study, Like how does a piece of a society, how does a social group survive a very difficult time and then come back to life? That was sort of my question, my starting point. And so now coming out of the Cultural Revolution, there's still a very challenging and restrictive political environment, but also a tremendous sense of opportunity to think about rebuilding. But you highlight in the book the very wide range of views, at least in Shanghai's Catholic community, about what rebuilding really means and the right way to go about it. And amid all of this ferment, you focus on the story of Bishop Louis Jin. Why pick Jin for your main character in illuminating this period of history? Some people would say he was the most important Catholic church leader in this whole period, maybe by far. There was definitely an underground church, and he was actually, in a sense, part of that early on. But he was a deft leader and a diplomat in many ways, an impressive person, someone who perhaps I grew to like more. At first, I thought he kind of made certain compromises he shouldn't have made. But he becomes, I think, the key Catholic leader in this whole period, not just for Shanghai, but as I say in the book, he was a churchman. He was also a shrewd Shanghai businessman. So he knew how to regain properties, how to generate income, and how to help the church. Much of the rest of the church was quite poor. So I thought focusing specifically on him would help humanize the story. So I start the book with a central dilemma. And in fact, it's not a dilemma because he's already made up his mind. But for those years, he's basically being courted by, you would imagine, the government. And you can be sure, as he says, this would include people from the security apparatus trying to entice him to take the leadership position in Shanghai. and yet he knows he does that he would be going against really canon church law that the pope decides who the bishop is so that's the central dilemma he decides to go along with the government's offer and i think it's for the reasons that that you point out there are these incredible opportunities opening up right now if i don't take them catholicism could well die and shine i don't think that's entirely true but it would be just a shadow of itself but now i have the option to do maybe what a bishop, a church leader should do in ways that are recognizable to the state, show some goodwill, build connections overseas, raise money, regain properties, train the next generation of priests, all of those great things. But it would come at the high price that he would not be considered a legitimate Catholic bishop and he would lose some of the moral clarity, I think, or prophetic edge of underground priests and seminarians So that his dilemma and the whole book is basically step how he does that how he builds up the diocese builds up the church and what compromises he has to make who he deals with on the ground level. All of those things are included. And as Jin is building up the state-recognized church, the underground church is separately continuing to rebuild and recover itself. How does what the state calls the patriotic church, how do they look at the underground church and how does the underground church look back at them? What's the relationship between these two Catholic communities? It's an interesting question, right? Because at a very big level, this should not be happening at all. Like one of the worst things you can say in the whole Catholic world is schism, right? That someone's in schism, they've broken apart. I mean, I think some of the background of the Reformation or religious history still sits a certain way. So to admit, I mean, even the title of the book, China's Church Divided, could be a bit controversial. So there's a lot of gray area, right? And yet these divisions were real because the bottom line is, Jin was not officially recognized by the Vatican for 30 years. It's a long time. from the time he became auxiliary bishop to the time where he definitely decided to heal that rift. And I think his reasons were he thought even the Vatican was penetrated by Chinese operatives, that the word would have gotten out. And so he preferred that kind of policy of ambiguity. I think in his heart of hearts, he still felt he was very much a Catholic and a priest in maybe good standing, I can't judge that. So I would say, yes, there are elements here that are very black and elements that are very white, but there's a big area of gray in between. And I think that that is exactly what Jin tried to negotiate. So I think in some elements, yes, they were really at loggerheads. They really disliked, maybe hated each other, the so-called underground church and the patriotic church. But in other respects, we're talking about people who might have been even a related to each other or people who knew each other a long time. So I think it might have been a little softer during some elements. And then regionally, I think, that's one reason why I wanted to do a bit more of a local or micro study that you could maybe infer larger issues. But I think in places like, we know even to this day, urban China and rural China are different realities. And that was the same of the church in China too, that in the north, the underground church caught on like wildfire. And there was a sort of father of the underground church there, I mentioned in the book. But that was a whole other reality. In Shanghai, there was a deep division, but it really cut across people's kind of hearts and minds. Where do I want to attend church? Who do I want to associate with? Who do I trust? And I think in some ways that was maybe a decision of the party. Like, right, if we can't completely subjugate the church, that we'd like to have a divided church. That's the best we can get out of it. And in this period of time, how was the party looking at the underground church? Like, did they see it as something to be managed or actively combated? How did they view the underground? I think in some places, for sure, a common thread even up to the present day is they've really try to remove that from the equation, remove the underground church. And I think there's a deep anxiety there from the party's point of view. At least my read is that they started as an underground organization themselves. They know the power of them. They know the magnetic, charismatic side of it, that the last thing you want is a very holy bishop running around in the back area of China ordaining priests and saying he has the truth, that this is a scary proposition. So I think they've been afraid of the underground church and want to see it removed from the equation. And having said that, I think in a place like Shanghai, where things are more open, more cosmopolitan, more urbane, they could tolerate it to some extent. And I had actually interviewed Bishop Jin three times, and he said something interesting just that, you know, don't bother with the underground church because it just backfires all the time. And when things were more open, if you arrested somebody, you could only keep them in prison five years, he says. What's the point? It sounds kind of funny. It's kind of a bit of real politic. But he was saying, in some strange way, he could also be a protector of some aspects of the underground church. So I think it continued. And the example I'll give is about 10 years ago, both the underground bishop died and Bishop Jin died. The interesting thing was they both joined the Jesuits on the exact day. They were novice brothers. They were in the same class. So they knew each other for a very long time. And the underground bishop died a year later, but thousands came out for his funeral. So the state had to accept that. And I know that was 10 years ago or 12 years ago, but it wasn't like they prevented. Now there was some back and forth And there was a little tussle about, you know, could he wear his bishop's pectoral cross? Would he be presented as a priest or a bishop? But the fact is thousands came out for at least the ceremonies in the funeral home. So that shows that the state was, I think, pretty smart and just sort of letting it happen and letting it move on rather than doing anything else. To step out of China briefly, what are the Vatican's goals for China during this period, during the 80s? And to what degree did that actually matter for what was happening on the ground, at least in Shanghai? Right. So my understanding is, I pretty much talked here about the micro level of Shanghai, which I found fascinating, but I kind of use a telescoping effect in the book. I start way far out. Yeah, there's some good tales of diplomatic intrigue in there as well. Right. So I step way out and then I telescope down to Shanghai, then I pull back again. And so basically, it's interesting that Deng Xiaoping is really coming to power in the late 70s and John Paul is stepping in at the same exact time. So I think that at that level, we have to take into account both of these men. And I do know that at one point, Pope John Paul did write to Deng Xiaoping around 1984, 1985. Usually those documents are sealed up. They're internal, but I think it was George Weigel got someone to read it out to him, and he put it in John Paul's biography. So we cannot think about this whole period without thinking about the figure of John Paul, which I think is fascinating because he himself was, in a sense, an underground seminarian during World War II. And as bishop in Poland, sometimes Czech bishops would come over and be consecrated in Poland. So he knew, and he was a supporter of other underground churches, and yet he also probably knew the limits about how far you can go with this kind of thing. So Vatican policy at this time revolves a bit around John Paul, but I also think the best I can say is, in essence, I don't know whether by accident or design, but it really was sort of a two-track policy. And the one anecdote that I can give you is I knew one priest who was going into China, I think probably, who knows, to teach English or something very low-key. And he went to Vatican offices. He went to the one Vatican office for state, and they said, whatever you can do to build bridges with the, they didn't call it the patron, they call it the open or official church, please do it. And then he went to another office, Propaganda Fide, which is in charge of more mission territories. And they said, stay away from the patriotic church. So I think that's the best that we can get. It does speak volumes that there were different policies. There were different documents. By 1988, we know that Cardinal Tomko put out a directive. I thought it was very carefully written, but it was basically, we want to encourage the churches in China, but we also want to be very careful about scandalizing people who we're working with. Some people thought that was too hard-line. So I think you had people in the Vatican kind of on both sides. So there was a policy, but I think it was implemented differently. And I'm sure there were organs even of my own order, the Jesuits who would have done whatever they could to fund and help. They didn't really consider it an illegitimate church. They called at the official church, even though they should have known that Bishop Chin was not a fully legitimate or not legitimate, but they wanted to fund him and help him. And then there were other organizations within the church that would kind of be very much against that. The conclusion of your book explores the very controversial deal that the Vatican finally did reach with the party in 2018. The deal was renewed last year. Can you tell us about that arrangement and how it's viewed by China's Catholic communities in the patriotic church and also underground? I think it kind of comes down to is the good news and bad news. I mean, the good news of that agreement is it seems like the Vatican is continuing to talk to China. And the bad news is it's talking to China, right? I mean, everything's sort of changed and it's not exactly easy and it's a period of greater tightening. Right We saying all of this is happening in a context where in Xi China especially kind of as his tenure proceeds space for independent religious practice shrinks and shrinks Yes, right. And so I would say that I've always been impressed with when I've visited churches in China that for the longest time, I mean, they seem to kind of make things look as normal as it possibly can. So I remember back in the day at the Shanghai Cathedral, there would be a picture of Pope Benedict or something right there. Like a life-size cutout as if to say, everything's fine, everything's legit. And to some extent, there was some truth to that. And right now, it's a bit tighter, but the Vatican is committed. So I think with any large institution, and especially a religious institution like the Vatican, which should have higher aspirations about human rights or the common good, that it's more in the mode, if this makes sense, of engagement and dialogue. Whereas in the 50s, it was more confrontational that not just the Chinese government, but the whole thing called Marxism and such is wrong, right, and such. So, yes, it's more in a moment of engagement. But the irony is it's taking place not in the 80s. It's taking place today. So the deal that they landed on is some version of co-appointment. Is that a fair description where like the Vatican and the party both play a role in appointing bishops and other figures in the church in China? But it also seems like even already the party hasn't kind of fully implemented its side of the deal. Is that right? Yeah. I mean, I'd say in so many words, we're not really sure what the church has gotten out of this, except the fact that people know that they're talking to China. So at least maybe some of that pressure could be lifted. but there doesn't seem to be any deliverables. For example, the great dream of the Pope being invited to China. Well, I haven't seen that happen. Pope Francis went to Mongolia, and I think he was looking over his shoulder. This was a signal that, hey, just a quick call, and I could come. It didn't take place. So I think that's sort of the moment we're in. It's still a secret accord, but I think by what we've seen afterwards is that the Chinese government and the Vatican decide on mutual candidates. Now, I don't want to be historically naive. There were long periods and there were big debates and there were a lot of backroom deals for hundreds of years, right? European monarchs could have appointed their bishops or such. So this is a big issue in church history. There are many different examples of this, but definitely by the 1960s and the documents of Vatican II, they're very clear. And I think it's for the same reason. We don't want political leaders to be speaking. We don't want just apparatchniks or tools of the state to be bishops, right? We want people who are pastors and who care for the people and not necessarily show up at special parties with the powers that be. So this is an old problem in the church, but I think they spoke eloquently about it. It's just that, what do they say? Politics is the art of the possible and sort of this is where we're at right now. So they've committed to this and they've renewed it every two years and now four years. So we'll have to see where we go from here. And again, it's a secret accord, but I think it's really about the naming of bishops. How does Taiwan fit into all of this? Well, I'd say again and again, sometimes one thing, even in the 80s, that the Chinese government would keep saying is a non-negotiable is that the Vatican has to break relations with Taiwan, et cetera, et cetera. I'm in Rome if the fact is the annunciature is still here, the Taiwan annunciature. But I think in some ways, I can't call it a non-issue, but the fact is a lot of that decision-making has been in Hong Kong for a long time. And I think the Vatican's point of view, they can't just abandon the Catholics of Taiwan without some kind of reassurances. But I'll go out a little bit on a limb here and I'll say it can also be flipped around because there were very few states in the world that do not recognize the Vatican. I think one is North Korea, another is China. There are countries that you might think have no connections with the Vatican, but they have some level of office. So it's just interesting. I think you can flip the script a bit on that, that China is, in a sense, a holdout on this and not necessarily the Vatican. I'm glad you mentioned Hong Kong, which plays a big role in the book. Hoping you can tell us about that and then also zooming ahead to present day, how has the crackdown on Hong Kong's autonomy in recent years affected religious freedom and affected the church, if at all? Right. So I think that there are still certain freedoms in Hong Kong to this day, but there's probably a divided opinion, meaning I know of one priest who got a little bit in trouble for speaking very freely about the situation there and the like. So I was in Hong Kong this summer, and some people there told me that everything is changing in Hong Kong. As more people from the mainland have moved in and more of the old Hong Kongers have moved out, they call it just a complete shift in society. And I think that impacts the church as well, so that those are sort of the things they have to deal with. I think the current Cardinal of Hong Kong is a fellow Jesuit. I've met him over the years, and he's kind of an interesting position because he can go to a place like Beijing, and he can talk to them, and also maybe they can talk to him. And he can also come to Rome and abroad. So I'm sure the pressures there are enormous. So I guess what he would probably try to do is make things be as normal as they possibly can be, given the realities on the ground. And just to look at the broader religious landscape one more time during the time framing of your book, you know, every religious community was decimated to varying degrees during the Cultural Revolution. So of course, it wasn't just Catholicism working to rebuild. I wonder, was there any kind of interfaith coordination when it came to carving out a place for religion again in Chinese society? Or was each religious group really charting their own individual path? You know, sadly, I think it's more the latter, that they were kind of in their own silos. There will be pictures and, you know, everyone's smiling or not in a kind of a long line of all the religious leaders of Shanghai. And it's some government meeting or anniversary or special event like, you know, the opening of a religious building. So yes, they would gather there. They would probably know each other, take photos together, and then probably go on their business for the next few months. That's the best I can think. There might've been grassroots initiatives, but I don't think there was a lot of coordination. I think each group probably felt it was enough of a task to keep their own side of things going as well. I think we'll have to wrap there, which I regret because there are so many wonderful stories in the book. One anecdote that stood out to me, it was, you can describe this period in time where for various reasons, the state-recognized church is holding mass in Latin, but the underground is using Chinese. It was like these incredible vignettes of an evolving Chinese society. Yeah. The whole liturgical side of things was fascinating. So there's the liturgical side of Vatican II happened, the form of the mass had changed, it had gone into the vernacular. And so it's working its way through China, but the people you think should be holdouts are actually, well, this is the way the Vatican has done things. Of course, there's the whole financial side of things. How did they finance themselves? What Bishop Jin's overseas visits, they're kind of propaganda tours, but they're also spreading the word about what he's doing. So a lot of things I learned myself, these kind of fascinating ins and outs about 1980s Shanghai. Yeah, I think that the book will really challenge the expectations of most readers in a way that I really appreciated. And also, it's just a great story. So, Paul, thank you again for coming on the show. Thank you, Henrietta. To learn more about the history of Catholicism in contemporary China, you can read Paul's new book, which is called, again, China's Church Divided, Bishop Louis Jin and the Post-Mao Catholic Revival. and as always we would love to hear what you thought of today's conversation and what issues you'd like to see Pekingology unpack in future episodes. You can send your ideas to Pekingology at csis.org and if you're new here we hope you will subscribe. We'll be back in your feed in two weeks. if you enjoyed this podcast check out our larger suite of CSIS podcasts you can listen to them all on major streaming platforms like apple podcasts and spotify visit csis.org slash podcasts to see our full catalog