From our visit to China, it seems that the Western conversion of Chinese civilisation is over — or at least, it will be in a few years. Going by the rate of deracination in the Chinese people, it seems that the Chinese are fast losing their connect with their 4000-year-old civilisation and are now being reduced to being merely a cheap copy of yellow-skinned Americans who have no culture of their own left.
There is no better way to understand the direction where they are headed than looking at their marriage ceremony and photos. The above picture is a typical marriage photo in today’s China and it demonstrates the Westernisation of China pretty well. Notice that the Chinese have completely thrown out their own customs during marriage along with their traditional dresses, which have now been reduced to museums. The Chinese in the marriage setting are wearing Western dresses and the customs followed in their marriages are increasingly getting Westernised. It is increasingly common these days to see Chinese couples doing pre-marriage photo-ops in Western attire from Beijing to Paris, demonstrating that they have completely fallen to the consumerism and narcissism of the West. Soon, China will look like South Korea, which already looks like a yellow-skinned American state — where the only place you will find Chinese civilisation will be in their museums, with the young Chinese deracinated to the point that they don’t want to connect with their civilisation even on a special day like their wedding.
What makes the above picture even more telling is the fact that the place where the above photo was taken is the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Even Beijing, which is the heart of Chinese civilisation, could not protect one of its most important civilisational symbols. The Temple of Heaven is a 600-year-old temple in Beijing used by Chinese kings to offer rituals and sacrifices to the Gods, thanking them for their bountiful harvest and for blessing their society. This temple, which was a spiritual and cultural icon of China just 100 years back, has been reduced to merely a glorified museum today — filled with card-playing old people and selfie-hungry young people jumping up and down at the sacrificial altar. Can you expect similar defilement and sacrilege of Rome or Mecca? No one notices how the Communists of China have destroyed hundreds of Pagan and Buddhist temples of China in the last 100 years. Thousands of years of civilisation and history being reduced to mere selfie spots fuelling narcissistic consumer culture. The Western-dressed wedding picture is just the last brick in the wall capturing the fall of Han identity and culture.
The Longmen Grottoes of China are another example of the Talibanism of the Communist government under Mao. This is a 2000-year-old Buddhist site where locals destroyed most of the statues inside the caves during the “Cultural Revolution” under state pressure — except the large ones. The large statues survived only because of the superstition of the locals, whose fear that the gods would punish them if they destroyed the statues was bigger than their fear of the Communist state. This site stands today barely surviving, only because of the superstition of the locals. Once again this shows how eager the Communists were in destroying their own past. Recent news seems to suggest that the conversion industry is working on overdrive in China. Given how eager the Chinese have been in destroying their own culture and past, it is pretty safe to say that the Evangelicals will reap a rich harvest of souls from their soul-harvesting programmes in China. With no culture to fall back on, the Church has a much easier job in converting the Chinese.
One can already see a large number of Chinese people who are starting to use Western names like Peter, Jack, Steven etc. to please their Western masters. Though it appears as an insignificant issue on the surface, it is actually a very important step in losing your own identity when large numbers of people start doing it in your locality. This act of changing names to suit Western civilisation is another example of Western domination of Chinese thought and civilisation — who are all but Chinese in name only. Conversion to Christianity now is only a formality for Chinese people. Also, given how most Chinese are not yet fluent in English, this problem is going to get worse once most Chinese become more fluent in English than they are today. It will only speed up the process of deracination of the Chinese.
How is it relevant to us Indians?
The Chinese experience greatly teaches us the importance of rituals and traditions in preserving our identity. Christians and Marxists know this well and that is why they attack our rituals constantly — be it our Sabarimala temple, or be it our Mangal Sutra, or be it our Durga Pujas. Christians attack our rituals like Pongal, Onam and Durga Pooja and want them to be secularised to deracinate us — making it easier for them to convert us to their own rituals. Marxists want our rituals and traditions destroyed, sometimes even masquerading as Hindus (like CPM in Kerala organising Sanskrit and Vedic festivals, or CPM of West Bengal organising ‘secular’ Durga Puja) with intellectual pretensions about how rituals and traditions are backward and hold us back. But the truth is, they understand the power of our rituals and ceremonies much better than we do. They know that if we lose our rituals, traditions and ceremonies, we have nothing to fight for and would be ripe for harvesting by soul vultures.
So the question is — are we Hindus going to learn from the Chinese experience? Are we going to discard our rituals just as the Adarsh liberals today want? Or should we start preserving our culture by preserving our traditions and rituals? The choice is ours to make. But if you do choose the former, be prepared for our Tirupati Devasthanam, Kashi Vishwanath temple, Thanjai Big Temple, Mahabalipuram Temple and other cultural and spiritual icons and centres to be trampled by the next generation.