Converts to Civil Society: Christianity and Political Culture in Contemporary Hong Kong

Conclusion

199 Conclusion The question of convergence addressed in chapter 6 pulls observers of religious life away from the focus of Converts to Civil Society: Hong Kong Christians’ individual choices and voices. Convergence draws attention to the patterns shared across individual lives, mutes the distinctions enabled by intimate investigation, and, in so doing, relates Hong Kong’s Statue Square and China’s Tiananmen Square movements. Just as taking such a big step back provides the wide scope to encompass two distinct Chinese societies, considering this one convergence invites the question of convergence for other squares entirely. Consider this question in association with the Islamic world’s Jasmine Revolution of 2011; Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt; or in 2013, Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey. In 2009 Al Jazeera English produced more than a dozen separate televised news episodes on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations. Stories highlighted the political struggle within the CCP that was backdrop to Tiananmen, the government crackdown on Chinese citizens that ended in tragedy, and the Tiananmen Mothers’ demands for justice after losing children to the crackdown. In addition, Al Jazeera conducted interviews with observers, leaders, and victims who had been in the Chinese capital the night of June 3, 1989. Their accounts of personal choices to act, to stay, to leave, to return, to face the police, to face in some distant future citizens free to vote candidates into office were accounts of a minority experience that already resonated with Al Jazeera’s viewers in 2009. In an effect similar to that of the aftermath 200 — Converts to Civil Society of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, the aftermath of Arab Spring 2011 demands careful study of the nature of affiliation within Islam and Islamic-majority societies, with the goal of overcoming the limitations of a simplistic approach that pigeonholes Christian versus Muslim, Shia versus Sunni, Egyptian versus Tunisian versus Turk. The lessons in Converts to Civil Society gleaned from attention to daily practices, utterances, and choices certainly apply beyond China. As Robert Hefner has written on Islam, analysis of ideas and institutions in the lives of believers, more so than of ideas and directives from religious leaders, attends to the realities of living in a modern, global world where people and their various products shift across political boundaries.1 Such a vantage point requires an appreciation of the pluralism found within contemporary religious experience. The pluralism apparent in everyday experiences not only challenges settled authorities and solidarities,2 but also highlights the basic fact that democracy cannot function without a civil culture and organization greater than itself.3 Mythmaking about the cultural uniformity, calcified orthodoxy, and totalitarian religiosity of the Chinese or Islamic world gives way instead to scholarship of the intimate.4 And so we are reminded of the need to appreciate the fine details, if we can only get close enough to see things as they are. What scholars of China convey about individual members of Chinese society is thus significant. But the silence from China is almost deafening. Whether it is a silence generated by a society that cannot and does not articulate itself in this manner or one imposed by scholars documenting society within the limits allowed by the state, this silence spells a warning to anyone hoping innovation in China runs deeper than economic liberalization. Only as social scientific research gains acceptance in China itself and, like the best of journalism, allows investigation of China’s religions on an intimate level can we begin to collect data on the entrepreneurial and complex membership possible in a diversifying religious marketplace. Research can give voice by allowing us to get close to people. But it cannot provide voices where none exist. No doubt 1 Robert W. Hefner, “Public Islam and the Problem of Democratization,” Sociology of Religion 62, no. 4 (2001). 2 Hefner, “Public Islam,” 495. 3 Hefner, “Public Islam,” 497. 4 Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Conclusion — 201 the candor with which people speak in Hong Kong reflects the openness and practiced eloquence of the wider society. Only because Hong Kong people can speak—enabled as they are by the civil society they have created —can anyone document this least known and most telling form of life that sustains Hong Kong civil society. Only when we begin to hear from scholars of China the details and depth...