For a Chinese Communist regime that has prided itself on a materialist philosophy for half a century, the mid-January ceremony it orchestrated in Lhasa, Tibet, was not without irony. While Buddhist monks chanted prayers for the occasion in Lhasa's thin and chilly air, two atheist Communist officials specially flown in from Beijing looked on approvingly as the government of the Tibetan Autonomous Region declared a shaved-headed two year-old to be the re-incarnation of the Sixth Reting Lama (who had died in February 1997). Some might see the event as nothing more than an our-lama-is-bigger-than-your-lama contest between the Chinese Communist Party and the Tibetan government-in-exile, headed by the Dalai Lama, in Dharamsala, India. Just a few days earlier, Beijing security officials had been embarrassed by news that another Tibetan Buddhist dignitary, the seventeenth Kannapa Lama, had defected to India after a harrowing six-day trek across the Himalayas. The Karmapa Lama, all of 14 years old, was the only reincarnated lama official recognized by both Beijing and the Dalai Lama. The Lhasa event was thus an effort by the regime not only to save face among Buddhists in China and elsewhere, but to show that when it chooses Beijing too can take Buddhist "religious" initiatives.

It is also tempting to see the Lhasa ceremony as another example of Beijing's curiously roller-coaster response to religious belief in China. In mid-December, a People's Daily editorial that could have been penned by a theological committee in Tubingen offered some thoughts on the transcendental nature of theism. "To distinguish a religion having a complete system from a crudely formed superstition;" it said, "we need only look at whether its ´supreme being' is a limitless, transcendent ´spirit' or a limited, materially oriented ´person.' That is sufficient." Quite so. As it continued: "All of the major religions which exist in the world today have undergone over a thousand years of changes, and taken on forms which are well adapted to some social environment. The major religions absorb and manifest many spiritual riches created by humanity and serve as important components of traditional culture and a way of life for a multitude of believers. They provide a proper coordinating function and serve as a balancing mechanism in various aspects of society."

This wasn't a case of theology-envy on the part of China's transcendentally challenged Communist leaders. In an odd way, Beijing was being forced to pay philosophical lip service to the five "traditional" Chinese religions-which it designates as Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism (not "Christianity")-which it allows to operate in a strictly controlled way. Since the late 1970's, China has used its semi-tolerance of religious belief to argue that it's becoming a more open society. But it has also become aware that many of its own citizens, including highly educated Chinese, are attracted to religious belief and ethics as an alternative to rampant consumer materialism and the turgid sloganeering of official atheism.

Indeed, the editorial was an almost desperate attempt to enlist the more thoughtful of China's cultural intelligentsia behind Beijing's long-term efforts to stamp out Falun Gong, the upstart meditation and exercise sect that has caused China's leaders deep embarrassment ever since last April 25. On that day, 10,000 entirely peaceful Falun Gong "practitioners" (to use the group's preferred term) suddenly and without any foreknowledge by Chinese security surrounded the Communist Party headquarters in Beijing to demand an end to police strong-arm tactics against them. Although Falun Gong leader actually secured a meeting with Premier Zhu Rongji before quietly dispersing, the regime, and President Jiang Zemin in particular, were infuriated by the public humiliation symbolized by such an unauthorized spectacle right on their own doorsteps. Last July, as Falun Gong was officially banned in China and its fol lowers subjected to the most intense nation-wide crackdown since democracy activists were hunted down following the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989.

For most Americans, the specter of a totalitarian regime fighting as if for its life against a peaceful meditation sect is not just quirky, but incomprehensible. It might help to keep in mind three important facts about China. The first is that, though the country is still ruled by the 60-million strong Communist Party virtually no one in this gigantic political machine still believes it the Marxism-Leninism on which the legitimacy of Communist rule is based. There is, in short, a huge and dangerous philosophical and ideological vacuum in China. Second, for at least two millennia, Chinese history has been pockmarked with murderous peasant rebellions led by sectarian religious cults against the nation's ruling dynasties. China's term for "cult,” xie jiao, or "evil religion"-connotes almost atavistic fears among many Chinese for whom the most frightening word in any political vocabulary is luan, or "chaos." Most Chinese appear to agree with the authorities that Falun Gong is a harmful cult. Most are also almost fatalistically aware of how vulnerable their own culture has historically been to extremist sectarian rebels. Finally, Falun Gong, despite its polite disclaimers in most public settings, is genuinely bizarre in its teachings, which in some respects evoke the millenarian ideologies that fueled the hideously destructive Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864 and 20 million dead) or the whirlwind terrors of the short-lived Boxer Rebellion of 1899-iqoo. Though Falun Gong repeatedly eschews any political ambitions, many Chinese are skeptical, particularly because its leader, Li Hongzhi, ascribes to himself a veritable phantasmagoria of supernatural attributes.

China's ideological vacuum is acknowledged even by the official keepers of the Marxist-Leninist faith in Beijing. Fu Qingyuan, director of research at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of China's Academy of Social Sciences, a sort of Chinese Communist Vatican, admitted to a Western reporter last September that many in China were facing "a crisis of faith." He readily noted that a majority of Chinese believe in the traditional Chinese god of good fortune, and added that 17 percent believe in the existence of gods and demons, and half of these believe they've actually seen them. More prosaically, an officially approved Gallup Poll in 1996 discovered that a robust 56 percent of Chinese subscribe to the motto, "Work hard and get rich." Only three percent expressed a belief in the traditional Communist line, "Never think of yourself; give everything in service to society."

The philosophical malaise is easy enough to comprehend. China enjoyed a double-digit economic upsurge throughout the 1980's and most of the 90's. But the growth was brought about only after the unleashing of entrepreneurial skills by political masters who for three decades had suppressed private enterprise as a criminal activity. The pro-capitalist policies of the 1980's cheerfully extolled in slogans like 'To get rich is glorious," were pushed through by bureaucrats who in the 1970's had sought to impose the greatest experiment in collectivist utopianism ever devised by human beings.

But it wasn't just a cynical shift in economic policy that caused China's philosophical and ethical consensus to implode. In an economy where 86 percent of officially registered companies are still controlled by the state, the combination of virtual absence of legal due process, an authoritarian polity, and a roiling, export-fed prosperity has led to a massive upsurge in corruption at every level of Chinese life. More ominous for China's leadership, the slowdown in the nation's economic growth (down to 7-8 percent officially in 1999 after stratospheric levels of 14 percent in the early 90's has resulted in an ever-growing army of urban unemployed, estimated last year to number around 16 million. In light of inadequate social safety nets and the probability of further economic turndowns, the regime's fear of an anti-government jacquerie is not far-fetched.

Historically corruption-like peasant unrest, natural disaster, and flaccid rule at the center-has been a benchmark of a Chinese regime's vulnerability to change. Westerners who notice only the enduring emblems of China's cultural prowess-the Great Wall, the MingTombs, the Temple of Heaven-often don't appreciate just how much blood has been shed over the centuries to maintain the system of control that made those achievements possible. The gentlemanly system of Confucian ethics that foreigners have always admired nevertheless cemented in place a rigid class structure at whose peak was an emperor whose legitimacy was derived from Heaven. Ever since the Yellow Turban revolt during the Han Dynasty 202 B.C.-220 A.D.), savage peasant rebellions sought not only to replace China's ruling dynasty but many times to overthrow the orderly culture of Confucianism itself. Many rebellions drew their strength from Daoism, the indigenous Chinese folk religion that extols the harmonies of nature but also is rooted in ancient shamanistic practices. Sometimes Buddhism has been the motivator of rebellion. When the alien Mongolian conquerors of China, the Yuan dynasty, were overthrown in 1368 by their ethnically Han Chinese Ming successors, many of the rebels fought under the belief that the Maitreya, a new reincarnation of the Buddha, would descend to earth to grant salvation to all his followers.

China's last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1911), was challenged almost constantly by similar millenarian groups such as the White Lotus rebels, the Taipings (whose leader believed he was the younger brother of Jesus), and the Boxers. All these rebel groups used charms, incantations, healing ceremonies, and invulnerability rituals based on ancient systems of shamanistic spirit-possession and on martial arts techniques derived from qigong. Although the term is a twentieth-century coinage, qigong originated in Daoism and it denotes a system of focusing through meditation on the qi, or "vital force," said by practitioners to exist in all human beings. When the qi is effectively harnessed, qigong adepts believe, virtual supernatural feats of human strength or concentration can be accomplished.

Pragmatic and good-natured Americans may believe that qigong belongs in a general category of socially neutral, New Age-style concepts that are merely subjective, not necessarily harmful, and incapable of scientific proof. But China's scientific community doesn't share this view. Experiments under controlled conditions established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the late 1970's and early 1980's concluded that qi, when emitted by a qigong expert, actually constitutes measurable infrared electromagnetic waves and causes chemical changes in static water through mental concentration. Qi, according to much of China's scientific establishment, for all intents existed.

This marked a major turnaround. During the first three decades of Communist rule, qigong had been dismissed by the authorities and by official science as nothing but "superstition," its practice ruthlessly suppressed. During the 1980's however, qigong masters were allowed to pass on their skills with official approval, just as Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, along with Buddhist and Daoist Temples and Muslim mosques, under carefully controlled official auspices, were permitted to open for worship. Qigong, however, enjoyed two advantages over its religious cousins. It was allowed to openly experiment with its claims to bring healing to people, and with its long-time connection to the martial arts it had an open door to China's military. Almost certainly, the ferocity and thoroughness of the Chinese Communist regime's attack upon Falun Gong stems from the sect's significant penetration of the military and state security. One of the four Falun Gong alleged leaders sentenced to 17 years in prison last December was a high-ranking member of China's police force, the Public Security Bureau.

hina has had other qigong movements in recent years, such as the Zhong Gong in Shanxi Province and the Xiang Gong in Henan, and there have been legally approved qigong movements in virtually every corner of the country. Essentially three things alarm the authorities about Falun Gong: Li Hongzhi's own claims to supernatural power, the cult-like devotion to him by his followers, and the sect's universalistic assertions that, if adopted, would essentially solve all the world's problems that have arisen from human folly. The claims Falun Gong makes about itself and its founder, Li Hongzhi, fall precisely in the millenarian category that has traditionally threatened entire regimes in China. Falun Gong, one of its official web sites proclaims, "is like a red sun rising from the east, whose radiance with unlimited vitality will illuminate every corner of the earth, nourish all the living things, warm the whole world and play an unparalleled role in the realization of an ideal and perfect human society on this planet." Only through Falun Gong, the official literature goes on, "can the myths of the universe, time-space, and the human body be completely unveiled."

Li himself was born in north China's Jilin Province in 1951, apparently into an intellectual's family. At the age of four, he was supposedly taken under the wing of the first of several qigong masters. At eight, he attained "supernatural powers" after catching in the comer of his eye a vision of the words "Compassion, Truth, Forbearance," the ethical watchwords of Falun Gong. (Evidently nobody else could see these words.) Thereafter, according to the official hagiographical account, he accomplished such supernatural feats as levitation, teleportation, passing through solid objects, and making himself invisible. He has come, his followers say, "with a special mission." Li, followers believe, "implants" in their abdomens a spinning reverse swastika (which is actually shown spinning on the official Falun Gong web site) and then bestows upon them a sort of supernatural protection from diseases and other problems. For a regime only too aware of its diminishing national authority and the risks of its own ultimate demise, Falun Gong's Panglossian promises are no doubt deeply menacing.

The regime's ongoing official campaign against Falun Gong focuses hard on the harm that the sect is said to have caused ordinary Chinese. Allegedly more than 1,400 Chinese have died because they neglected to seek proper medical attention or even, in a few cases, cut their stomachs open with a knife to see if they could locate that swastika. But this can't be the real reason for Beijing's underlying fear. After all, millions of innocent Chinese died in the profligate social and political experiments of Chinese Communism itself.

Although China's Falun Gong practitioners may number a mere two million in China-rather than the 70 million claimed by the sect's spokesmen-China's Communist rulers plainly sense something much more worrisome than the movement itself. They fear that, in the minds of ordinary Chinese, they have lost the "Mandate of Heaven" to rule China, that almost tangible aura of ultimate national legitimacy. As they wrestle with what spin to put on the Boxer Rebellion, whose tooth anniversary occurs this June, they must also wonder if Falun Gong is, as the Boxers were, a sign that the collapse of a regime is close at hand: deeply heterodox, perhaps ephemeral, but emblematic of massive disillusionment with the old Communist orthodoxy.

Ordinary Chinese, meanwhile, have an even harder task. A return to Confucianism in the philosophical sense, though attractive to some intellectuals, offers little solace because its code of ethics belongs to an era when social hierarchies were second nature to people. Even in China that is no longer true. Disapproving as it is of anything that rocks the boat, Confucianism is not an ideal vehicle for political pluralism.

Buddhism offers solace to many Chinese, but except in times of great upheaval, it has tended to stay clear of addressing contentious political and social issues. The real wild card is Daoism, whose ability to attract large numbers of followers and endow them, at least temporarily, with great mental and physical prowess, can lead to the downfall of old regimes but not necessarily to the construction of lasting new ones. (The Ming conquerors of the Yuan relied on a Confucian bureaucracy for political stability.) That leaves Christianity, an increasingly attractive ethical model for some Chinese intellectuals. They, for instance, are astonished that America remains a profoundly religious nation despite its technological prowess and social mobility. China's Christians continue to grow rapidly in numbers in the countryside (perhaps 5070 million nationwide, compared with four million in 1949), but they have yet to surface significantly in China's teeming cities. To provide a critical mass for lasting cultural change, China's Christians wouldn't have to constitute a majority in the nation but merely the bones and sinews of a new civic consensus on the rule of law, representative government, and a global role more mature than the current edgy nationalism upon which Beijing relies.

Whither China? That perennial question has engaged outsiders for centuries. Today, more than ever in Chinese history, the answer lies in the emerging shape of the nation's soul.