ABSTRACT
Two days before Christmas, in 2010, ten renowned Confucian scholars published an open letter addressed to different levels of government and ‘all followers of Jesus's teachings (yejiaotu) who love Chinese culture’ to protest in no uncertain terms against the construction of a new church in Qufu three kilometres away from the ‘holy sites’ of Confucianism. The surprisingly aggressive letter claims that a church building so near to the Confucian temple was an affront to Chinese culture, that no other religion in China's history had ever so blatantly disregarded the centrality of Confucianism in Chinese culture, and that its presence would lead to religious strife and conflict. The letter stresses the point that Christianity is a foreign religion, and that the attempt to build a church in Qufu was a manifestation of the conflict between Chinese and Western culture. At the same time, the letter also referred to Confucianism as a religion, comparing Qufu to Mecca, and Jerusalem and Vatican City. Conceding that the construction of the church was entirely legal and had obtained all necessary permits and finance, it nonetheless made the following demands: that the construction of the church be stopped immediately; that if there had to be a church in Qufu, that it be built outside a 50 Chinese mile (li) radius of the Confucian ‘holy sites’; that it should not allowed to be built to the planned height of 41 metres , nor to the planned capacity of more than 3,000 so as not to create the impression that Christianity was more important than Confucianism. The letter concluded by calling on the central government to afford Confucianism the same status as other officially recognized religions and to stop the exploitation of religious sites like Qufu for commercial and tourist purposes so that the spiritual function of these sites could be reinstated (Rujia zhi xuezhe 2010).
