When Slavoj Zizek writes an op-ed in the NYT titled, "How China Got Religion," how could I not respond?

   I have no trouble with most of it.  He does the usual post-modern reversal thing by pointing out how China’s repression of Tibetan Buddhism has certain features common to our own society:

Perhaps we find China’s reincarnation laws so outrageous not because
they are alien to our sensibility, but because they spill the secret of
what we have done for so long: respectfully tolerating what we don’t
take quite seriously, and trying to contain its political consequences
through the law.

 OK, there’s some truth in that: modernity reduces "culture" to a set of tolerable practices that are limited by the power and practices of markets and states.  That is true in the US (just ask Christian conservatives who believe that we have gone to hell in a hand basket) and in China.   And it is also true that the corrosive effects of modernization pose a very great threat to Tibet, and that modernization now has a Chinese face, with or without the most overt forms of repression. 

        But this should not get the PRC off the hook for its treatment of Tibet.   Yes, the US destroyed Native American culture, as Zizek mentions, but that does not mean it is right that the PRC throw Buddhist monks in jail.

        I want to turn to another point Zizek makes, however.  He writes:

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the Chinese government is not
antireligious. Its stated worry is social “harmony” — the political
dimension of religion. In order to curb the excess of social
disintegration caused by the capitalist explosion, officials now
celebrate religions that sustain social stability, from Buddhism to
Confucianism — the very ideologies that were the target of the Cultural
Revolution. Last year, Ye Xiaowen, China’s top religious official, told
Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, that “religion is one of the
important forces from which China draws strength,” and he singled out
Buddhism for its “unique role in promoting a harmonious society.”

 Two things.  First, harmony is not exclusively the political dimension of religion.  It can be the political goal of non-religious ideologies.   Although Marx did not develop the idea sufficiently, his notion of communism in the German Ideology has a harmonious utopian ring to it:

…in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive
  sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society
  regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today
  and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the
  evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter,
  fisherman, herdsman or critic….

 Economic liberals, too, in the manner of Adam Smith, also had faith in a certain secular social harmony emerging from an efficient division of labor.  Harmony is not only a religious ideal.

      Second, is Confucianism a religion?  I have posted on this before (background here and here) and have come to the conclusion that it is not a "religion" as that notion is conventionally defined:

…For him [Confucius], patterns in nature and
questions of origins were best understood as they were mediated by
immediate social networks and relationships.  Our place in the world,
and by extension the cosmos, was determined by our more direct
connections to families and friends and communities.  Improving
ourselves in those contexts demanded a great deal of effort, and that
is where our attention should be focused.

Adept
Kung said: "When the Master talks about civility and cultivation, you
can hear what he says.  But when he talks about the nature of things
and the Way of Heaven, you can’t hear a word." (5.12)      

     Long story short: the revival of Confucianism in the PRC is more about neo-traditionalist legitimation of the authoritarian state and less about religion, per se.  The revivals of Taoism and Buddhism, and the upsurge in Christianity, on the other hand, make Zizek’s point.  Confucianism, however, is not quite the same.