In the mid-2000s, Internet users in the People's Republic of China (PRC) mocked the state ideology of the “harmonious society” (héxié shèhui) with a term that was almost pronounced the same way: “river crab” (héxiè). To have been “river crabbed” means to have been censored, to have been clawed into harmony by eliminating dissident speech. When Kin Sheung Chiaretto Yan positions this “harmonious society” ideology as the point of dialogue between the Roman Catholic magisterium and the PRC authorities in Evangelization in China: Challenges and Prospects, one wonders if the magisterium is being river crabbed. Granted, Yan's central argument appears politically benign: he centers sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci's deep inculturation into China as a model evangelization strategy. However, Yan contentiously equates “Chinese culture” with the ideology of the “harmonious society,” suggesting in the book's first section that the perennial subjection of religion in China to the imperial court (and by extension, the party-state) means that spiritual and political spheres in China have always been separated. For Yan, inculturation in China means to separate the political from the religious in deference to the state. As Joseph Shih, SJ, writes in the foreword, “His reconstruction of the past is partly debatable, but it reflects well the sentiment of the majority of Chinese who are not Catholics” (vii); this is, as political scientist Zhao Suisheng argues in Nation-State by Construction (2004), an ideological account that makes the Chinese Communist Party the arbiter of “Chinese culture.”

Yan's reading of the magisterium's missiology, in particular John Paul II and Benedict XVI, rests on this flawed account of inculturation. In a second section, Yan reads John Paul II's 1981 speech to Chinese Catholics in Manila, his 1991 encyclical Redemptoris Missio, his 1999 apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Asia, and his 2001 celebration of Ricci; he also examines Benedict XVI's 2007 letter to Chinese Catholics. Emphasizing the theme of inculturation in all of these texts, Yan argues that the magisterium itself is proposing that the spiritual and political spheres of Catholicism are separated, enabling the possibility of being Christian and Chinese at the same time. In the third section, Yan protests what he sees as a culture of confrontation and misunderstanding between the Vatican and the PRC, arguing that they can better achieve a harmonious society by separating the political and the spiritual. One Vatican overture that Yan commends includes clarifying that the state's official Catholic Church, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA), has bishops who are spiritually loyal to Rome; indeed, one of Benedict XVI's acts has been to privately accept some into full communion. With nary a reference to scholars of Sino-Vatican relations such as Beatrice Leung and Paul Mariani, Yan uses the Vatican's overtures to the CPCA to call for further separation between the political and religious spheres.

In other words, Yan's argument is for the Catholic Church in China to become basically Protestant. Yan calls on Catholics to learn from Protestants, to subjectivize their faith because such depoliticization could produce friendlier overtures from the Chinese party-state and might enable the flourishing of Chinese Catholics. Indeed, Yan admires the growth of Protestants, who are more amenable to a depoliticized, subjective faith, noting the contrast between the 5,714,853 Catholics who make up only 0.44 percent of China's current population and the rapid growth of Protestants, who outnumber Catholics by an estimated four times. Yan ignores the fact that bracketing politics from ecclesial life secularizes the church—which, as anthropologist Talal Asad observes, is basically “protestantizing” because it reduces religion to mere cognitive faith—making the church susceptible to co-opting—being river crabbed—by the state.

My critique of Yan is not for “having sold out to the Chinese government” simply for “working for more constructive dialogue with Chinese authorities” (107). It is instead that following Yan's proposals would qualitatively change the theology of the Catholic Church. His proposals for inculturation would mean that Chinese Catholics would give the universal church the protestantizing message of political and spiritual separation, enabling churches everywhere to join in ideological cooperation with states to produce harmonious societies without dissent. It turns out that the claws of the river crab may not be merely political: they may be spiritual too.