When the Taliban demolished statues of the Buddha, many people all over the world, including many non-Buddhists, denounced the destruction as an act of barbarism. The government of China has announced plans to perpetrate a similar atrocity.

In Tianjiajing, Henan province (east-central China)is a century-old sanctuary of the Virgin Mary. The sanctuary was nearly destroyed by the Japanese, and later by the Red Guards, but since 1979, citizens have been rebuilding it.

The sanctuary features a statue of Mary in her role as "Our Lady of Mount Carmel." On July 16, the worldwide Mount Carmel feast day, as many as fifty thousand pilgrims visit the sanctuary. Yet as reported in AsiaNews.it, the provincial government has recently forbidden visits to the shrine, and declared that the police and military will prevent the July 16 pilgrimages. Moreover, the government has declared that the entire shrine will be dynamited. Nor will local Catholics be allowed to save the Mary statue, or other sacred artwork on the site, by removing them before the explosions go off.

Some local Catholics believe that the government may want the property, which sits high on a mountain overlooking a valley, to build a hotel, or for a home for a high Communist party official. This certainly possible; as Mencius, the greatest developer of Confucian thought, observed, "Now the way feudal lords take from the people is no different from robbery." But mere rapacity does not explain why the government is so determined to destroy the statue, rather than allow it to be taken to another location.

The Chinese government is terrified of large public assemblies not directed by the government. Should the Mary statue not be destroyed, its new location might become a site of mass gatherings. People at the mass gathering would of course remember the history of the theft of the statue's original location.

Around the world, many people are urging their own governments to request that the Chinese government cancel plans to demolish the Tianjiajing sanctuary. The dynamiting would reveal the current Chinese regime, at least in this regard, as even more maliciously destructive than the Japanese fascist army or Maoist Red Guards.

"The mandate of heaven" was the traditional ideological basis of the rule of a Chinese government. Mencius said: "Heaven sees as the people see; Heaven hears as the people hear." Thus, the dissatisfaction of the people could remove the mandate of Heaven from a ruler, and place it on another ruler. Mencius considered revolution to be morally imperative in some cases.

A government which trembles in fear at the prospect of China's tiny Catholic minority gathering to honor the Virgin is plainly a government which has lost the Mandate of Heaven; it is the kind of tyranny against which Mencius and Confucius specifically sanctioned armed revolution. (Analects 11:17: Mencius book 7).