Love is important in Islam, but what is now preached is “love for the Motherland, Socialism, and the Chinese Communist Party.”
by Ma Wenyan
![Yang Faming during his June 23 lecture in Yiwu, Zhejiang. From Weibo.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BITTER-WINTER-8.jpg)
![Yang Faming during his June 23 lecture in Yiwu, Zhejiang. From Weibo.](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BITTER-WINTER-8.jpg)
What can be more important and beautiful than love in Islam? For Muslims, God is the Loving One and his divine attribute of love resonates in his creatures. Muslims were thus not surprised when on June 23, Yang Faming, the President of the government-controlled China Islamic Association, during a visit to Zhejiang province together with leaders of the United Front Work Department, announced that he would devote his main lecture, which he presented in Yiwu city, to love.
However, the audience might have been more surprised when Yang presented the historic evolution of love in Chinese Muslim thought as progressively focusing on love for the country and patriotism, for which he said believers were prepared to sacrifice everything else.
With the victory of the CCP, Yang explained, loyal Chinese Muslims embraced the “Three Loves.” In fact, the “Three Loves” appeared in the 1980s as a core principle of Chinese education. They are love of the motherland (热爱祖国), love of socialism (热爱社会主义), and love of the Chinese Communist Party (热爱中国共产党).
![](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BITTER-WINTER-1-3.jpg)
![](https://bitterwinter.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/BITTER-WINTER-1-3.jpg)
As local Muslim believers in Zhejiang who attended the event told “Bitter Winter,” even an audience mostly including Party bureaucrats and loyal members of the China Islamic Association started whispering when Yang insisted that the love proposed by the great Muslim theologians and mystics and the CCP’s “Three Loves” are one and the same.
Undaunted, Yang announced that the China Islamic Association expects the “Three Loves” and their identification with the Muslim concept of love to become a central theme of preaching and a key tool for the “Sinicization” of Islam.