THE CHINA JOURNAL, NO. 65, JANUARY 2011 BEYOND REPRESSION AND RESISTANCE—CHRISTIAN LOVE AND CHINA’S HARMONIOUS SOCIETY Gerda Wielander The revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. (Che Guevara) As a student in China in the 1980s I rarely came across the word “love” in daily conversation. Although several works of literature dealing with the topic of love had been published since Mao’s death (most famously Zhang Jie’s Love Must Not Be Forgotten), these debates were confined to academic and literary circles. Today, “love” is much more evident in China; the character is commonly used in advertising, and as a word it has entered common parlance. Love is a frequent theme in popular literature, and the young, urban generation uses and practices love in a casual fashion that was still quite unthinkable in the 1980s. “Love” has also found its way into local government websites, charitable organizations and Marxist philosophical writings. It seems that not only popular culture but also official discourse have discovered love in the context of building a Harmonious Society. This article examines the role of love as a social force in today’s China, with particular focus on the role of “love” as a motivational force in social reconstruction and welfare work. It argues that the use of the term in the discourse on Harmonious Society in general and in the context of charitable work in particular has strong Christian roots, despite the official emphasis on Confucian values, and may constitute a tacit acknowledgment of the growing importance of Christian values in contemporary China. The findings are based on a close analysis of official and intellectual writings on building a harmonious society and academic writing on China’s “moral crisis”, as well as Chinese Christian writing in a variety of contexts. The “love” with which this article is concerned is perhaps best represented in terms of the Greek agape, the Latin caritas or the German Nächstenliebe. The Chinese texts that I have been analyzing invariably use the monosyllabic term ai (爱) to express these notions. Occasionally, and primarily in sources emanating from the charitable sector, the term aixin ( 爱心) is used, a term which in common parlance is understood to mean “compassion” or “kindness” but which I have translated as “loving heart”.