While religious intolerance has long been intertwined with China’s history, measures of control have grown increasingly harsh under Xi Jinping. Since his ascent to power in 2012, particular religious and spiritual communities have seen increased constraints and more intrusive controls. In the region of Xinjiang, upwards of 3 million Muslim Uighurs have been sent to “counter-terrorism” or “re-education” camps, where they are tortured into renouncing their religion and forced to recite state propaganda. Their freedom of movement has also been severely limited by the confiscation of passports in addition to the collection of DNA samples, fingerprints, and other biometric data.
Christian communities have also been threatened by the forced demolitions of churches and the detainment of pastors and priests. Meanwhile, new measures of repression further constrain Tibetan Buddhists’ ability to practice. State laws have codified harsher punishments for assisting self-immolators, in addition to canceling previously permitted festivals, increasing surveillance of major monasteries, and interfering in the selection of religious leaders. “Consistent with Xi’s rule on economic and security matters, his tenure with respect to religion has been marked by increasing control and regulations,” Human Rights Watch’s China Director Sophie Richardson said in an interview with the HPR.
China’s persecution of religious minorities is part of a broader, systematic strategy to eradicate external influence in the social and political lives of citizens while harnessing aspects of religion that could serve the state’s interests. Its campaign of religious persecution is a not unprecedented effort to cement public recognition of the state’s authority and thereby generate political conformity. At its core, China’s rigid political system can only derive legitimacy from continuously relying on instruments of repression, which is why it fundamentally opposes religious freedom.
Religion and the Party Apparatus
The state-sponsored coercive apparatus at the disposal of the Chinese Communist Party perpetuates religious repression under the guise of public safety and interest. The Chinese Constitution is deliberately vague when it comes to the scope of religious freedom. Under Article 36, citizens rightfully “enjoy freedom of religious belief” provided that they practice “normal religious activities.” The term “normal,” however, is ambiguous and leaves room for broad interpretation. In practice, the CCP has exploited this leeway to implement extreme measures of control and attack religious communities threatening its power.
Under longstanding protocol, all religious groups are required to register, with the CCP’s permission, with one of five state-sanctioned patriotic religious associations which oversee the selection, training, and monitoring of politically loyal clerics. Only religions formally registered are recognized under the law. There are currently only five state-recognized faiths: Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism.
However, no religion is truly free; even registered religions are subject to suppressive measures and threats of eradication. As carefully codified in the Chinese Constitution, public officials reserve the right to strictly monitor registered and unregistered groups to prevent events that “disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the State.” In practice, constitutional government surveillance frequently targets peaceful religious activities protected by international law.
The CCP has long distanced itself from religion, often violently. Under Mao Zedong, the CCP took extreme measures to eradicate religion and spirituality. Thousands of religious sites were destroyed, and countless numbers of believers were tortured or killed. Since then, party leaders have continued to grapple with the suppression and regulation of religion. Today, the CCP is still firmly separated from religion: it prohibits its 90 million members from holding any spiritual beliefs.
Religious policy in China has consistently centered on shaping legal and bureaucratic instruments for three purposes: opportunistic exploitation, selective eradication, and long-term asphyxiation. “Religious policy in China is not just about outright repression — [it is] a combination of trying to maximize the potential benefits [of religion] to party rule, either in terms of control, profits, or social [stability], while minimizing the risks,” Freedom House senior research analyst Sarah Cook said in an interview with the HPR. “While religion exists, the party seeks to harness its benefits but carefully control and limit it under rule by law and selective eradication. [In the long-term], the party wants to curb religious expansion and accelerate the extinction of religion.” Under Xi Jinping, what seems to be a distinctly harsher religious campaign is no different.
Xi’s Sinicization of Religion
The campaign of Sinicization, or making things Chinese in character or form, under Xi Jinping is an effort to consolidate power and curb social unrest. It is based upon a two-fold strategy of suppressing non-traditional or “foreign” religions while promoting traditional faiths. The first part of its strategy is rooted in the party’s deep-seated fear that religious individuals could form allegiances to authorities outside the state’s control. “As long as China is a one-party state, [there can only be] a single center of power that views all other organizing mechanisms as threats,” Richardson said. As identified by Freedom House, since Xi took the helm of the CCP, state religious policy has created a more restrictive legal environment, expanded its targets of repression, increased intrusion into religious life, and further capitalized on technological advancements.
State laws have codified and given legal legitimacy to previously informal political directives under Xi. Updates to national religious affairs regulations have codified new provisions and harsher penalties in the criminal code. Crucially, under Xi, religious restrictions have also expanded their scope and targets: while many of the methods of control remain the same, the range of groups under attack has broadened. Harsher penalties and acts of government demolition, typically reserved for unregistered religious groups, have been increasingly extended to state-sanctioned religious communities. Even benign acts of religious expression, such as praying or lighting incense, have drawn harsher punishments from state authorities. For example, an Uighur teenager was sentenced to 15 years in prison for watching a religious video on his phone.
Particularly intensified methods of control under Xi include the use of doctrinal manipulation to Sinicize religions and the further capitalization of technology. Under doctrinal manipulation, a thought-reform tactic, government officials or affiliated organizations parse theological teachings to identify key elements compatible with party ideology and promote those elements. In addition, with more technological resources at their disposal, the CCP has adopted new modes of surveillance, ranging from facial-recognition cameras to online monitoring, to allow for greater intrusion into private lives.
In stark contrast, the second part of religious strategy under Xi centers on leveraging the benefits of particular “traditional” faiths — namely versions of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism — to curb social unrest. While suppressing supposedly foreign religions such as Christianity and Islam, the state has promoted faiths deemed authentically Chinese as a way to fill a spiritual vacuum. These faiths offer outlets through which the party can placate dissatisfaction with its policies without losing its source of authority. For the disaffected individuals who cannot afford housing, education, or medical treatment, faith and spirituality offer a form of appeasement through self-reflection and inner peace. “The party is trying to come up with a positive narrative to bind society together, and part of this is restoring Chinese traditions,” said Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, in an interview with the HPR. “In this regard, Buddhism, Taoism, and folk religions are viewed as indigenized and helpful to the state,” he said. A similar capitalization on traditional faiths has been implemented by past Chinese leaders. Under Jiang Jiemin and Hu Jintao, the state passively supported the expansion of Buddhism because its growth aligned with the bolstering of state legitimacy; Buddhism helped to elevate an image of China’s peaceful rise on a global level and supported the party’s goal of fostering a “harmonious society” because of the values it preached.
Religious Resistance and Revival
Whether or not Xi Jinping’s religious policies have actually been successful is debatable. When it comes to changing the deeply held beliefs of faith communities, the state’s measures have been counterproductive. Rigid state constraints have only encouraged more believers to operate outside the law, strengthening resistance and revival in response to government policies. Millions of believers defy religious restrictions in their daily lives, both in secret and in public. According to Freedom House’s report, Muslim Uighurs blacken their curtains to avoid detection, Tibetan Buddhists pray for the Dalai Lama’s health, Falun Gong practitioners meditate in the dark at home, and Christians find help through Hong Kong radio programs or mountainside workshops. Via the internet, smartphones, underground publications, and homemade DVDs, believers also access and spread spiritual teachings.
In signalling trends of growing resistance, various faith communities have taken to advocacy within the existing political-legal system or even through direct protest to challenge state religious policy. Leaders of unregistered churches have made efforts to build friendly relationships with local police forces tasked with monitoring them, and consequently, local officials have granted de facto approval to these “house churches.” Over many years, Falun Gong practitioners have reached out to thousands of judges and prosecutors within and outside of China to counter party propaganda and raise awareness regarding their inhumane persecution. Increasing numbers of local police officers have refused to detain adherents, with some helping them in secret. A Chinese judge even granted the first de facto acquittal of a practitioner in 2015.
Protestant and Catholic Christians have held sit-ins in an effort to physically prevent the desecration of their churches and have disseminated public information demanding the release of church leaders. Some of these efforts have resulted in concrete changes: demolitions have been prevented, detainees have been released, and information challenging government propaganda has been disseminated.
In the long term, the CCP’s repressive religious policies may in effect generate sufficient backlash and resistance to significantly undermine its legitimacy and authority. As it is, these policies are already introducing detrimental social and political consequences for the party. Tightening controls over benign and routine religious practices have created growing resentment among communities of believers and encouraged further radicalization. More individuals are engaging in direct and indirect forms of protest to challenge state policies, from sharing banned information to joining unofficial congregations across the country. “As the CCP expands targets of repression, they face greater backlash because people who previously would have been agnostic to or accepting of party rule begin to question the party’s legitimacy,” Cook said. “Growing resistance lays the groundwork for undermining legitimacy and creating some sort of change in the future.” These emerging social dynamics are exacerbating threats to the party’s goal of maintaining social stability, which in turn poses a serious risk to the party’s central authority.
If the government under Xi continues to expand religious repression and persecution, as trends indicate, trust in the government will only erode further. More members of targeted religious groups, many of whom are part of the educated upper-middle class, will become increasingly dissatisfied with the party-state apparatus, and their activism and influence will create greater internal resistance within the party. Over time, increasingly organized movements will chip away at the CCP’s political control.
Sustainability of Chinese Authoritarianism
At its core, the Chinese authoritarian bureaucracy is structurally and ideologically inadequate to govern a rapidly modernizing and increasingly diverse society humanely. “It comes down to the nature of the party — Chinese authoritarianism will not allow for any individual, group [or] institution [to be] perceived as independent of its absolute control,” ChinaAid President Bob Fu said in an interview with the HPR. “To use a favorite phrase of Xi, ‘from east to west, south to north, peasant farmers to white collar workers, students to soldiers, the party controls all.’ According to Xi’s vision, the party has to be embedded in every [aspect] of Chinese society.” In order to legitimize and maintain its authority, the regime must continuously fall back on repressive instruments and tools of propaganda because it has not derived public trust and recognition democratically. For religious freedom to truly exist in China, its political system must shift toward more democratic reforms. From Guatemala to Papua New Guinea, many hybrid systems between democracy and dictatorship provide adequate space for religious freedom.
It is possible for the CCP to ease religious restrictions and provide more space for religious practice, but that seems highly unlikely given the party leadership’s track record. Fundamentally, the core tenets of its rule and the sources of its authority seem at odds with religious freedom, and perhaps even long-term economic development.
While it views the freedom of religious thought and expression to be antithetical to the centralization of authority, it is highly unlikely that the Chinese government will end its repressive practices. Instead, the global community must step up to support the activism of internal groups by applying external pressure. Whether it applies collective force through individualized sanctions against party officials or diplomatic censures, the international community can and should respond in concrete ways to uphold its commitment to human rights.
Image Credit: Unsplash/Leon Liu