Religion and the Chinese state: three crises and a solution

Abstract

On the surface, religious policy in China may appear contradictory. On the one hand, the state is officially atheist. It has mounted a highly publicised campaign to suppress Falun Gong, and maintains restrictions on Islam, Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity that reveal a profound fear of independent religious organisation. On the other, China insists that it respects religious freedom. The Chinese government proudly supports the staging of certain religious festivals, finances reconstruction of historic temples, and sponsors Chinese Muslims to visit Mecca. In fact, both tendencies are part of a consistent pattern of religious policy that seeks to establish firm political control over religious organisations, while visibly integrating religion into nation-building discourses. This same policy impulse applies to the treatment of both illegal and legal religions. Suppression of groups such as Falun Gong recreates the political theatre of earlier political campaigns, while support for ethnic religions and Christianity also allows the state to interpret religious ideology within a nationalist framework. In this regard, the most overt and successful ideological policy has been the state's sponsorship of Confucianism, which, unlike the other religions mentioned, has no existing organisation to overcome, and can thus be completely moulded to fit political needs.

Notes

1. This 1990 census figure measures only ethnicity, rather than religion (Gladney 2003: 453).

2. For how such events were portrayed in the newspapers of the 1960s and 1970s, see MacInnis (1972).

3. It is worth noting that some new Christian teachings, such as Eastern Lightning, do bear a rather uncomfortable resemblance to traditional White Lotus groups (Dunn 2009).

4. For a more specific description of the Confucian education program, see Billioud and Thoraval (2007 ,2008) and the essays in Makeham (2003).

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Notes on contributors

Thomas David DuBois

Thomas David DuBois is a historian of modern China based at the National University of Singapore. He has written on local religion in the villages of rural Hebei, the role of imperialism in shaping the practice and understanding of religion in East and South-East Asia, and social engineering in the Japanese colonial regime in Manchuria. His new book, Turning the Wheel: Religion and the Making of Modern East Asia, examines how religion shaped political, social and economic life in China and Japan over seven centuries, and is anticipated for publication in 2011