Sat, Feb 14, 2026 page8

• Subjugation of religion to politics in China

  • By Shen Yan 沈言
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  A few years ago, China’s approach to handling religious affairs underwent a transformation. Formerly an executive agency, reforms in 2018 led to the merger of China’s official body for religious affairs with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD). Representing more than just a name change, the shift is a reframing of religion and its social practices as objects of state governance.

  After transitioning from being under the authority of the State Council to being incorporated into the UFWD, China’s National Religious Affairs Administration has become less concerned with religion’s legality within society and more with how it can help to achieve the party’s political objectives. Understanding this can explain the treatment of different religions in China.

  Christianity and Islam are subject to high restrictions. Each features a higher power above the state and are explicit in their lore about faith being a duty with primacy over secular powers. They have the power to bind international communities together. For a system that demands all forms of authority to be subservient to the party, such religions are seen as a threat.

  The situation for Buddhism and Taoism is different, not because they are inherently safer, but because they are more malleable. Without a single paramount authority, their scriptures can be taken as pieces of culture or philosophy. Their organizational forms are highly localized, making them easier to incorporate within other structures, lessening the need for wholesale suppression.

  With religion formally incorporated into the “united front” system, designed to advance the CCP’s interests overseas, the nature of its international exchanges on faith-based matters should be expected to undergo changes. Take the interfaith worship of the sea goddess Matsu: The Meizhou Ancestral Temple in China’s Fujian Province was badly damaged during the Cultural Revolution, and its subsequent reconstruction relied heavily on funding from Taiwan. This represents a genuine effort for collaboration and repair. After the realignment of the religious affairs body, religious exchanges and spaces are subject to an entirely different kind of political machinery.

  The same mismatch exists between China and Taiwan for cross-strait Buddhist exchanges. In Taiwan, these are understood as non-political humanitarian practices. In China, religion, charity and community services are all fair game as government resources, with political functions that are by no means dictated by their original intent.

  What Taiwan needs to be alert to is not a particular group, religion or exchange activity, but whether it has fully come to grips with the reality of religion as an arm of “united front” work — or whether it is still defaulting to an old understanding of religious exchanges. It is this lag that constitutes a risk.

  Throughout the policy program of religion’s sinicization, Chinese officials have repeatedly emphasized in policy documents and statements that interpretations of religious texts must adhere to political requirements.

  There is a joke circulating among Chinese Christian households: If there were a Bible with Chinese characteristics, it would contain not the original Genesis 1:3 verse, but a revised “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and, following party approval, there was light.”

  The point? The agency and decisionmaking authority of religious institutions has already been plucked out and transferred into the hands of the party.

  Shen Yan is a political commentator.

  Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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