State Dominance of Religion

Surveying the fraught relationship between church and state in China, the late Chinese church historian Daniel Bays asserted that government control of religion has been a constant feature from Imperial times to the present. While this control may have varied in intensity, the assumption has always been that the state maintains the prerogative to monitor and regulate religious groups, which are ultimately accountable to the government. 

Bays cites two reasons for this insistence on state control of religion.

One is the state’s own claim to religious authority. “Now as then,” says Bays, “in its mode of public discourse, in its sanctification of the existing political order, and in many other ways the Chinese government behaves as a theocratic organization.”¹

The other factor is the government’s fear that unregulated religious groups will use their influence to subvert state power, a legitimate concern in light of the long history of sectarian movements becoming politicized and threatening the regime. The classic case, which directly implicates Christianity, involved an aspiring scholar-official in the mid-nineteenth century who failed in the imperial examinations and, for a time, came under the tutelage of a Baptist missionary from America. Gathering a massive following of disciples in southern China, he later declared himself king of a new political order and launched the Taiping Rebellion, culminating in a protracted civil war that nearly toppled the Qing dynasty.

A “Chinese State” Phenomenon

As Bays points out, these same factors are at work in today’s China, leading him to conclude, “Religious monitoring and regulation by the state in the recent past and present is not only a ‘Chinese communist’ phenomenon but also a ‘Chinese state’ one. Attitudes of suspicion and systematic policies of regulation or suppression (or both) toward grassroots religion have characterized the mind-set of all Chinese political regimes.”²

Writing in the early 2000s, a time of relative optimism about the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) social and political trajectory, Bays warned, “This situation will not easily change….” One might argue that if the present Chinese state is capable of adapting to international regimes such as the World Trade Organization, it is certainly capable of adopting international standards of religious freedom, or at least of easing up on the compulsion to interfere in its citizens’ religious lives. Of course it is capable; but it is not inclined to do so.”³

Events of the past two decades have confirmed Bays’s prediction. Rather than aligning more closely with international norms, the current regime has sought to carve out an alternative path. Doubling down on its claim to absolute authority, the Party has launched a Sinicization campaign to ensure behavioral compliance and ideological conformity among China’s religious believers. National security measures aimed at heading off any potential threat to the regime by religious groups have included a crackdown on unregistered Christian gatherings and stepped-up vigilance against foreign involvement in China’s church.  

Is There Another Way?

While change is not evident on the horizon within the PRC, one may ask whether Bays’s observations hold true for other Chinese societies. Taiwan and Singapore come to mind as obvious examples. Both developed under strong authoritarian leadership, yet in both places one finds thriving religious communities operating relatively free of state control. Setting aside the obvious difference in size between the PRC and the other two examples, this comparison is useful in exploring what could be possible within the realm of Chinese authoritarianism. 

Of the two, Singapore has followed a course more closely in line with the traditional Chinese relationship between state and religion. The government’s strong authority effectively headed off any threats to its rule from the religious sector but also created conditions within which religious activity could flourish. Inheriting a tradition of pluralism from its colonial predecessors and faced with integrating three different cultures that had a history of ethnic conflict, the government under Lee Kuan Yew prioritized harmony over conformity of belief or behavior. 

Policies such as ethnically integrated housing aimed at building understanding among Singapore’s Chinese, Malay, and Indian citizens, and preventing geographic concentration of people with the same religious tradition. The 1990 Maintenance of Religious Harmony Act (MRHA) is based on two principles:

1. Followers of different religions should exercise moderation and tolerance toward each other and their beliefs and not instigate religious enmity or hatred.
2. Religion and politics should be kept separate.

The MRHA contains strict regulations on reporting donations over a certain amount or those coming from foreign sources. It requires that leaders in key positions and at least half the members of religious groups’ governing bodies be citizens of Singapore. 

The Case of Taiwan

Bays sees a continuation of the traditional state dominance of religion in the Republic of China government before its retreat to Taiwan in 1949. It recognized the five religions (Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestant Christianity, and Catholicism) that would later become the five official religions under the PRC and took measures to regulate Christian schools. The strongly authoritarian New Life Movement, which sought to enforce civil behavior and loyalty to the party, provided leverage over the Christian community.⁴ Similar to the late-Qing regime that preceded it, however, the ROC’s weakness prevented it from effectively exerting control over China’s diverse religious population. For this reason, Bays considers the first half of the twentieth century to be an anomaly in China’s relations between religion and state, which returned to the historical status quo with the founding of the PRC.⁵

In Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek’s own Christian identity, a strong foreign missionary presence, and the regime’s close relationship with the United States gave the church favor even as Chiang’s authoritarian government continued to exert strong social control. Christians played a major role in education, social welfare, business groups, and other aspects of a burgeoning civil society that would flourish following the lifting of martial law in 1987. In the wake of Taiwan’s democratization, the legitimacy of folk religions and new religious movements was recognized. 

Authoritarian Pragmatism

While an exhaustive treatment of the factors contributing to these divergent religious policies is beyond the scope of this short essay, a few preliminary observations may be offered. In both Singapore and Taiwan, one could argue that authoritarian regimes that might have otherwise continued the tradition of state dominance were constrained in their ability to do so and thus compelled to institute pragmatic policies that were more tolerant of religion.Singapore’s delicately balanced ethnic communities required both the space to practice their various faiths and the guardrails to keep them from antagonizing one another. Exerting top-down ideological control would likely have backfired. Instead, the regime resorted to a bargain whereby religious freedom was granted in exchange for political loyalty. In contrast, rulers in the Han-dominated PRC have used force and a policy of assimilation to subdue geographically isolated ethnic and religious minorities.

Taiwan’s vulnerability and its reliance on Western support, along with the regime’s favorable attitude toward Christianity, militated against a hardline policy toward religious groups. Unlike the PRC, where religion was viewed through the lens of atheistic Marxism and anti-imperialism, the church in Taiwan became an ally of the regime and played an instrumental role in the development of Taiwanese society. As Taiwan embraced secular pluralism, the risk of any one religious group challenging the government diminished. 

In both cases, state power mitigated the threat of subversion from within the religious community, not through coercion, but by creating the space for religion to flourish within legal limits.

Finally, economic priorities and a high degree of interdependence with the West supported the loosening of restrictions on religion in Singapore and Taiwan. Alienating religious communities and business elites would have run counter to the need to mobilize all of society to pursue economic development goals, while the desire to maintain positive relations with overseas partners from various religious traditions encouraged religious tolerance. 

The PRC after Mao experienced something of this dynamic, as economic modernization took precedence over ideology. With a loosening of restrictions came rumblings in the late 1980s that perhaps the TSPM had outlived its usefulness. Officials in the 1990s were open to dialogue with their foreign counterparts about removing restrictions on religious activities. Hopeful conversations among urban house church leaders in the early 2000s raised the prospect of legal registration for unofficial Christian gatherings.

Yet unlike the outliers examined above, the PRC is not constrained by domestic realities that would necessitate a more nuanced religious policy. Nor do its leaders feel the need to entertain foreign concerns about religious liberty; emboldened by the PRC’s success, their defiance has become a mark of China’s imposing presence on the world scene. 

“Looking back over a thousand years of Chinese history,” Bays writes, “One finds little new about today’s pattern of relations between the state and religion in China. Government registration and monitoring of religious activities, although irregularly exercised, has been a constant reality of organized religious life in both traditional and modern times.”⁶

While anything is possible; it seems leaders in the PRC today have little incentive to break with tradition.

1. Daniel H. Bays, “A Tradition of State Dominance,” in God and Caesar in China: Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions, ed. Jason Kindopp and Carol Lee Hamrin (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), 27.
2. Bays 2004, 35.
3. Bays 2004, 36.
4. Daniel H. Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Chichester, West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 127–28.
5. Bays 2004, 35-36.
6. Bays 2004, 25.