In a recent post I wrote about the paradoxical treatment of religion in China’s Constitution. On the one hand, Article 36 of the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. On the other hand, the same article puts clear conditions on this freedom, making it subject to the needs of the state as defined by the Communist Party of China.
The lack of legal protection and the bias toward “controlling” religion evidenced in China’s Constitution point to an institutionalized discrimination against religion based in an underlying assumption that religion is a problem, rather than a positive force in society.
As Zhang Shoudong of the University of Politics and Law in Beijing points out, the Party’s stance toward religion has been rooted in the concept of class struggle since the founding of the Party. Although current official discussions of religion do not deal with religion in these terms, the notion of class struggle still underpins the Party’s ideas about religion and how it is to be dealt with. Religious groups are seen as posing a particular threat to national security and social harmony and are thus singled out among other groups in society as needing special regulation. Those within the officially sanctioned religious bodies (in the case of Protestant Christians, the TSPM/CCC) are treated as objects of an imposed “church-state harmony,” while unregistered groups, viewed as the enemy, are essentially objects of class struggle.
In the words of Zhang Shoudong:
At the same time that state-religion harmony is being promoted, the model of class struggle still persists. I think that it is more accurate to describe official church-state relations today as being a combination of state-church harmony and class struggle. It claims that, similar to other citizens, religious citizens enjoy the same political, economic, social and cultural rights. Yet, it emphasizes that religion must correspond with the socialist society and that it has special features. In the final analysis, the goal of state-church relations remains guiding religion to conform to the socialist society, assimilating it into the official ideology, with the corresponding loss of its salient features.[1]
This negative orientation toward religion manifests itself in the lives of Chinese Christians in numerous ways, creating obstacles to their fully realizing a vision of the Christian community playing a multi-faceted role in China’s urban society.
By delimiting religion’s sphere of influence (as seen in the Constitutional references to education and to “normal” religious activities, for example), current policy circumscribes the believer’s role. Although China’s Christians have found ways to become creatively involved in various sectors of society, in each of these areas the Party retains the prerogative to tell Christians how far they can go. In recent years their push into areas such as education or social media may have been unprecedented, but China’s believers have no guarantees that they will not be forced to retreat in the future.
Outside of a tightly constructed box intended to contain the influence of religion, exercising one’s faith publicly, particularly in concert with other believers, can take one beyond the protected area of “normal” religious activity and into a gray area in which one’s behavior may or not be allowed. This gray has grown significantly in recent decades, creating the space for China’s Christians to explore the outworking of their faith in new ways, yet the boundaries remain.
Brent Fulton
Brent Fulton is the founder of ChinaSource. Dr. Fulton served as the first president of ChinaSource until 2019. Prior to his service with ChinaSource, he served from 1995 to 2000 as the managing director of the Institute for Chinese Studies at Wheaton College. From 1987 to 1995 he served as founding …View Full Bio
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