The collection of internal Chinese government documents released last week offers an unprecedented glimpse into the ruling communist party's determination to assert control over religious groups in China.
The documents, collected and translated by the New York-based Committee for Investigation on Persecution of Religion in China (and available for download at www.freedomhouse.com), show the party's escalating concern with spiritual groups that resist its restrictive policies and expose its comprehensive strategy, originating at the highest levels of government, to eradicate them.
China's government permits religious activity, but only in restricted forms. Official regulations require all religious activities to be conducted by government-approved clergy in venues registered with the government. Within official religious organizations, the communist party also employs a strategy of elite cooptation, appointing religious leaders on the basis of their political loyalty. As a result, much of the nation's spiritual ferment has occurred outside official boundaries. Dozens of spiritual movements, each claiming as many as several million adherents, have sprouted up across the country, mostly in China's vast rural hinterland, where strong traditions of religious sectarianism overwhelm the state's ability to assert control over the population.
It is the growing organizational virtuosity of these groups that underlies the sense of urgency among China's authorities. The degree of the religious groups' perceived threat is visible in the language China's propaganda machine uses to label them. Smaller, isolated groups are typically described as "illegal organizations" that "disturb social order" by conducting illicit religious services. By contrast, the large networks targeted in the set of documents just released are labeled "evil cults" guilty of nothing less than "endangering national security."
The government's multifaceted strategy to eradicate these large spiritual groups resembles post-Sept. 11 efforts to destroy Al Queda's terrorist network, not self-styled religious leaders and their followers. The documents instruct China's public security organs to compile personality profiles, improve intelligence networking, mobilize reconnaissance teams, infiltrate the groups, coerce members to spy for them and, ultimately, arrest "all members in one blow."
While most observers in this country attribute official hostility toward religion to the ruling communist party, the bureaucratic impulse to control religion is deeply rooted in China's centuries-old tradition of totalistic governance. Indeed, official ranting against "evil cults" today is lifted almost verbatim from imperial predecessors of centuries past. Historically, China's rulers claimed to rule by Heaven's mandate, which made them the guardians of Truth as well as power. Their governing principles derived from pre-modern norms of cosmic harmony that integrates all of social reality into an organic whole, giving rulers the prerogative to decide which beliefs, values and social groups were "in" and which were "out." China's communist party today adheres to the same basic governing principles, merely changing its source of authority from Heaven's mandate to the objective laws of History -- courtesy of Karl Marx.
