CIAO DATE: 07/03

The Prospects for Political Reform in China: Religious and Political Expression

Introduction

Religion is flourishing in China today. After being severely restricted in the first decade and a half of the Maoist era, virtually all forms of public religious practice were suppressed during the Cultural Revolution and replaced by a quasi-religious cult of Mao, complete with sacred texts (the Little Red Book), rituals, and claims of miracles. But the Mao cult imploded amid the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. After the death of Mao and the overthrow of his close associates, the Deng Xiaoping regime relaxed restrictions on religious practice; and the freedoms of an expanding market economy made the remaining restrictions easy to subvert. In this environment, hundreds of religious flowers began to bloom, some of them replications of pre-revolutionary religious forms, many others new mutations of the old. According to the government's own—almost certainly underestimated —figures, there are over 100 million religious believers in China today. The real number is probably several times as large.

With this spectacular growth (unpredicted not only by Communist ideologues but by most Western social scientists), has come considerable conflict—among religious practitioners themselves and between some religious communities and the government. The conflicts are partially the result of the government's heavy handed attempts to regulate and control religion. But they are also a result of the enormous diversity of religious practice itself and of the passions that religion engenders.

Full Text (PDF, 6 pages, 52 KB)