Faith Under Party Rule

In a “Christmas Greeting Letter to the Chinese Catholic and Christian Communities,” the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA)¹ outlined the government’s vision for religion in China throughout 2025.

In the past year, the Catholic and Christian communities have fully implemented the [Communist] Party’s theory of religious work in the new era, fully implemented the Party’s basic policy on religious work, adhered to the direction of the Sinicization of religion in China, adhered to the principle of independence and autonomy, held high the banners of patriotism and socialism…²

Central to this statement is the “direction of the Sinicization of religion in China.”  What is Sinicization (zhongguohua, 中國化)?  Understanding it begins with defining what it is not. It is not the same as what anthropologists, historians, and theologians mean by “indigenization,” “localization,” or “enculturation.” These generally refer to adaptations to local cultural traditions carried out by religious leaders and community members to make their practices more understandable and practicable. In China, it means conforming to the party-state’s agenda.  It utilizes the Party’s United Front Work Department (UFWD, 中國共產黨中央委員會統一戰線工作部/統戰部) to “match the needs of China’s development and the great traditional culture and proactively fit into the Chinese characteristics of a socialist society.”³

It is part of a general project of the Xi Jinping regime to tighten Party control over Chinese society. Party membership only encompasses about six percent of the population and the department of the Party that reaches out to non-Party members is the UFWD.  It does so by identifying or inserting leaders who are sympathetic to the Party (and helping to get rid of those who are not) and using techniques of surveillance and control to ensure that these leaders make their followers conform to Party agendas. The UFWD has played more or less active roles in different periods of Chinese history. When taking power in 2013, Xi Jinping expanded the UFWD’s resources and mandate to make it reach deeper into society and widen its influence among groups—especially overseas Chinese—outside of the PRC.  The UFWD’s mandate includes all manner of groups in civil society, such as academia and professional associations, community service associations, ethnic advocacy associations, and so forth.  Sinicization is the UFWD’s agenda for Chinese religious associations. All religions are to be Sinicized, even Taoism, which has been a deep part of Chinese culture for more than two millennia. But the challenge of bringing “foreign religions” like Christianity and Islam into the Party’s agenda requires increased effort.

Xi Jinping first officially called for Sinicization at a UFWD meeting in 2015 and has reiterated it at major Party gatherings, including the National Party Congress in 2017. In his official formulation, the term means that all religions and indeed all parts of Chinese culture should “match the needs of China’s development and the great traditional culture and pro-actively fit into the Chinese characteristics of a socialist society.”  According to Yang Fenggang, the somewhat contradictory formula is the outcome of tensions between different factions of Chinese leadership. A crucial issue for elite factions is what kind of Sina—or China—they want. Militant atheists want a modern China with no religion at all.  Traditionalists want to retain in some form a pre-modern Han Chinese religious heritage. Nationalists want to purify China of Western influences—especially of Christianity.⁴ To enforce Sinicization, the UFWD has absorbed SARA.

Compared with the religious policy laid out in 1982 in Document 19 from the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the new policy is more proactive. The old policy recognized that religion would persist (although gradually fade away) and set restrictions to keep its influence from expanding. The Sinicization policy aims to transform religions, root and branch, so that they serve the Party-led society. This includes shaping the stories told by historians, philosophers, and theologians to say that China’s religions have only developed effectively when they conform to proper state authority; to reform liturgical practices to fit the needs of economic and political development; to identify and educate leaders committed to this agenda and dispose of those who are not. These agendas are carried out through the “Patriotic Associations” established for each religion.

A key requirement is that religions must be properly patriotic. Translations of basic religious texts, like the Bible, are to be revised “to bring them into line with the official Marxist ideology of the CPC and the ‘new era.’”⁵ Patriotic education programs are to be held with special emphasis on the study of Party history and the writings of Xi Jinping. Courses on these subjects are mandatory in institutes for training of religious professionals. Religious art and architecture must conform to Chinese traditional styles.⁶ This is part of the rationale for the campaign to take down crosses on churches in certain places. However, “traditional culture” is narrowly defined. When the Jade Buddhist Temple in Shanghai tried to hire a Japanese architect to build a modern style lecture hall, perhaps to be attractive to modern urban practitioners, this was rejected for being insufficiently traditional. Religious leaders who resist these measures can be banned from practicing and sometimes imprisoned.⁷

An obstacle to implementing Sinicization is Chinese culture itself. Religious life for thousands of years has been communal, deeply embedded in networks of kin and friends, with a hearty resistance to formal organization. It has been heir to an extremely rich and diverse repertoire of symbols and stories and customs, all available to be creatively combined and elaborated by innovators arising from outside any official hierarchies. Throughout the twentieth century, this led to many religious movements—syncretistic “redemptive societies,” indigenous charismatic Christian churches, and new religious movements like Falun Gong and the Church of Almighty God. These are the most truly indigenized forms of religion in China, although they of course are rejected by the State as the very opposite of Sinicization. Since the massive crackdown on Falun Gong and other “evil cults” (the official translation of xiejiao [邪教], the traditional term that has been used to denote heterodox sects) in 1999, in the early twenty-first century such groups have faded from public view, at least in the West, but we can assume that their “precursor components” are still available and still, outside of public view, are being assembled.

Partly in response to such movements, the state has been developing an unprecedently massive modern system of surveillance and control.  But its effectiveness is constrained by an enormous traditional repertoire of resistance, passive, active, hidden, and partially open, all deployed at times with amazing creativity. These are carried out not only by heterodox sects but also by members of established churches. To cite a few things that I saw in my own fieldwork, Daoist and Buddhist temples get presented as museums. Spiritual practices are named “intangible cultural heritage,” and churches get registered as “companies.” Members of officially approved churches are creatively carrying out enculturation, while calling it Sinicization.

Faced by myriad forms of resistance, then, the UFWD apparatus for Sinicization, impressive as it looks on paper, may be a paper tiger. The cadre charged with implementing Sinicization has among the lowest status in the system. It’s commonly observed—and among the top leadership decried—that “formalism” is the modus operandi of much of the bureaucracy—go through the motions, fulfill official requirements, stay out of trouble, but don’t put in any effort—especially creative effort—to solve real problems. People with real religious zeal have long known how to handle such bureaucratic behavior.

One area, though, where Sinicization is relatively effective is in participation of UFWD-directed religious leaders in international fora. Most religious representatives at international meetings can only do so if permitted by the UFWD. Any speeches they give are vetted and possibly even written by the UFWD, and any meetings they have are reported by cadres from the UFWD traveling with them. The version of their particular faiths that they give is thoroughly “Sinicized.” Foreign observers of China, though, should prepare to be surprised when the creativity of authentic Chinese culture emerges in unexpected ways—for better or worse—from the grassroots of the society.

1. Editor’s note: The State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) was merged into the United Front Work Department (UFWD) in 2018. The UFWD now uses the names of both SARA and the National Religious Affairs Administration (NRAA).
2. State Administration for Religious Affairs 國家宗教事務局, 〈致天主教、基督教界的聖誕賀信〉[A Christmas Letter to the Catholic and Christian communities], Catholic Church in China, December 23, 2024, accessed Feburary 5, 2025, https://www.chinacatholic.cn/ccic/report/2412/0370-1.htm.The message is basically the same as in every greeting given during the recent past at Christmastime.
3. Xi Jinping Speech to United Front Work Conference on Religious Work, Xinhua News Agency, April 23-24, 2015.
4. Yang Fenggang 楊鳳崗, “Sinicization or Chinafication?” in Richard Madsen, ed. The Sinicization of Chinese Religions: From Above and Below (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), 16-43.
5. Sergio Ticozzi and Editorial Desk, “2019 Statistics and Major Events of the Catholic Church in China,” Tripod, no. 196 (Spring 2020): 217, accessed March 11, 2025, https://hsstudyc.org.hk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/T196_11-major-events.pdf.
6. Editorial Committee, “The Catholic Church in China in 2021: An Analysis,” Tripod, no. 200 (Spring 2022): 238, accessed March 11, 2025, https://hsstudyc.org.hk/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/T200_12.pdf.
7. Huang Weishan 黃維珊, “The Sinicization of Buddhism and Its Competing Reinventions of Tradition,” in Madsen, The Sinicization of Chinese Religions, 64-85.