‘Religious controls intensified under Xi’
BEIJING: Religious controls have intensified across China during the four-year rule of President Xi Jinping and authorities have focussed on electronic surveillance and targeted social media platforms used by believers to bypass online censorship, according to a new report.
The report released on Tuesday says Xi has presided over an overall increase in religious persecution and four communities have borne the brunt - Protestant Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, and Hui and Uyghur Muslims.
Religious activities commonly practiced around the world, such as fasting during the Islamic holy month of Ramzan, can be harshly punished in China, said the report titled The Battle for China’s Spirit: Religious Revival, Repression and Resistance ton-based rights watchdog Freedom House.
The report analysed the status of seven religious groups accounting for some 350 million people – Chinese Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Tibetan Buddhism and Falun Gong (banned in China since 1999).
China officially recognises five religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Taoism and Islam.
“The Battle for China’s Spirit examines the evolution of the Communist Party’s policies of religious control and citizens’ responses to them since November 2012,” Freedom House said, calling it the “first comprehensive analysis of its kind”.
Sarah Cook, the report’s author, said: “The scale and severity of controls over religion, and the trajectory of both growing persecution and pushback politics far beyond the realm of religious policy alone.
“The party’s rigid constraints render it impossible for statesanctioned institutions to meet the growing demand for religion in Chinese society,” Cook said.
“The result is an enormous black market, forcing many believers—from Taoists and Protestants to Tibetan Buddhists—to operate outside the law and to view the regime as unreasonable, unjust, or illegitimate.”
The report found and exam China’s religious sphere as well as the country’s gradually improving relations with the Vat ican. It also found, rather inexpli cably as the report put it, “cracks in the crackdown against Falun Gong” practitioners.
The Chinese government under Communist Party general secretary Jiang Zemin, banned and cracked down on Falun Gong, described as a spiritua practice that combines medita tion and exercise, in 1999. Its prac titioners continue to be among the worst hit by religious perse cution in China.
“Falun Gong practitioners though still subject to severe abuses, are experiencing reduced persecution in many locales, as top officials driving the campaign have been purged in intra-party struggles, and years of grassroots outreach by adherents and their supporters have won over some lower level authorities ” the