Download: Religious Minorities and China

BY MICHAEL DILLON

REPORT

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Religious Minorities and China

MINORITY RIGHTS GROUP INTERNATIONAL

MRG works to secure rights and justice for ethnic,linguistic and religious minorities, and indigenouspeoples worldwide. MRG is dedicated to promotingthe cause of cooperation and understanding betweencommunities.Founded in the 1960s, MRG is a small internationalnon-governmental organization that informs andwarns governments, the international community,non-governmental organizations and the wider publicabout the situation of minorities and indigenous peo-ples around the world. This work is based on thepublication of well-researched Reports, Books andPapers; direct advocacy on behalf of minority rightsin international meetings; the development of a glob-al network of like-minded organizations and minoritycommunities to collaborate on these issues; and thechallenging of prejudice and promotion of publicunderstanding through information and educationprojects.MRG believes that the best hope for a peacefulworld lies in identifying and monitoring conflictbetween communities, advocating preventive mea-

sures to avoid the escalation of conflict, and encour-aging positive action to build trust between majorityand minority communities.MRG has consultative status with the United NationsEconomic and Social Council and has a worldwidenetwork of partners. Its international headquartersare in London. Legally it is registered both as a chari-ty and as a limited company under English law withan international governing Council.

THE PROCESS

As part of its methodology, MRG conducts regionalresearch, identifies issues and commissions Reportsbased on its findings. Each author is carefully chosenand all scripts are read by no less than eight indepen-dent experts who are knowledgeable about the sub-ject matter. These experts are drawn from theminorities about whom the Reports are written, andfrom academics, journalists, researchers and otherhuman rights agencies. Authors are asked to incorpo-rate comments made by these parties. In this way,MRG aims to publish accurate, authoritative, well-balanced Reports.

RELIGIOUS MINORITIES AND CHINA

© Minority Rights Group International 2001All rights reserved.Material from this publication may be reproduced for teaching or for othernon-commercial purposes. No part of it may be reproduced in any form forcommercial purposes without the prior express permission of the copyrightholders.For further information please contact MRG.A CIP catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.ISBN 1 897693 24 9ISSN 0305 6252Published November 2001Typeset by Kavita GraphicsPrinted in the UK on bleach-free paper.

Acknowledgements

Minority Rights Group International (MRG) gratefullyacknowledges the support of the Ericson Trust and all theorganizations and individuals who gave financial and otherassistance for this Report.

This Report has been commissioned and is published byMRG as a contribution to public understanding of the issuewhich forms its subject. The text and views of the author donot necessarily represent, in every detail and in all itsaspects, the collective view of MRG.

MRG is grateful to all the staff and independent expert read-ers who contributed to this Report, in particular ShelinaThawer (Asia and Pacific Programme Coordinator) andSophie Richmond (Report Editor).

Michael Dillon is Senior Lecturer in Modern ChineseHistory and Director of the Centre for ContemporaryChinese Studies at the University of Durham in the UK.He studied Chinese language and history at Leeds and isthe author of China’s Muslims (Oxford University Press)

and China’s Muslim Hui Community (Curzon), and editorof China: A Historical and Cultural Dictionary (Curzon).he is a regular visitor to China, particularly the Muslimregions of the northwest.

THE AUTHOR

BY MICHAEL DILLON

C O N T E N T S

Relevant international instruments

Preface

The historical context

Religious traditions before 1949

Religion and the Chinese Communist Party

Document 19

Hong Kong

Major religions

Confucianism

Daoism

Buddhism

Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism

Christianity

Islam

New religions

Conclusion

Recommendations

Notes

Bibliography

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Muslim men at a mosque inKashgar, XinjiangIAN TEH/PANOS PICTURES

Religious Minorities and China

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United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms ofIntolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief,25 November 1981

Article 11. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and

religion. This right shall include freedom to have a religion or what-ever belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in com-munity with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion orbelief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.

2. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedomto have a religion or belief of his choice.

3. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or belief may be subject only tosuch limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protectpublic safety, order, health or morals or the fundamental rights andfreedoms of others.

Article 2 1. No one shall be subject to discrimination by any State, institution,

group of persons, or person on the grounds of religion or other belief. (...)

Article 3 Discrimination between human being on the grounds of religion orbelief constitutes an affront to human dignity and a disavowal of theprinciples of the Charter of the United Nations, and shall be con-demned as a violation of the human rights and fundamental freedomsproclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and enun-ciated in detail in the International Covenants on Human Rights, andas an obstacle to friendly and peaceful relations between nations.

Article 4 1. All States shall take effective measures to prevent and eliminate dis-

crimination on the grounds of religion or belief in the recognition,exercise and enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms inall fields of civil, economic, political, social and cultural life.

2. All States shall make all efforts to enact or rescind legislation wherenecessary to prohibit any such discrimination, and to take all appropri-ate measures to combat intolerance on the grounds of religion orother beliefs in this matter.

Article 5 1. The parents or, as the case may be, the legal guardians of the child

have the right to organize the life within the family in accordance withtheir religion or belief and bearing in mind the moral education inwhich they believe the child should be brought up.

2. Every child shall enjoy the right to have access to education in thematter of religion or belief in accordance with the wishes of his par-ents or, as the case may be, legal guardians, and shall not be com-pelled to receive teaching on religion or belief against the wishes ofhis parents or legal guardians, the best interests of the child being theguiding principle.

3. The child shall be protected from any form of discrimination on theground of religion or belief. He shall be brought up in a spirit ofunderstanding, tolerance, friendship among peoples, peace and uni-versal brotherhood, respect for freedom of religion or belief of others,and in full consciousness that his energy and talents should be devot-ed to the service of his fellow men.

4. In the case of a child who is not under the care either of his parents orof legal guardians, due account shall be taken of their expressed wish-es or of any other proof of their wishes in the matter of religion orbelief, the best interests of the child being the guiding principle.

5. Practices of a religion or belief in which a child is brought up must notbe injurious to his physical or mental health or to his full develop-ment, taking into account article 1, paragraph 3, of the present Decla-ration.(...)

Article 6 In accordance with article I of the present Declaration, and subject tothe provisions of article 1, paragraph 3, the right to freedom ofthought, conscience, religion or belief shall include, inter alia, the fol-lowing freedoms:

(a) To worship or assemble in connection with a religion or belief, and toestablish and maintain places for these purposes;

(b) To establish and maintain appropriate charitable or humanitarian institutions;

(c) To make, acquire and use to an adequate extent the necessary articlesand materials related to the rites or customs of a religion or belief;

(d) To write, issue and disseminate relevant publications in these areas;

(e) To teach a religion or belief in places suitable for these purposes; (f) To solicit and receive voluntary financial and other contributions

from individuals and institutions; (g) To train, appoint, elect or designate by succession appropriate leaders

called for by the requirements and standards of any religion or belief; (h) To observe days of rest and to celebrate holidays and ceremonies in

accordance with the precepts of one’s religion or belief; (i) To establish and maintain communications with individuals and com-

munities in matters of religion and belief at the national and interna-tional levels.

Article 7 The rights and freedoms set forth in the present Declaration shall beaccorded in national legislation in such a manner that everyone shallbe able to avail himself of such rights and freedoms in practice.

United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belongingto National or Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic Minorities, 18December 1992

Article 2 1. Persons belonging to national or ethnic, religious and linguistic

minorities (hereinafter referred to as persons belonging to minorities)have the right to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practise theirown religion, and to use their own language, in private and in public,freely and without interference or any form of discrimination.

2. Persons belonging to minorities have the right to participate effective-ly in cultural, religious, social, economic and public life.

3. Persons belonging to minorities have the right to participate effective-ly in decisions on the national and, where appropriate, regional levelconcerning the minority to which they belong or the regions in whichthey live, in a manner not incompatible with national legislation.

4. Persons belonging to minorities have the right to establish and main-tain their own associations.

5. Persons belonging to minorities have the right to establish and main-tain, without any discrimination, free and peaceful contacts with othermembers of their group and with persons belonging to other minor-ities, as well as contacts across frontiers with citizens of other States towhom they are related by national or ethnic, religious or linguistic ties.

United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20November 1989

Article 30In those States in which ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities or per-sons of indigenous origin exist, a child belonging to such a minority orwho is indigenous shall not be denied the right, in community with othermembers of his or her group, to enjoy his or her own culture, to professand practise his or her own religion, or to use his or her own language.

United Nations International Convention on the Elimination ofAll Forms of Racial Discrimination, 21 December 1965

Article 5 In compliance with the fundamental obligations laid down in article 2 ofthis Convention, States Parties undertake to prohibit and to eliminateracial discrimination in all its forms and to guarantee the right of every-one, without distinction as to race, colour, or national or ethnic origin, toequality before the law, notably in the enjoyment of the following rights:

(...)(vii) The right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; (viii) The right to freedom of opinion and expression; (ix) The right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association;

International Covenant on Economic, Social and CulturalRights, 16 December 1966

Article 131. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of

everyone to education. They agree that education shall be directed tothe full development of the human personality and the sense of itsdignity, and shall strengthen the respect for human rights and funda-mental freedoms. They further agree that education shall enable allpersons to participate effectively in a free society, promote under-standing, tolerance and friendship among all nations and all racial,ethnic or religious groups, and further the activities of the UnitedNations for the maintenance of peace.

Relevant international instruments

The treatment of religious minorities liesbehind many of the headlines from China inrecent years. China’s treatment of the Falun-gong and its policies in Tibet receive regularcomment in the West, but rarely is this com-

mentary informed by an understanding of how China’spolicies towards religious minorities as a whole havedeveloped. This new MRG Report, Religious Minoritiesand China, fills that gap and provides an authoritativeoverview of the major world religions in a country that isas diverse as it is vast.

Both Tibet, with its Buddhist population, and Xinjiang,with its population of Muslim Uyghurs, are contested ter-ritories with contested histories. However, as this Reporthighlights, both are subject to the laws and regulations onreligion that are enforced by the People’s Republic ofChina (PRC). As such, their inclusion in this Report iscrucial. The Report does not purport to provide a com-mentary on the political status of Tibet and Xinjiang, butthe situation in both territories clearly demonstrates howthe activities of the religious communities within Chinashape the actions of other religious communities and, inturn, determine the state’s response to and treatment ofminority religions.

This Report focuses predominantly on Buddhism,Christianity and Islam. These major world religions areconsidered synonymous by the state with separatist move-ments and thereby a threat to its sovereignty. In addition,they are seen to have strong support – financially and oth-erwise – from communities outside China. As a conse-quence, they receive the greatest share of attention fromthe Chinese authorities. While it can be argued that someof the smaller and local religions practised by ethnicminority groups enjoy a certain degree of protection fromChina’s undoubted nationalist response to the major worldreligions, what holds true for all is the threat of the Chi-nese Communist Party’s (CCP) policy of assimilation andthe social, political and cultural consequences of itsapproach to economic modernization.

As Dr Michael Dillon highlights in the Report, territo-rial integrity is an overriding political priority of the CCPin the twenty-first century, including maintaining and pro-tecting the borders that China has held on and off sincethe Qing dynasty. In practice this translates into retainingcontrol of Xinjiang and Tibet, protecting itself from theinfluence of foreign powers and asserting its status as aworld power. Any activities that are considered to under-mine the state by lending support to separatist tendenciesor deemed to be advancing the interests of other states areviewed with suspicion. More often than not this results inthe suppression of religious freedom and association.

Religious communities, desperately attempting toretain their identity and resist the erosion of their culture,continue to oppose resolutely the imposition of a nationalor ethnic unity by the state through its assimilation policy.

Such attempts are manifested in the form of separatistmovements within Tibet and Xinjiang; demonstrationsand various other forms of resistance by the Protestantand Catholic communities; as well as protests by some ofthe new religions, the Falungong in particular.

As Dillon reports, within the prevailing environment, itis fairly safe to predict that there will continue to be con-flict between the CCP-dominated state and leaders ofboth recognized and unofficial religious groups as the lat-ter attempt to retain their culture and identity and pushforward the boundaries of the religious freedom to whichthey feel entitled.

Minority Rights Group International (MRG) believesthat the most effective resolution to these conflicts is forthe rights of religious minority communities to berespected and acted upon. In particular, the state isencouraged to allow for more effective participation ofreligious and other minorities in public life and increasedfreedoms of religion and association. The set of policyrecommendations contained at the end of the Reportconcludes by urging the PRC to take steps to implementthe provisions of international standards on minorityrights and freedom of religion and to fulfil its obligationsunder the International Convention on the Elimination ofAll Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and otherinstruments to which it is party. Last, but by no meansleast, the PRC is encouraged to ratify and implement theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights(ICCPR), which it signed in 1998.

China has a rich and diverse religious heritage. Guar-anteeing the rights of religious minorities will enableChina to recognize that heritage as an asset rather than athreat.

Mark LattimerDirectorOctober 2001

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Preface

The People’s Republic of China (PRC), createdby the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in1949, is officially an atheist state.1 Religiousbelief and worship have been tolerated tosome extent, although the degree of toleration

has varied considerably with the political climate. TheCCP has always been concerned about the threat to itsauthority posed by religious organizations. Sects of thetraditional Chinese religions, Buddhism or Daoism, havea long history of involvement with underground secretsocieties and were frequently implicated in the overthrowof governments in the 2,000 years of the Chinese Empire.With religions of foreign origin, particularly Christianity,there is the added dimension that they are perceived to beundermining both the authority of the state and tradition-al Chinese values, and patriotic fervour has from time totime been mobilized against them.

There is a clear distinction in the minds of the author-ities between officially recognized religious groups andunofficial, unregistered groups and they are treated verydifferently by the state. Official religious bodies, whetherthey are Buddhist, Christian, Daoist or Muslim, havesome representation in government through various Unit-ed Front organizations. These organizations were createdby the CCP in the early 1950s, when it recognized the factthat it did not have universal support and needed to winover large sections of the population who were eitheropposed to, or were indifferent to, the policies of theParty. These bodies, supervised by the United Front WorkDepartment of the CCP, were designed to give a voice topolitical, ethnic and religious minorities, and to provide ameans for the government of the CCP to demonstrate tothe outside world that it was taking minority views intoaccount. The most important organization in which non-Communist Party groups have representation is the mainnational forum for ethnic and religious minorities andother interest groups including overseas Chinese andtheir relatives and former businesspeople, the ChinesePeople’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Thisinstitution, like the quasi-parliamentary body, the Nation-al People’s Congress (NPC), is often regarded as simply arubber stamp for CCP policies. The reality is more com-plex than this, and the CPPCC has at times had consider-able influence on national policy and plays an importantrole in implementing government policy at grassrootslevel.2

Unofficial groups are generally regarded by the Com-munist Party as potentially subversive and unpatriotic, andare subject to periodic and arbitrary repression. In somecases, notably the Tibetan Buddhists and the MuslimUyghurs in Xinjiang, there is active support for secession.It is an article of faith for the CCP that China must remaina unified state forever with its present borders.3 The caseis less clear for non-Tibetan Buddhist organizations,Daoists and Christians, but the CCP has maintained itscontrol over China since the 1950s by attempting to con-

fine all social activity, including pressure for the rights ofworkers and women, within ‘mass organizations’ that arerun from Beijing, and has ruthlessly suppressed any inde-pendent bodies. The perceived threat from unofficial reli-gious organizations such as house churches – groups ofChristians who gather to worship in each other’s housesrather than in a church – is as much because of their inde-pendence as because of their beliefs.

In contemporary Chinese usage in the PRC, a distinc-tion is made between zongjiao (‘religions’), which are per-mitted although not encouraged, and xiejiao, which istranslated as ‘heresy’ in many Chinese-English dictionar-ies. It has connotations of both evil and heretical religionand corresponds to the pejorative Western term ‘cult’. Itwas applied most notably to the Falungong and similargroups of qigong4 practitioners in the 1990s and ‘cult’seems more appropriate than ‘heresy’ for these. Chineseofficial publications have also consistently criticized mixin(‘superstitions’), a broad category which encompasseslocal traditions, shamanism and the religions of the small-er ethnic minorities, as well as some aspects of the largerreligions.

Religion and the ConstitutionReligious freedom has been guaranteed formally by the suc-cessive Constitutions of the PRC.

1954 First Constitution (Article 88)

‘Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom ofreligious belief.’

1975 Cultural Revolution period (Article 28)

‘Citizens enjoy freedom of speech, correspondence, the press,assembly, association, procession, demonstration and the free-dom to strike, and enjoy freedom to believe in religion andfreedom not to believe in religion and to propagate atheism.’

1982 Reform and Opening period (Article 36)(incorporating revisions by National People’s Congress1999 )

‘Citizens of the People’s Republic of China have the right toreligious belief. No state organ, social organization or individ-ual may compel citizens to believe in any religion or notbelieve and neither may they discriminate between citizenswho are believers and those who are not. The State protectsnormal religious activities. No-one may use religion to destroysocial order, damage the health of citizens or obstruct theactivities of the state educational system. Religious organiza-tions and religious work must not be controlled by foreignforces.’

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Religious traditions before1949

The traditional religions of China are usually said to beConfucianism, Daoism (often written as Taoism) and

Buddhism.5 Daoism and Buddhism fit into any conven-tional Western concept of religion, but Confucianism ismore an ethical system than a religious belief and appearsto have very little spiritual or transcendental content,although the concept of tian (heaven) is central to Confu-cian teachings. However, the influence of Confucianismon traditional Chinese society was all-pervasive and per-sists to the present. It has also influenced society and gov-ernment in China’s neighbours, notably Japan, Korea andVietnam. In addition to these major belief systems, thatwere practised throughout the whole of China, there werevery many popular religions and local cults and deities,frequently associated with secret societies which also hadsocial and political agendas.6

Confucianism was perceived as having been antipathet-ic to women, and this was one of many reasons why radi-cals in the twentieth century, including the CCP, attackedthe Confucian value system. During the 1940s, the CCPtargeted women and recruited large numbers, attractingsupport with its policies of ending concubinage and forcedmarriage, and promoting education and employment forgirls and women. These policies were enshrined in law inthe very early years of the PRC and more women than everbefore in China found themselves able to play a role out-side the narrow confines of the home, in schools, in workand, to a certain extent, in government. This predisposedlarge numbers of women, especially younger ones, to thenon-religious policies of the CCP.

Islam has had a presence in China since the seventhcentury, and is most evident in the northwest of the coun-try, the region that was settled by Central Asian Muslims,beginning with those brought back by the conqueringMongols in the thirteenth century. It has become particu-larly deep-rooted in the province of Gansu and the Xin-jiang Uyghur and Ningxia Hui Autonomous Regions.Clashes between Muslims, the Han majority and theauthorities have been a regular occurrence in these areasand the turmoil in Xinjiang in the 1990s (see p. 19) wasonly the latest manifestation of this. In spite of the lengthof its history in China, Islam, unlike Buddhism, continuesto be viewed as an alien religion by the majority of theHan Chinese.7

Christianity of the Nestorian creed may have enteredChina as early as the seventh century and maintained apresence there until the tenth century. Nestorianism wasregarded as a heresy by mainstream Christianity as it dis-tinguished between two separate natures of Christ, thehuman and the divine. It later became the doctrine of theEastern or Persian Church. However, it was the work ofJesuit missionaries, beginning with Matteo Ricci in the six-teenth century, and the Protestant missionary endeavour,at its height in the nineteenth century, which formed thebasis for the present-day Christian community in China.

Religion and the CCP

Marxism advocates atheism and Marx’s view of religionwas that it was a product of society. He argued:

‘Religious suffering is at the same time an expres-sion of real suffering and a protest against real suf-fering. Religion is the sign of the oppressed creature,the sentiment of a heartless world, and the soul ofsoulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. Theabolition of religion, as the illusory happiness ofmen, is a demand for their real happiness.’8

Marx’s views on religion may have been inspired bylibertarian concerns, but the way they were used by Stal-inist regimes, both in the United Soviet SocialistRepublics (USSR) from its origins in the Constitution of1923 until its demise in 1991, and in the PRC, was dis-tinctly authoritarian.

The CCP drew heavily on the experiences of the Com-munist Party of the USSR in dealing with and repressingreligious organizations. Before 1949, the CCP had littledirect experience of religious groups and this was one ofthe major problems it faced when coming to power. Thesuccessive Constitutions drawn up by the CCP appearedto provide for freedom of religious belief as long as thisdid not conflict with the security of the state. According toArticle 88 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic ofChina published in 1954, ‘Citizens of the People’s Repub-lic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief.’9 This clausewas deleted during the Cultural Revolution but restoredin the 1982 Constitution, the first to be adopted after thedeath of Mao Zedong in 1976. However, the 1982 Consti-tution made a clear distinction between what it describedas normal religious activities and those that threatened thestability of the state, and stated explicitly that religiousbodies and religious affairs should not be ‘subject to anyforeign domination’.10

Since religious observance was always considered to bea potential threat to the state, this freedom was alwayslimited and was often completely illusory. Religious affairswere placed under the overall control of the United FrontWork Department of the CCP’s Central Committee, adepartment that also had responsibility for relations withethnic minorities and for the integration of all minoritiesinto the new Chinese society. Views on the desirability ofintegration have varied considerably and depend to someextent on the changing political climate. At one extremesome ‘Great Han chauvinists’ rejected the existence ofminorities and argued for total assimilation, while othermore liberal voices argued for the tolerance of differencesand genuine autonomy for minorities. This range of viewsstill exists within the majority Han population today.

The Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB), an organ of theState Council with close links to the CCP, was created in1954 on the basis of an earlier Religious Affairs Office andremains the state organization charged with the detailedsupervision of religious activities. Its name was formallychanged to the State Religious Affairs Bureau of the State

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Council in March 1998. The RAB created national associ-ations for Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism and Islam andused its branches at county level to regulate and controlthe practice of these religions so that they did not consti-tute a threat to the power of the CCP. As the sociologistC.K. Yang has noted, these organizations closely resem-bled the ‘central and local agencies in the imperial gov-ernment for control of the Buddhists and Taoists’.11

The observations of Wing-tsit Chan, professor of phi-losophy and student of religions in China, made after aresearch visit to China in 1948–9, just as the CCP weretaking control of the country, make interesting readingfifty years later:

‘Communist triumph in China seems on the sur-face to forecast the termination of religion in China.Viewed in the historical perspective and in the pat-terns of Chinese religious thought, however, Chinesereligion has outlived many political systems and ide-ologies. Communism may change Chinese religionbut Chinese religion may change Communism too.’ 12

C.K. Yang, writing during the first decade of CCP rulein China, had detected a contradictory attitude towardsreligion. On the one hand there was a marked trendtowards secularization, especially among modern educat-ed intellectuals, and many temples were sequestered bythe central or local government and put to secular use. Atthe same time there was a revival of interest in Daoismand Buddhism among the population at large and a moveto repair old temples and build new ones.13

Temples, churches and mosques which were registeredwith the Religious Affairs Bureau were given a limiteddegree of freedom and their members were allowed toworship, at least during relatively liberal periods such as1950–6, 1960–5 and after 1979. However, in the periodsduring which radical Maoism was the dominant politicalculture, the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957), the GreatLeap Forward (1958) and the Cultural Revolution(1966–76), and particularly during the latter, bureaucraticcontrol was superseded by mass action against religiousinstitutions that were seen as representatives of the old‘feudal’ order. During the Cultural Revolution, the stu-dents, schoolchildren and young workers who joined theRed Guards were encouraged to criticize the Four Olds:old customs, old culture, old habits and old thinking. Thisgave them carte blanche to attack both secular and reli-gious institutions; tens of thousands of people werearrested, sent to labour camps, or subjected to severepublic criticism; many thousands of monasteries, templesand mosques were destroyed or damaged. While thisdestruction took place throughout all of the regions ofChina, the non-Han areas, including Tibet and Xinjiang,were affected particularly badly.

Document 19

The history of the PRC is inextricably linked with thelife of Mao Zedong, Chairman Mao. According to the

official versions of Party history, he was at the head of the

CCP from the time of the Zunyi Conference of January1935, which took place during the epic Long March.Recent research suggests that Mao was far from being thepre-eminent leader then and that he did not becomeChairman of the Politburo until 1943 after the ‘rectifica-tion campaign’ that he waged within the Party.14 Never-theless, by 1949, Mao was unquestionably the leader ofthe CCP, although he was never able to be an absolutedictator in the mould of Stalin, whom he greatly admired,and he had to resort to devious means and mass cam-paigns against his opponents within the CCP to retain hissupremacy.

Mao Zedong stood for what has been described as a‘revolutionary romantic’ position, best exemplified bygrand radical gestures such as the Great Leap Forward(1958), when he tried to turn China into a leading indus-trial nation overnight, and the Cultural Revolution of1966–76 when he mobilized hundreds of thousands ofstudents and young workers as his Red Guards in the fightagainst bureaucracy and revisionism. His main rivals werethe bureaucrats and apparatchiks, notably Liu Shaoqi andDeng Xiaoping, who favoured a more gradual transfor-mation of society and the creation of Soviet-style institu-tions, and who were verbally and physically attacked bythe Red Guards.

The death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 removedthe major obstacle to social and cultural change. The‘Reform and Opening’ policy of Deng Xiaoping, whichbegan in 1978, heralded a period of openness and cultur-al vitality unprecedented since 1949. The official attitudeto religion in this period is best exemplified by Document19, which first emerged as part of the documentation ofthe Third Plenum of the Eleventh Congress of the CCP in1978, but remained unpublished until 1982 when arevised version appeared in the 16 June edition of Hongqi(Red Flag), the official journal of the CCP. Document 19considered the historical background of religion in China,analysed how the CCP had dealt with religious affairssince 1949, including the ‘leftist’ errors of the Great Leapand Cultural Revolution, and laid down guidelines onParty policy towards religion. Essentially this was toensure that there was a body of religious professionalswho were prepared to work with the CCP and foster‘patriotic’ religious organizations. The publication of thisdirective made possible the open publication of manymore articles on what had been a taboo subject for at least15 years.15

Document 19 acknowledged the existence of religionand its role in ‘the development of human society’. It out-lined the history of religions in China among both the Hanand ethnic minorities. It advocated Lenin’s exhortation ‘tobe especially alert, to be very strict’ on the question of reli-gion, an acknowledgement of the potential power of reli-gious movements. The CCP’s policies on religion weresubmitted to a critical analysis, concluding that sensiblepolicies of winning over the ‘broad masses of religiousbelievers’, which had been adopted in the 1950s, gradual-ly gave way to ‘leftist’ errors, for which Lin Biao and JiangQing were blamed. They ‘forcibly forbade normal religiousactivities by the mass of religious believers’ and attacked‘patriotic’ religious leaders. This culminated in the physi-cal destruction of Buddhist and Daoist temples, churches

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and mosques, and the forcible closure of many more dur-ing the Cultural Revolution.

Outlining the CCP’s post-Cultural Revolution policy,Document 19 stated unequivocally that, while ‘normal reli-gious beliefs and practices were permitted, religion shouldnever be allowed to regain its ‘feudal’ power and privileges,nor would religious organizations be allowed to ‘make usein any way of religious pretexts to oppose the Party’s lead-ership or the Socialist system, or to destroy national or eth-nic unity’.

Document 19 also analysed the clergy of the variousreligious communities (‘religious professionals’, to use theterm preferred by the CCP). It estimated that there wereapproximately 59,000. Of these 27,000 were Buddhistmonks and nuns, including lamas of the Tibetan and Mon-golian Buddhist orders, and 2,600 were Daoist priests andnuns. There were 20,000 imams, 3,400 Catholic priestsand 5,900 Protestant clergy. The majority were assumedto be ‘patriotic and law-abiding’ with a small minorityactively opposed to the regime or colluding with foreigncounter-revolutionaries. Supporting the patriots in eachdenomination and suppressing the anti-communistminority was a key part of CCP policy.16

The document accepted that temples, churches andmosques should be restored and maintained but insistedthat rebuilding must be controlled. In particular ‘theindiscriminate building and repairing of temples in ruralvillages’ must be guarded against, in case they became fociof dissent. Document 19 also noted that some ‘normal reli-gious activities’ took place in the homes of believers andthat these should be permitted. However, some homeworship was clearly a cause for concern: ‘As for Protes-tants gathering in homes for worship services [sic], inprinciple this should not be allowed, yet this prohibitionshould not be too rigidly enforced.’ Services in officiallyapproved temples, churches and mosques were prefer-able as they could be regulated more easily.17

Implementing the CCP’s religious policies was the taskof the eight national ‘patriotic religious organizations’,most of which dated back to the early years of the PRC.These had fallen into abeyance during the Cultural Revo-lution but were reconvened in the 1980s. The eight are:

Chinese Buddhist AssociationChinese Catholic Patriotic AssociationChinese Daoist AssociationChinese Islamic AssociationChinese Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement

Chinese Catholic Bishops’ ConferenceChinese Catholic Religious Affairs CommitteeChina Christian Council

The Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Associations wereestablished under the direction of the Religious AffairsBureau in 1957 and the Catholic, Protestant and Islamicorganizations were set up along the same lines.18 The finalthree bodies were created in the 1980s and do not havethe degree of political influence enjoyed by the other fivesince they do not send representatives to the CPPCC.

These organizations were given the responsibility forestablishing ‘seminaries’ to train the new generation of

clergy: ‘the task of these seminaries is to create a contin-gent of young religious personnel who, in terms of poli-tics, fervently love their homeland and support the Party’sleadership and the Socialist system and who possess suf-ficient religious knowledge’. The order of priorities isinteresting.

Document 19 makes clear that CCP members cannotbe believers or take part in religious activities, but doesaccept that this may be more problematic for ethnicminority CCP members and that patience is required toattract minority cadres who do not have particularly strongbeliefs. This is a serious issue for the CCP in its recruit-ment of members in Tibet and Xinjiang, and the Hui areasof Muslim northwest China.19

Document 19 also articulated the fears of the CCPleadership that religious organizations and activities couldbe used as a cover for criminal or counter-revolutionaryactivities. Members of secret societies, fortune-tellers,witches and wizards are marked out as illegal practitionerswho are punishable under the law.

The international dimension of religious activity causesthe CCP the greatest concern and it is the foreignness ofcertain religions, mainly Christianity, that has provokedthe greatest opposition from both Communist and earlierpolitical leaders in China. Document 19 recognizes thatinternational religious contacts are likely to increase asChina opens out, but warns against ‘reactionary religiousgroups abroad, especially the imperialistic ones such asthe Vatican and Protestant Foreign Mission Societies, whostrive to use all possible occasions to carry on their effortsat infiltration to return to the China mainland’. The com-plete independence of Chinese churches is seen as theonly way to prevent these foreign organizations from tak-ing control of significant sections of society in China.20

Document 19 is one of the most important documentson religion in post-Mao China, as it set the tone for thedebate on the key issues of freedom and control of reli-gion in the years of ‘Reform and Opening’. However, indi-vidual provinces and autonomous regions have alsoformulated their own regulations to apply central policy tolocal conditions. There are significant regional differencesin the way that religious organizations are managed by thelocal authorities.

The new atmosphere introduced by the reform policiescreated fertile ground for the revival of religion. Centraland local government were encouraged to restore templesand encourage the restoration of local festivals and ritualsto attract foreign visitors and bring in much-neededtourist revenues.

Hong Kong

Hong Kong was reincorporated into China as a SpecialAdministrative Region (SAR) in 1997, after a centu-

ry and a half as a colony of the United Kingdom. It wasand remains a special case. It retains a strong Christianpresence, which developed during the colonial period.The traditional Chinese religions of Daoism and Bud-dhism were not suppressed as they were in China andhave survived and thrive. There were fears that, onceChina reasserted its control, religious freedoms that had

7



been similar to those enjoyed in the West would be cur-tailed. These fears do not appear to have been justified sofar and Hong Kong’s religious institutions remain largelyuntouched. China has controlled Hong Kong with consid-erable subtlety and has, by and large, allowed the SARadministration considerable autonomy.

The issue of Falungong (see pp. 21–2) severely testedthis autonomy. Although the organization was proscribedin China in 1999, it remained legal in Hong Kong. Whensupporters of Falungong organized a conference in HongKong in January 2001, there was considerable pressurefrom the National People’s Congress and the CPPCC forit to be made illegal in Hong Kong as well. The ChiefExecutive, Tung Chee-hwa, told the Hong Kong legisla-tive assembly (LegCo) on 8 February that Falungongwould not be allowed to use Hong Kong as a base fromwhich to subvert China. He met the Chinese President,Jiang Zemin, in Beijing on 5 March and Jiang made itclear that the regulation of Falungong in Hong Kong wasa matter for the administration of the SAR. In spite ofconsiderable speculation in the press, there has been noattempt to legislate against Falungong.

◗

8



9


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10


Confucianism

Overt Confucianism does not play a significantrole in Chinese society today, but it is worthmentioning because Confucian attitudes andways of thinking have persisted. Confucian-ism is synonymous with China and is often

counted as one of China’s religions. Confucianism is in factprimarily an ethical system that has both religious and polit-ical aspects; it played a vital role in holding together Chi-nese society under the empire. In the Chinese world it isknown as Rujiao, the teaching of the scholars. Confuciusprobably lived from 550 to 479 BCE and was a peripateticteacher of princes rather than a professional politician. Histeachings are preserved in a number of texts, primarily theAnalects (Lunyu). Among the central tenets of Confucian-ism are moral leadership by cultivated and scholarly men(junzi – often translated as ‘gentlemen’), social responsibil-ity and mutual obligation according to one’s place in thesocial hierarchy, filial piety and the pursuit of an elusiveconcept, ren, translated variously as ‘benevolence’, ‘human-ity’ or ‘goodness’.

In traditional China, as in many if not all pre-modernsocieties, the status of women was very low. This is oftenblamed on Confucianism but in reality Confucianism onlyarticulated the prejudices of a traditional patriarchal societyin a form that reflected Chinese culture.21 The role ofwomen was to be subservient to their fathers until theywere married, then to their husbands and, if they were wid-owed, to their sons. Confucian writers codified this state ofaffairs and made it explicit, but there are close parallels inother traditional Asian societies.

Radicals and reformers from the end of the nineteenthcentury onwards blamed Confucianism for the poverty andbackwardness into which China had fallen. Anti-Confu-cianism was an important component of the political think-ing of Chinese radicals, including the CCP.

Confucianism never became an official state religion inspite of its influence in the educational system and numer-ous attempts over the centuries to make it so.22 Emperorsfrom the Han and Tang dynasty onwards ordered the con-struction of temples to honour the sage, clearly indicatinghis importance to the court. The Nationalist Guomindang(the party in power in China from 1928 to 1949, and in Tai-wan since 1949) attempted to revive Confucianism, but, bythe time the CCP came to power in 1949, Confucianismwas moribund with no national organization and no period-ical. There was a national holiday in honour of Confuciusbut the CCP abolished that.23

Confucian temples and shrines were closed down duringLand Reform and the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s,and many were converted into workshops, warehouses orgrain stores during the Cultural Revolution. Confucius andhis legacy were among the main targets of the Cultural Rev-olution: Red Guards attacked his ancestral home in thetown of Qufu in Shandong and his tomb was desecrated.24

After the Cultural Revolution this trend was reversedand Confucius came back into favour. Qufu became atourist attraction and temples, tombs and other sites asso-ciated with the Kong family, the descendants of Confu-cius, were restored and repaired. The Association forResearch on Confucius, an academic body, was estab-lished in 1985, reviving the study of Confucianism, whichhad ceased, at least officially, in 1962.25 During the 1980s,some officials and intellectuals attempted to reintroduceConfucian values in a modified form to help stabilize asociety that was experiencing rapid change. The inspira-tion for this was the economically successful and multi-ethnic state of Singapore, where the political culture isstrongly influenced by traditional Chinese Confucianmores.

Daoism

Daoism is (together with popular and folk religions)found only in China and among Chinese communi-

ties abroad. Shinto occupies a similar position in Japanand there are parallels between the two religions. Dao-ism, especially in its popular form, overlaps with Bud-dhism, a second-century import that is nevertheless alsoregarded as a Chinese religion. Daoism has two aspects.Literary and philosophical Daoism, exemplified by theclassical texts Zhuangzi and Daodejing, advocated thathuman beings should accommodate themselves to theflow of the natural world. Popular Daoism, on the otherhand, was a religion with its own texts and rituals, focusedon ‘immortals’ and the quest for everlasting life. It wasfragmented and frequently at odds with authority. Thepopular tradition of Daoism persists today, openly inHong Kong and Taiwan; on the mainland it remainedunderground until the 1980s and has been linked withnew religious sects and clandestine organizations brandedas criminal by the CCP.

Wing-tsit Chan, on his visit to China in 1948–9, con-cluded that Daoism was defunct along with folk religion ingeneral. Temples, shrines, idols and priests were still in evi-dence, although their numbers were in decline, and Chanfelt ‘the real spirit of the religion [was] dead, and its vitali-ty [was] fast disappearing’. When the CCP established theCPPCC in 1949 to provide a forum for and a means of con-trolling political, ethnic and religious minorities, therewere delegates representing and Buddhism, Islam andProtestant Christianity, but none from the world of Dao-ism. The Daoists had no effective leadership and no pro-gramme. Its influence was limited to art, rituals andfestivals.26

Chan clearly overstated the decline of Daoism and hisview is challenged by present-day authorities, notablyKristofer Schipper, who point out that the collapse wassuperficial and that the importance of Daoism is in the waythat it is inseparable from the rituals of daily life in China.27

Major religions

Daoism survived by ‘metamorphosing into religioussocieties’, secret societies which also drew on Buddhisttradition and had political agendas. Some of them permit-ted women to play a role in their activities, and in someparts of China there were women’s societies that providedmutual defence and support. These include the WhiteLotus and the Guiyidao (the Way of Returning to, or Fol-lowing, the One). Chan observed that, although many ofthese religio-political associations had been in declinesince the 1930s, one, the Yiguandao (Way of PervadingUnity), had ‘gained strength and extended its activitiesduring the Second World War’. Many religious groups,including the Yiguandao, flourished during the Japaneseoccupation of China (1937–45) and provided a degree ofself-defence for the rural population.28

Daoism was forced to abandon its apolitical anddetached position and adapt to the conditions of the1950s. Daoist temples lost much of their land during theLand Reform movement, as did other religious institu-tions, and this considerably weakened their economicpositions. Monks were obliged to take manual jobs to sup-port themselves and this was seen as a positive change bythe CCP. Even official Communist Party publicationsnow accept that during the Great Leap Forward of 1958,many ancient and precious Daoist artefacts such as bellsand cauldrons were melted down in the ‘backyard fur-naces’ campaign to produce steel at any cost.29 In spite ofthis repression, the Daoist tradition continued, particu-larly in the countryside, sometimes underground andsometimes openly. In the 1980s the police were reportingthe arrest of members of the Yiguandao, a proscribedorganization which was supposed to have been wiped outduring the 1950s.

Daoist temples and monasteries re-opened in the1980s, sometimes first as tourist attractions, but they grad-ually regained their religious functions. Monks wererecalled from retirement or from work units to which theyhad been assigned; funds were raised to rebuild or repairtemples; local seminaries were set up to train priests butsome novices were also sent to Beijing for training. TheChinese Daoist Association was re-established in 1983and based at the Baiyun (White Cloud) Temple in Beijing,the largest Daoist temple in northern China. The Associ-ation was originally set up in 1957 but suspended duringthe Cultural Revolution. The Baiyun Temple was closedin 1966 when the Cultural Revolution started and onlyreopened in March 1984 with over 30 resident monkstraining Daoists from over a hundred monasteries regis-tered with the Chinese Daoist Association.30

In the southeastern province of Fujian, one of the areasthat has benefited most from the economic reforms ofDeng Xiaoping, Daoist temples were re-consecrated byformer monks. Rituals and local cults that had appearedextinct were revived and once again began to play a sig-nificant role in local politics.31

Belief in Daoism has persisted in spite of decades ofrepression. It is noteworthy that, like the Falungong, Dao-ism draws support from government employees.

Buddhism

Although Buddhism, which originated in India, is tech-nically a foreign religion it has been established in

China for so long that it is regarded as Chinese. Buddhismwas well established in Central Asia by the first century BC

and began to spread to China in the early Christian era.32

During the Han dynasty, one of the formative periods ofChinese culture, the main centres of Buddhism in Chinawere Pengcheng in the south of what is now the provinceof Hebei, and Luoyang. Another centre, Tonkin, is now inVietnam.33

Buddhism acquired particular influence during theTang dynasty (618–907) when it attracted support fromthe imperial court.34 Buddhist monasteries becameextremely wealthy on the basis of donations, and acquiredland, social influence and economic power. There is someevidence that financial support for mainstream Buddhistmonasteries in the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) often camefrom endowments made by women, wealthy women nat-urally, but this could not be recorded directly and wasoften attributed to their husbands.35 This supports evi-dence from literature that women were more enthusiasticabout Buddhism than men, though support for the reli-gion is always represented in Chinese historical writings ashaving been entirely masculine.

By the later years of the Ming dynasty, prosperity andstability had created a large landowning gentry class, farmore than were needed for official government positions.For many, Buddhist monasteries were to become thefocus of their social lives, either as patrons or as monks.Consequently monasteries acquired immense wealth,prestige and authority.36 In addition to the Buddhist estab-lishment, there were many sects linked with secret soci-eties, such as the millenarian White Lotus, which drew onthe tradition of the Maitreya, the Buddha who is yet tocome, and which took part in rebellions against theManchu Qing dynasty in the eighteenth century. WhiteLotus ideas were influential in the Boxer Rebellion of1899–1901 and remain influential in parts of rural Chinato this day.37

In the early years of the PRC, hundreds of thousands ofmonks were compelled to leave their orders and work onfarms, in workshops or in factories. At the same time theCCP recognized Buddhism as an official religion andallowed two Buddhist delegates to attend the meetings ofthe CPPCC.38 The author of a major study of Buddhism inChina summarizes the official status of the religion in thefirst 17 years of the PRC: ‘until the Cultural Revolutionbegan in 1966, it was the policy of the Chinese CommunistParty to protect Buddhism, while at the same time keepingit under control and utilizing it in foreign policy’.39 This didnot prevent the destruction of temples and their contents,and physical attacks on Buddhist clergy during the cam-paigns for Land Reform (in spite of clauses in the LandReform law prohibiting this) and the Suppression ofCounter-Revolutionaries. Although the general tenor ofMarxist writing in China was anti-clerical there was someambiguity, even in the writings of Mao Zedong, wherethere is some respect for peasant religious beliefs and anacknowledgement that if those beliefs were to be over-

11


Major religions

turned it should be the peasants themselves who decide todo so.40 It is clear that support for Buddhism remainedstrong although repressed during much of Chairman Mao’speriod of rule, and observation suggests that more womenthan men visit, pray in and give donations to temples.

The career of Juzan (Chü-tsan) is instructive in indicat-ing the position of Buddhism in the early years of thePRC. He was considered to be ‘modern and progressive inoutlook’41 and was one of two Buddhist delegates to theCPPCC. Juzan became a monk in 1931 having studiedunder Taixu, ‘the leading Buddhist reformer of theRepublican era’. He moved to Hong Kong in 1948 andcame into contact with a group of people who were to beextremely influential in the PRC. As the CCP came topower, he lobbied for the preservation of a reformed Bud-dhism, under the Communist state, by placing it at theservice of New China. In June 1950 he became the editorof the journal Modern Buddhism. ‘This was … the nucle-us of a Buddhist front and the precursor of the nationalBuddhist association that was to be established in 1953.’42

The journal and association were part of the system forcontrolling religious activity, and to a lesser extent solicit-ing feedback from believers, that was established by theCCP in the 1950s.

Land Reform was the single most important policyimplemented by the CCP in its early years in power.Designed to alleviate dreadful rural poverty and to dis-tribute land, albeit temporarily, to peasant families whohad been the party’s power base, it also undermined thetraditional social structure of rural China and effectivelyabolished the landowning class. Buddhist monasteries hadacquired large holdings of land over many centuries, andwere treated as landlords. During Land Reform, many ofthem lost land and thus their means of livelihood,although the Agrarian Reform Law was implementedunevenly and not all monasteries suffered.43

As collectivization succeeded Land Reform, monksformed themselves into cooperatives and farmed orworked in craft industries to avoid being criticized as para-sites. In 1958, the year of the Great Leap Forward, dona-tion boxes at Buddhist shrines were outlawed and monkswere forbidden to carry out divination for money.

Many monks and nuns left their monasteries andbecame lay people, working in agriculture or industry.Many monasteries and temples were taken over by thegovernment and converted into schools, museums,administrative offices or even army barracks. This was notunprecedented as there were instances of the previousNationalist Guomindang government requisitioningmonasteries. Some smaller temples were also destroyedduring the 1950s. The net effect of these policies was adramatic decline in the sangha, the community of Bud-dhist clergy, which, along with the Buddha and the dhar-ma (or doctrine), were the Three Jewels, the essentialcomponents, of Buddhism.44 However monasteries andtemples remained open and were visited by foreign Bud-dhists who travelled to China.

With the Cultural Revolution of 1966, the destructionof Buddhism appeared almost complete. Mao Zedong’syouthful political shock troops, the Red Guards, wereencouraged to attack the Four Olds: old ideas, old culture,old customs and old habits. Although Buddhism was not

specifically named as a target, by the end of September1966 almost all Buddhist monasteries and temples hadclosed down (at least in the cities), as had mosques andchurches. Many of these were converted into flats or forother uses. Buddhist icons were damaged or destroyedand thousands of monks were arrested and ill-treated.Many were criticized in public meetings and the work ofthe Chinese Buddhist Association came to a halt althoughit was able to resume some of its responsibilities in 1972following the intervention of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai.45

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Buddhist templeswere once again opened, and, although there were veryfew monks to be seen, it was quite common to see votiveofferings of money or fruit that had been left in the out-stretched hands of the statues of Bodhisattvas. Officialestimates suggest that there are now over 13,000 Buddhisttemples in China and more than 200,000 monks and nuns.Out of this total, there are probably 120,000 lamas andnuns in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition with 3,000 templesand 1,700 Living Buddhas.46

Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism

The question of Tibet is one of the most complex andthorniest political, ethnic and religious issues in Asia.

There is no universal agreement on the boundaries ofTibet, what its status is now or what it has been in the past.The official Chinese claim, that Tibet has always been partof an unchanging China, is clearly untenable. However,the nationalist case, that Tibet was a completely indepen-dent sovereign country for centuries until the armies ofthe Chinese Communist Party occupied it in 1950, is sim-plistic. Tibet, like Xinjiang, was incorporated into theManchu state that ruled China as the Qing dynasty from1644 to 1912. The Qing maintained a military garrison inLhasa and appointed officials, amban, as its representa-tives in the Tibetan capital. What is certain is that from1913, when the 13th Dalai Lama arrived back in Tibetafter a period of exile in India, until 1951, when the 14thDalai Lama put his signature to the disputed Seventeen-Point Agreement, Tibet was ruled by Tibetans withoutChinese interference. It is this period of independencethat many modern Tibetans take as their model.47

A clear distinction can be made between ‘politicalTibet’, the area clearly under the control of successiveDalai Lamas, and ‘ethnographic Tibet’, which is muchgreater in size as there are five ethnic Tibetan populationsin the Chinese provinces of Gansu, Qinghai, Sichuan andYunnan, which have common borders with ‘political Tibet’or the Tibetan Autonomous Region as it is has beendefined today.48 The complexity of the Tibetan issuemeans that it is even more difficult to separate religionfrom politics than with other faiths in territories con-trolled by Beijing.

Buddhism was brought into Tibet from India, with thefirst known monastery established near Lhasa around AD

779, and gradually absorbed the native animistic folk reli-gion, Bon, which still coexists with Buddhism. Buddhism’stemporal authority was strengthened during the rise ofMongol power in Asia in the thirteenth century and thetitle of Dalai Lama was first bestowed on Sonam Gyatso,

12


Major religions

a prominent lama of the Gelug or Yellow Hat sect, in 1578by the Mongol ruler Altan Khan. Tibetan Buddhism, oftenknown as Lama Buddhism (although this name is notfavoured by Tibetans), also spread to Mongolia. It was andremains quite distinct in its organization, scripture, liturgyand culture from Buddhism practised in most of Chinaproper.

The rulers of the last dynasty of the Chinese Empire,the Qing, ran Tibet as a protectorate rather than attempt-ing to absorb it into the Chinese administrative system ofprovinces. In the eighteenth century the Qing stationedsubstantial numbers of troops in Tibet but Tibet retained‘its own language, officials and legal system and paid notaxes or tribute to China’.49 The Qing dynasty declined inthe nineteenth century and finally came to an end in 1911,whereupon the 13th Dalai Lama, exiled to India afterbeing outlawed by the Chinese, returned to Lhasa. Hearrived in the Tibetan capital in 1913 and was officiallyrecognized by the first president of the new Republicangovernment of China, Yuan Shikai.50 Tibet enjoyed defacto independence between 1913 and 1950 and this is thebasis for independence claims today by Tibetan national-ists. The period of independence ended in 1950 with thearrival of the People’s Liberation Army and the signing(reluctantly and under pressure on the Tibetan side) ofthe controversial and contested Seventeen-Point Agree-ment for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.51 In 1959, afterfierce Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule exploded ininsurrection, more troops were moved from China intoTibet and the Dalai Lama fled into exile in Dharamsala, innorthern India. Tibet was created an autonomous regionof the PRC on 9 September 1965. The Dalai Lama and hissenior religious and political officials remained inDharamsala, depriving Tibet of the leadership that mostof the population recognized.52

The Cultural Revolution of 1966–76 increased thescale of attacks on Tibetan Buddhism and its material cul-ture that had begun in the suppression of the 1959 rising.53

The death of Mao Zedong in September 1976 led to aperiod of relative liberalization in the mid-1980s, influ-enced by CCP Secretary General Hu Yaobang (whosepremature death in 1989 precipitated the Democracymovement and the demonstrations in Tian’anmenSquare). There was an increase in the number of TheTibetans participating in government and the status of theTibetan language and culture was enhanced in govern-ment and education.54 Hu Yaobang visited Tibet in 1980on the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Seventeen-PointAgreement and was openly critical of the policies and atti-tudes of Han Chinese cadres in Tibet.55

Partly in response to the new liberal atmosphere andpartly in response to a major international diplomatic ini-tiative by Dharamsala to try to procure a settlement to theTibet question, a wave of demonstrations began in Tibetin 1987, led by monks and nuns who supported an inde-pendent Tibet under the Dalai Lama. The first demon-strations were by monks of Drepung monastery to thewest of Lhasa, the senior monastery in the Gelug or Yel-low Hat tradition. They carried out religious circumam-bulations of Lhasa and were arrested when they marchedon government offices. The demonstrations became vio-lent after demonstrators were arrested and assaulted, and

police fired on the crowds killing some demonstrators.56

Demonstrations continued, led by monks and nunswhose courage and fortitude in the face of alleged brutal-ity was recognized internationally. A further riot tookplace in 1988 when the Panchen Lama (who died on 28January 1989) visited Tibet in an attempt to ensure thesuccess of the Great Prayer Festival which is held duringcelebrations of the Tibetan New Year. Many monks feltthat their festival had been hijacked by the CCP and aminor contretemps exploded into riots that were followedby mass arrests and a political and religious clampdown. Anationalist Tibetan Buddhist movement had been formed,stimulated by but isolated from and essentially indepen-dent of the leadership in Dharamsala.57

The death of the Panchen Lama in January 1989 andthe search for a successor precipitated another crisis. ThePanchen Lama is second only to the Dalai Lama in theTibetan hierarchy and some place his spiritual authorityahead of that of the Dalai Lama. In the twentieth century,successive Panchen Lamas have generally been closer togovernments in Beijing than any other high lamas. Beijingtried to control the selection process which also neededconfirmation by the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamaannounced his candidate, Gendura Choeki Nyima, on 14May 1995 but in November Beijing endorsed a differentcontender and the whole process ended in complete dis-array.58

Conflict between the Tibetan religious leadership andBeijing about the Panchen Lama succession was high-lighted when the Abbot of Kumbun monastery in theprovince of Qinghai, part of old Tibet, was expelled fromthe CPPCC in June 2000 after leaving China for the USAin 1998. Agyo Lobsangtubdain Gyurma had been a mem-ber of the Chinese committee entrusted with locating thereincarnation of the Panchen Lama but spoke out in sup-port of the Dalai Lama and rejected the Chinese choice ofGyaltsen Norbu.59

The Dalai Lama gave an interview to the journal Asia-week in which he reflected on the effect his death wouldhave on Tibetan people. He said ‘if I passed away, thereincarnation would logically come outside Tibet, in a freecountry. But China will choose a boy as the next DalaiLama, though in reality he is not.’ He added that Tibetanswould reject the Panchen Lama nominated by Beijing.60

Reports of ill-treatment and brutality continued tocome out of Tibet, and monks and nuns, the standard-bearers of Tibetan national and religious identity, werefrequently the targets. Five nuns, arrested after demon-strations in May 1998, were interrogated in Drapchiprison and beaten with belts and electric batons after call-ing out Tibetan nationalist slogans when ordered to singChinese patriotic songs. They committed suicide.61 InTibet, young nuns have often been in the forefront of sep-aratist or religious demonstrations and appear to have suf-fered particularly from violence and indignities at thehands of Chinese paramilitary police and prison officials.

A young lama, virtually unknown outside the Tibetancommunity, left Tibet in December 1999 to join the DalaiLama in Dharamsala. The 17th Karmapa Lama, who was14 years old at the time, left the Tsurphu monastery to thenortheast of Lhasa saying that he was going abroad to buymusical instruments and black hats worn by previous

13


Major religions

incarnations of Karmapa. Unusually, the Karmapa LamaUgyen Trinley Dorge, the son of nomads, was recognizedby both Beijing and the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation ofthe previous head of the Kagyu sect in 1992.62

The flight of the Karmapa Lama embarrassed theauthorities and was followed by a crackdown on monaster-ies in Tibet. Thirty monks were expelled from the Jokhangtemple in Lhasa in June 2000 and the government threat-ened reprisals against those taking part in pilgrimage dur-ing the festival of Sagadawa. Children were told theywould be expelled from school, officials that they would bedismissed and pensioners that their pensions would bestopped. There were also reports of houses being raidedand the seizure of religious objects and photographs of theDalai Lama. Members of the CCP and teachers who hadphotographs of the Dalai Lama in their possession werefined.63 The US Ambassador to China, Admiral JosephPrueher, visited Tibet for the first time during this crack-down and met Legqog, Chair of the Tibetan AutonomousRegional Government.64

The following month, the Tibetan government in exilepublished a report on China’s Current Policy in Tibet,claiming that Beijing was aiming at the ‘total destruction’of Tibetan culture. The report also argued that the DalaiLama had moderated the more extreme elements ofTibetan nationalism and that China’s refusal to have anycontact with him could lead to more violent expressions ofprotest.65

Christianity

There is no single term in Chinese to refer to the wholebody of churches that would be regarded as Christian

outside China. There are separate terms for Protestantism(Jidujiao) and Catholicism (Tianzhujiao) and they areeffectively treated as if they are two unconnected reli-gions. Orthodox Christianity, which has a following innortheast China and in the Russian communities of Xin-jiang, is also often referred to as if it were a completelyseparate religion, Zhengjiao.

The main issue in relations between the churches andthe CCP state has been the extent to which Christianchurches in China are independent Chinese organizationsor are part of worldwide Christian organizations andtherefore subject to the control of authorities outsideChina. The CCP does not allow genuinely independentorganizations or branches of international organizations ofany kind, religious or otherwise, to exist in China, andChristian organizations in China are supposed to be underthe control of the CCP state. The Three-Self PatrioticMovement was established in the 1950s to allow Chris-tians to belong to churches that were considered to bepatriotic. However, significant numbers of congregationsrefuse to be part of this government-sponsored movementand worship in underground and house churches. TheCatholic Church in China is similarly divided, with twosets of bishops, one group ordained with the sanction ofBeijing and the other with the authority of the Vatican.

Christianity in its Nestorian form probably firstappeared in China as early as the seventh century AD butwas crushed during a period of religious persecution in

the mid-ninth century though it did have supporters in theMongol court in the thirteenth century.

Jesuits had a far greater impact on Chinese society andculture, the first missionaries of the Society to visit Chinabeing Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci. Ricci estab-lished a Jesuit mission in Beijing in 1601 and was the firstof a series of scholars and priests who were frequentlypresent at the courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasty.The question of whether Christian converts could alsopaticipate in Confucian rituals (a matter on which theKangxi emperor insisted) led to the Rites Controversy,conflict between the Jesuits and the Vatican, and the dis-banding of the Society of Jesus by the Pope in 1773.66

The Protestant mission to China began with RobertMorrison of the London Missionary Society, who arrivedin Macao in 1807. During the nineteenth century, Protes-tant missionaries from all the Western countries wereactive in China. Their main purpose was to create Chineseconverts but they contributed greatly to social reform inChina, especially in the fields of education and medicine.67

Wing-tsit Chan, returning to China for a research visitin 1948, was impressed by what he termed the Lay move-ment in Chinese Christianity, an emphasis on the individ-ual believer rather than the clergy, a trend that hebelieved was particularly Chinese and could be tracedback to Chinese Buddhism, which had long been a massreligion rather than merely a monastic one.

‘In short it is the layman who has given Chinesereligion its vitality, strength and leadership. …Christianity can hardly escape the same influences.Since the National Christian Council was estab-lished in 1922, the [centre] of Christianity in Chinahas gradually shifted from the clergy to the layman.’

An example of this was the Jesus Family. This commu-nity of families, who lived, worked and worshipped as areligious extended family, was established in 1921 by JingDianying in the village of Mazhuang in the Taian regionof Shandong province to the south of the provincial capi-tal. By January 1950, Chan estimated that the Jesus Fam-ily was about 10,000 strong with 179 linked families.68 BobWhyte has a lower estimate of 6,000 followers. Accusa-tions of sexual immorality and other offences against Jingled to his imprisonment and the dissolution of the JesusFamily.69 Other Christian groups of debatable orthodoxyactive at the time of liberation included the True JesusChurch, which had most support in the coastal provinceof Fujian, and the Little Flock, whose leader WatchmanNee (Ni Duosheng) was imprisoned for corruption duringthe 5-Anti campaign. This campaign was launched by theCCP in 1952, ostensibly to counteract bribery, fraud andtax evasion in the business community, but it also broughtabout the downfall of many members of the former upperand middle classes.70

Protestantism

The China Christian Council estimated that in 1981there were 4,044 Protestant churches in China, a

quarter of them recently built, but nearly 17,000 meetingplaces for Christians altogether. Estimates of the totalnumber of Protestants varies enormously. The figure

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accepted by the China Christian Council is 5 million, butunofficial estimates are much higher. The greatest con-centration of believers is in the provinces of Henan, Zhe-jiang and Fujian. Lay leadership, as identified by Wing-tsitChan, remains an important part of church organizationalthough theological colleges train clergy.71

The Three-Self Patriotic Movement is the vehiclethrough which Protestant Christianity is simultaneouslylicensed and controlled by the CCP. It grew out of theChristian Manifesto signed by 19 Protestant leaders at ameeting with Zhou Enlai in April 1950 and a meeting of151 Protestant leaders the following year as part of theCCP’s United Front bridge-building policy.72 The Three-Selfs are self-governing, self-supporting and self-propa-gating, concepts which pre-date the CCP and its ReligiousAffairs Bureau, and which some have traced back to theChina Inland Mission of the nineteenth century.73 Theywere used to indicate that Christianity would be toleratedprovided that it remained a Chinese Christianity, awayfrom the control of foreign churches. Bob Whyte haspointed to the fact that the use of ‘patriotic’ in the title ofthe association was unique to Christians.74

Six leaders of underground Protestant churches weresentenced to various terms of ‘re-education throughlabour’ in Nanyang (Henan). They were among 40 churchleaders arrested in August 1999. Among the six wereZhang Rongliang and Zheng Shuqian of the Fangchengchurch, one of the most enduring of the undergroundProtestant churches. The others belonged to the ChineseEvangelical Fellowship.75

Leaders of underground churches that had integratedChristian doctrines with local culture were arrested inNovember and December 1999 during a major campaignwhich had concentrated on the Falungong. Groups affect-ed included the All Scope, set up in Xiangtan (Hunan) in1985 with foreign assistance, the Zhushen in Nanxiang(Guangdong), whose leader Lui Jiaguo was under arrestcharged with rape and other offences, and the OrientLightning in Tanghe (Henan).76

In May 2000, 20 members of the Disciples, a groupfounded by Ji Sanbao in Shaanxi Province in 1989, weredetained, beginning with the arrest of one of its leaders LiXueqing on 28 March. Li was sentenced to a year in a lao-jiao (education-through-labour camp), and the Discipleswere branded a cult, their chief offence having beenopposition to China’s family planning policies.77

One of the largest reported mass arrests of Christianstook place in August 2000 when 130 members of thechurch in Fangcheng, Henan province, were detained.The founder of the church had already been arrested andsentenced to two years in a laojiao camp in December1999. Among the 130 detained were three missionaries ofTaiwanese origin who held US passports, Henry Chu, hiswife Sandee Lin and Patricia Lan, who were quite clear-ly acting outside the law.78 They were released on 25August and left China. Of the 130 members of theFangcheng church, 85 were charged with cult member-ship in September 2000.79

Further arrests of underground Protestants werereported in Guangshui (Hubei), Yucheng (Hunan) wheremembers of the China Evangelical Fellowship weredetained, and Hejin (Shanxi).80

The reasons for the crackdown were made clear byLuo Guanzong, the chair of the Three-Self PatrioticMovement, the body that speaks for the official Protes-tant Church in China and is approved by and broadlyspeaking supports the policies of the CCP on religion. Hesaid that Chinese churches had been independent for 50years and that they would never again come under thecontrol of foreigners so they could be used by imperialiststo invade China.81

The Three-Self Patriotic Movement marked the fifti-eth anniversary of its foundation on 23–4 September 2000with a concert and a service of thanksgiving. Bishop DingGuanxun, who chairs both the Three-Self Patriotic Move-ment and the China Christian Council, called for theadaptation of theology to suit the conditions of a socialistsociety.82

Catholicism

The official Catholic Church in China also subscribes tothe Three-Self policy and its churches, which have no

formally acknowledged links with the Vatican, are super-vised by the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association (againthe term ‘patriotic’ is used in the title). This has causedmuch conflict within the Catholic churches as many bish-ops, priests and laymen remain loyal to Rome and theyhave been described as an underground CatholicChurch.83 In practice there is often cooperation betweenthe official and underground churches at the local level.84

The simplistic division of the Catholic Church in Chinainto the official and the underground, the ‘patriots’ andthe ‘faithful’, masks a complex and changing reality. By1989 ‘more and more of the “patriots” were openly declar-ing their allegiance to the Pope, and among the “faithful”many found working with the government-sponsoredPatriotic Association an acceptable modus vivendi. On theother hand a new group, calling itself the “undergroundchurch” was emerging with a clear confrontational poli-cy.’85 The confrontation resulted in the arrest of under-ground Catholics setting up illegal churches, and thedetention of 30 clergy, including six bishops, betweenDecember 1989 and February 1990. The undergroundchurch involved in these clashes was based on Catholicswho refused to recognize the leadership of the PatrioticAssociation in the 1950s on the instructions of the Vatican.They worshipped privately with the assistance of priestswho similarly rejected conformity with the United Frontpolicies. The underground church, from the 1980sonwards, has become more organized and assertive. Itordains priests secretly and sends them around China towork against the Patriotic Association. The growth of theunderground church was given a boost in 1979 when theVatican relaxed regulations for underground pastors,including regulations for ordination.

One of the staunchest supporters of the undergroundchurch until his death in 1992 was Bishop Fan Xueyan ofBaoding, known to be particularly close to the Vatican.The underground church published a document, TheThirteen Points, in September 1988 which shook Catholi-cism in China. Essentially, the underground church wasgaining support for their argument that marriages andbaptism by ‘patriotic priests’ were invalid.86

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In the early 1990s there was a change of attitude in theofficial Catholic Church and it appeared to move closer tothe Vatican, with worshippers praying openly for the Popeand declaring themselves ‘united with the Holy See’ with-out necessarily attracting the ire of the authorities. Movestowards establishing diplomatic relations between Beijingand the Vatican were thought to be behind the changingsituation, but CCP concern at the ‘growing strength of theunderground church’ may also be an important factor. InApril 1989 the CCP Central Committee and the StateCouncil issued ‘Directives of the Party on how to dealwith the Catholic Church in the new situation’, common-ly referred to as Document No. 3, which appears to toler-ate moves of the official church towards Rome whileurging the eradication of the underground church.87 Thiswas reinforced in November 1999 when the Vatican’sFides news agency reported that it had obtained a CCPCentral Committee Document which included plans forthe establishment of diplomatic relations between theVatican and China, broken off in 1951; and the break-upof the underground church, with its leaders either joiningthe Catholic Church approved by the state or riskingimprisonment or administrative detention.88

The effect of a possible agreement with the Vaticanmade the state-approved Catholic Church in China verypositive about the future for Catholics in China. Li Duan,Bishop of Xi’an in the official church stated: ‘Under-ground bishops say we do not recognise the Pope. That isnot true of course. But now if the Pope recognises Chinaand China recognises the Pope, there is no point in stay-ing underground any more.’ There was even discussion ofthe possible abolition of the China Patriotic CatholicAssociation.89

The power struggle between the Vatican and Beijingcontinued with plans to ordain three new bishops, forNanjing, Suzhou and Hangzhou, in the official ChineseCatholic Church on the same day that the Pope was toordain new bishops at the Vatican.90 Cardinal IgnatiusGong Pinmei – who had been imprisoned for 30 years inChina, moved to the USA and died in March 2000 – hadbeen Bishop of Shanghai and Apostolic Administrator ofSuzhou and Nanjing. The Vatican reacted with ‘surpriseand regret’ at the ordinations and indicated that Beijing’smoves would hinder the normalization of relations.91 Nev-ertheless, the official Catholic Church proceeded with theordination of Matthew Cao Xiangde as Bishop ofHangzhou. The ordination in May 2000 of ZhaoFengchang was, in contrast, also approved by the Vaticanand leaders of the official Catholic Church in Chinaexpressed the hope that pragmatism would prevail andthat normal relations between Beijing and the Vaticanwould be possible.92 Bishop Michael Fu Tieshan, the pres-ident of the government-sponsored China PatrioticCatholic Association, told China Daily in August 2000that religion in China was entering a new golden age butwarned of the danger of cults.93

Meanwhile, the campaign against the undergroundCatholic Church continued. Jiang Shuang, a priest in theunderground church was sentenced to six years’ imprison-ment for illegally publishing the Bible and other religiousmaterial in Cangnan (Zhejiang). Seven unregisteredchurches were also closed down by police and a number

of underground priests disappeared.94 Another under-ground priest, Gao Yihua from Jinfengzhen (Fujian), wasarrested while celebrating Mass in a private house on 19August 2000, after he apparently refused to register withthe China Patriotic Catholic Association.95 Other reportsspoke of the arrest of 24 underground Catholics in Fujian,and violence against a priest, Liu Shaozheng.96 Yang Shu-dao, Archbishop of Fuzhou, remains under police surveil-lance after his release from brief detention in February2000. The Bishop of Zhaoxian (Hebei), Joseph JiangMingyuan, was arrested in August.97 Bishop Zeng Jingmuwas detained in Jiangxi and Liao Haiqing, a priest in theunderground Catholic Church, was also arrested. InFujian, Ye Gongfeng, another underground priest, wasarrested and ill-treated.98

Cardinal Roger Etchegary, a veteran emissary of thePope, visited China in the middle of September 2000,while these arrests were taking place, to attend a meetingorganized by the Institute of World Religions of the Chi-nese Academy of Social Sciences, but also to talk to lead-ers of the Catholic Patriotic Church.99 He protestedagainst the arrests of Catholic clergy and lay people andcelebrated Mass in Beijing, the first cardinal to do sosince 1949.

The decision of the Vatican to canonize 120 missionar-ies and Chinese martyrs further fuelled the dispute withBeijing. The date chosen for the canonization was 1 Octo-ber, the feast day of St Thérèse of Lisieux, the patron saintof missions to China. With its long history of sinologicalstudies, the Vatican cannot have failed to notice that 1October is China’s national day and that 1 October 2000marked 51 years of Communist rule. Beijing’s reactionwas predictably furious and many of the martyrs, mostlykilled in the nineteenth century, were described as crimi-nals and sinners. Many died during the Boxer Rising of1899–1901.100

The new saints, 87 Chinese martyrs and 33 Europeanmissionaries to China, were canonized at a ceremony in StPeter’s Square, Rome on 1 October. No representativestravelled from China. The Pope named Agostina ZhaoRong, who died in 1815, Anna Wang and Chi Zhuzi, butvery little detail was forthcoming about their lives or thenature of their martyrdom. ‘The celebration at present isnot the best time to come to a judgement on these histor-ical periods, what could have and what should have beendone in another See.’

At an audience for pilgrims he said: ‘If there were any[mistakes in Christian missionary activity in China] – andis man ever free of defects? – we ask forgiveness.’101

Islam

The total number of Muslims in China and the XinjiangUyghur Autonomous Region is difficult to estimate

precisely. Documents published in the Islamic worldbefore the Second World War often referred to 50 millionMuslims, a figure now accepted as having had no basis infact as the first census in China that had any claim to accu-racy was in 1953. A more realistic estimate would be 20million.102

These Muslims can be divided into two major groups,

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according to their language. The Hui, also called the Chi-nese Muslims, are spread throughout, with a significantconcentration in the northwest provinces of Shaanxi andGansu and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. Theyspeak the Chinese of their region although they do retainsome Arabic and Persian in their everyday language. HuiMuslims follow Gedimu, or orthodox Sunni Islam, butmany are also members of one of the many Sufi orders tobe found in the northwest, which have frequently comeinto conflict with the Gedimu leadership and the stateover the building of tombs for their founding shaykhs(spiritual leaders). The non-Hui Muslims are consideredseparately (see next section).

‘In spite of its 13 centuries in China, Islam hasremained a foreign religion on Chinese soil. Cut offfrom the world Islamic community at large, and iso-lated from Chinese culture and life, it thrives byitself. Since its introduction into China it has hadalmost no contact with the outside Islamic worlduntil our own time.’

Wing-tsit Chan’s analysis in 1949/50 is mainly accuratealthough more recent studies have pointed out that hajjpilgrimage and Central Asia missionaries travelling toChina both made significant contributions to the develop-ment of Sufi orders, particularly in the northwest.103 How-ever, the sense of isolation from mainstream Islam is stillkeenly felt by Muslims today, particularly in the ruralareas of Ningxia, Gansu and Xinjiang, in spite of theimprovements in transport and communications and therelative freedom to travel. The familiar division betweenofficially recognized religion and underground groups alsoexists in Islam in China and the division can be tracedback well before the appearance of the CCP.

Muslims of the Gedimu (Arabic al-qadim – the ancienttradition) have been responsible for building and runningmost of the mosques, madrasas (Quranic schools) and col-leges for training imams since Islam arrived in China, andcertainly since the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), a period forwhich documentation is fairly reliable. During theManchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911), a period of travelrestrictions while the dynasty consolidated its control wasfollowed by territorial expansion into Central Asia and rel-atively free travel. Muslims from China came into contactwith radical, reforming Islamic groups in Central Asia andthe Middle East as they travelled on the hajj and broughtback new ideas into China. As a result of these links, orga-nizations like the Ikhwani (an offshoot of the eighteenth-century Wahabbist revivalist movement that was thespiritual inspiration for modern Saudi Arabia) and a pro-liferation of Sufi orders appeared in China, mainly in whatis now Gansu, Ningxia and Xinjiang. These groups werefrequently in conflict with the Gedimu leadership and theChinese authorities.

This conflict occasionally spilled over into widespreadviolence, notably in the insurrections of 1862–78 and1895, which devastated the northwest and drasticallyreduced the population of Muslims. These conflicts haveoften been portrayed as simply rebellions of ethnic andreligious minorities against a corrupt and decliningManchu state, but conflicts within Islam also played animportant role.104 The Manchu and Chinese authorities

certainly regarded the insurrections as rebellions againsttheir legitimate authority and brutally suppressed them.Muslim communities in the early twentieth century kept avery low profile after this, and played down the differencesbetween themselves and the majority Han population,although there was a resurgence of Muslim organizationafter the 1911 Revolution toppled the Qing and a briefperiod of republican government was inaugurated.105

Independent Sufi and other religious orders flourishedand one powerful community in the southwest of Gansu,the Xidaotang, became wealthy from its agricultural andbusiness enterprises. Its collective resources provided foreducation and other services for over 400 families. Thecombination of wealth and religious authority made theXidaotang a considerable power in northwest China inthe 1940s.106

China and the Naqshbandiyya

The Sufi orders, including the Naqshbandiyya,although not directly under that name, spread further

east into the Hui communities of what are now Ningxiaand Gansu in northwestern China, extending the reach oftransnational Islam in its Sufi form. In this part of China,the central organization of the Sufi pathway (Arabictariqa) evolved into the daotang ‘hall of the path or doc-trine’ or jiaotang ‘hall of teaching’ often based on thetomb (gongbei) of the founder, paralleling the mazars ofthe Uyghur Sufis of Xinjiang. The equivalent of the Ara-bic silsila (the inherited chain of succession) is probablythe menhuan.107

In the 1980s, when the outward expression of Muslimidentity was possible in northwest China, members of theSufi menhuan, who had continued to perform their dhikr(remembrance of Allah) in secret, emerged and began toreclaim the land on which the tombs of their shaykhsstood. Mosques and daotang were rebuilt and refur-bished, and the tombs once again became a centre for Sufiworship. There was particular resistance to rebuilding thetombs of the shaykhs of the Sufi orders, from local CCPofficials and local government. In addition, there were dis-putes between rival branches of Sufi groups, which some-times led to violent conflict between them.

Xinjiang: religion and ethnicity

Almost all the Muslims whose first language is not Chi-nese are found in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous

Region (Eastern Turkestan). Most are speakers of Turkiclanguages, mainly Uyghur and Kazakh, although there arespeakers of an eastern variety of Tajik (Wakh) in thePamir mountains.108 There are also Hui communities inXinjiang. Because the authorities see their religiousbeliefs as tied closely to separatist ideas, the Turkic-speak-ing Muslims are subject to greater controls and are farless free to practise and express their faith than are theHui. At times when Hui mosques have been open andbusy with worshippers, Uyghur and Kazak mosquesremained closed, even in the Xinjiang capital Urumqi,which is generally stable and thoroughly under Chinesecontrol.109

Among Xinjiang Muslims there are also numbers of

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Sufi groups, including the Naqshbandi, order which isnoted for its active involvement in politics in the Indiansubcontinent and Central Asia. A nationalist separatist tra-dition in Xinjiang, which had been suppressed between1949 and 1976, began to flourish again after the end of theCultural Revolution and gradually developed into anactive opposition movement, parts of which are stronglyinfluenced by the radical political Islam of Iran andAfghanistan. Separatist sentiment has been strengthenedby fears that the original population of Xinjiang is beingdeliberately overwhelmed by the migration of Han Chi-nese from the east. Economic development, designed tosolve the problems of Xinjiang by relieving poverty, is giv-ing rise to new conflict as many Uyghurs perceive thatnew economic opportunities are going to the Han incom-ers rather than to their own community. Serious distur-bances began in Baren in 1990 and reached a climax withthe riots in Yining/Ghulja in February 1997, which costmany lives and resulted in many more casualties.110

Hui Muslims also consider themselves to be ethnicallydifferent from the Han Chinese. However, they are Chi-nese-speakers so the differences between them and theHan are not as clear-cut as they are in Xinjiang, where thelevel of understanding of standard Chinese and localdialects varies considerably. Many Uyghurs in the ruralareas know little spoken and no written Chinese.

Xinjiang Sufism

Sufi orders and their leaders, are known in Xinjiang, asin the rest of Central Asia, as Ishan (Yishan in Chi-

nese). This is a highly respectful form of address for Sufishaykhs which was then applied by extension to the orga-nizations whose loyalty they commanded. The termderives from the third person plural pronoun meaning‘they’ or ‘them’ in the Persian language. In the fourteenthcentury, the leaders of the Sufi orders were sanctified, andtheir disciples, out of respect or fear, did not address themdirectly by their personal names, instead calling themIshan. This gradually evolved into the name used for theleaders of the orders. In Chinese, all Sufi groups areknown as yishanpai and their leaders as yishan.

The Ishan are considered by their followers to besomething approximating to contemporary living saints.They are seen as the protectors of the well-being of theirdisciples both in this life and the next, and are believed bysome to be able to perform miracles. Because of this theyare venerated and obeyed by their followers.

The hereditary and hierarchical nature of the Sufiorders is important as an explanation of their persistenceand the firmness with which they were able to exert con-trol over their organizations. Succession to the post ofIshan normally passed from father to son, but the Ishancould instead choose a favoured disciple. The ordersimposed tight communal discipline on their membersthrough education, ritual and worship at the tombs(mazars) of the shaykhs or founding fathers of their order.

In general, the towns and villages of the far south andsouthwest of Xinjiang, the Altishahr, being the furthestfrom Chinese influence, have preserved the most distinc-tively different Uyghur culture. Of these, the best-docu-mented, and one of the furthest west in Xinjiang, is the

great religious, intellectual and commercial centre ofKashghar (Kashi in its Chinese form) and the rural areasthat surround it.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Islam inKashghar society up to the point at which it came underthe control of the CCP after 1949. It has been estimatedthat in the early 1950s, there were more than 12,000mosques of different size and status in the prefecture inwhich Kashghar is situated, while in the Muslim sector ofKashghar city itself (known in Chinese as Shufu), therewere no fewer than 126. The waqfiyya system of landowned by mosques and other Islamic bodies, and theIslamic courts were also central to the power of Islam, butSufism also played an important role. Some waqfiyya land,for example, was attached to the mazars of the Sufi orders.

Khotan 1950

The first major incident of resistance to the CCP afterit took control over Xinjiang in 1950 was probably the

Khotan rising by a Pan-Turkic organization Emin (thename deriving from the Arabic amin, which means faith-ful, loyal or trustworthy), led by Abdimit in December1954 and strongly influenced by Sufi thought. Declaringits intention of establishing a Muslim state, the Emingroup published a document entitled Guidelines for anIslamic Republic, issued many posters and pamphlets, andelected a government in which Abdimit was to be Presi-dent. On 31 December, Abdimit led more than 300 sup-porters from the Karakash, Hotan and Lop areas, all ofthem followers of one of the Sufi orders, in an attack on aprison camp (the Chinese term for this is laogainongchang labour reform farm) in Karakash during whichan officer and seven soldiers were killed. It is not clearfrom the Chinese sources with which of the Sufi ordersthe attackers were associated.

They seized weapons and a vehicle, launched an attackon the county town of Khotan, and sent disciples to near-by towns and cities, including Kashghar, where anti-Chi-nese disturbances took place. The main activists of theEmin group escaped and fled abroad, but betweenDecember 1954 and the Lop riots of May 1956, in whichsupporters of Abdimit seem to have played a part, therewere eight major disturbances in the Khotan area underthe slogans ‘Allah commands us to fight for religion’ and‘The Communists have stolen the land, food, minerals andproperty of the Muslims’, the latter clearly referring to theconfiscation of land during the implementation of LandReform. It is quite clear that Abdimit used his positionand influence as a Sufi shaykh to motivate his supportersto rise up against the Chinese, gathering them together ina large group in Moyu (Karakash) county and gettingthem to take an oath of loyalty to him while holding theQur’an. In this way he developed a considerable followingin the rural areas which seems to have persisted even afterhe left Xinjiang. From this point onwards, it is extremelydifficult to be precise about the religious affiliations oforganizations and individuals as their activities have beencarried out in the face of severe repression by the Chinesestate, i.e. banning of all religious organizations other thanthose registered by the state, and close supervision of reli-gious activities by police and civil authorities.

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Baren 1990

The most serious large-scale disturbances in Xinjiang inthis period, and perhaps the crucial events which

determined the region’s slide into conflict and violence,were the riots at Baren in Akto county, which is in theKizilsu Kyrgyz Autonomous Prefecture in southern Xin-jiang, in April 1990. Akto is to the south of the great trad-ing centre of Kashghar and close to the Pamir mountainswhich form China’s border with Afghanistan. A group ofKyrgyz men attending prayers at a mosque on 5 Aprilbegan criticizing CCP policies towards ethnic minorities,including birth control, nuclear weapons testing and theexport of Xinjiang’s resources to ‘inland China’. Thisdeveloped into a mass protest, with some activists callingfor a jihad to drive the Han unbelievers out of Xinjiangand to establish an East Turkestan state. One hundredpolice officers sent to quell the riot were overpowered andtheir weapons and ammunition stolen. Disturbances con-tinued on 6 April, with rioters firing small arms and throw-ing bombs at police and officials who were surroundingthem, and blowing up part of the local government build-ing. According to the official account of the events, the ris-ing was finally suppressed by the Public Security Bureau,People’s Armed Police from the Kashghar garrison andmilitia units, but there were also reports that 1,000 regu-lar PLA troops were brought in, and local politicians latervisited injured soldiers in hospital to thank them for theirpart in suppressing the rising.111

There were conflicting reports of the number of casu-alties in the insurrection, with the foreign press quotingover 60 dead and Tomur Dawamat admitting that six Peo-ple’s Armed Police officers and one Uyghur cadre hadbeen killed, and that 15 demonstrators had also beenkilled and over 100 arrested. The Chinese-language chan-nel of Xinjiang Television on 22 April showed film ofUyghur-language documents, which it claimed gaveinstructions for a jihad combined with an armed Turkicnationalist uprising for an East Turkestan Republic. TheChinese media reported that young Uyghur militants hadbeen receiving weapons and unarmed combat training inan Islamic Holy War Force financed by contributions(extorted, according to the Chinese authorities) from thelocal Muslim population. Some reports suggested that therebels were supplied with arms by mujaheddin units inAfghanistan and named the leader as Abu Kasim fromKarghalik, a town south of Yarkand in the Altishahr, nearthe border with Afghanistan. Chinese officials blamed for-eign interference, in particular the long-established groupof Uyghur exiles in Turkey associated with Isa YusufAlptekin and his family. In September 1990 there weresimilar disturbances, but on a smaller scale, in northernXinjiang near the border with the former USSR.112

What appeared at the time to have been a spontaneousact of defiance against Chinese rule in Baren was in fact,according to Chinese scholars, a well-planned and highlyorganized operation, confirming the Xinjiang televisionreports. The rising had been prepared in great secret theprevious year by a group led by Zeydin Yusuf, whorecruited members to his Eastern Turkestan IslamicParty at prayer meetings in the mosques. They were mak-ing plans for an armed uprising to create an East

Turkestan Republic based on Baren. The youth wing wasformed into an ‘Islamic Dare to Die Corps’ (Yisilan gan-sidui). Party members set up loudspeakers in the court-yards of mosques in the villages of Baren and Tur andplayed cassette tapes praising the virtues of jihad. Theyheld ceremonies in which they placed knives on theground and got people to swear their support for thejihad on the Qur’an, threatening to kill those whobetrayed Islam. There is no explicit proof that these dis-turbances involved members of Sufi orders, but themodus operandi was very similar.113

After the 1989 demonstrations, a campaign had beenlaunched to bring unofficial religious schools under cen-tral control, and in southern Xinjiang two were closed andimams whose qualifications were not recognized officiallywere stripped of office. Following the 1990 Baren insur-rection this clampdown was intensified, to include a banon foreign preachers and a move to close down ‘illegalIslamic schools, forced donations for mosque building andanti-Han activities’. This was formalized in two sets of reg-ulations enacted by the Xinjiang Region government inSeptember 1990, the Regulations for Religious Personneland Regulations on Religious Activities, which aredesigned to restrict religious activities to those which donot threaten the status quo in Xinjiang, and to prohibitreligious leaders other than those approved of andlicensed by the authorities from practising. In Akto coun-ty, site of the Baren rising, 50 mosques, described as‘superfluous’, were closed and the construction or plan-ning of 100 projected new mosques was halted. All imamswere required to write a letter to the government pledg-ing their loyalty. Islam was subject to the same controls asall other religions in China, that is, the only religious activ-ities permitted were those registered with and formallyapproved by the authorities. In the case of Islam, theseregulations were designed to exclude groups such as Sufis,which were beyond the control of the registered imams.114

‘Strike Hard’: the long hot summers of 1996 and1997

Asystematic crackdown on crime throughout the wholeof China was launched at the end of April 1996. It was

known as the ‘Strike Hard’ (Yanda) campaign, and was ini-tiated after a working conference of the Bureau of PublicSecurity, the date of which has not been made public.

However, in addition to this crackdown on crime ingeneral, the campaign was quite clearly directed againstunofficial political organizations and, in particular, sepa-ratist activists in Tibet, Inner Mongolia and, of course, inXinjiang. A meeting of senior government and party offi-cials held in Urumqi on 30 April called for the campaignto be deepened, and a statement issued demanded thatthe crackdown ‘should mainly focus on the violent and ter-rorist cases organized and manipulated by national sepa-ratist forces’, The statement continued:

‘There is every indication that national sepa-ratists are working in collusion with all kinds ofcriminal and violent elements. Their reactionary andsabotage activities are increasingly rampant andhave seriously threatened the safety of people’s lives

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Major religions

and property, as well as social stability and thesmooth progress of the modernisation drive in Xin-jiang.’115

The following week, the Xinjiang Party Committeeexplicitly linked separatism with what it termed ‘unlawfulreligious activities’ and launched a campaign to reducetheir effect in schools, in publishing and throughout theregion. The Party pointed to the Xinjiang Production andConstruction Corps as ‘a major reliable force with theassignment of maintaining Xinjiang’s stability and buildingand defending the country’s frontiers’, indicating theimportant role that it continues to have in policing andcontrolling the region.116

In April 1996, a 13-Article document outlining regula-tions for controlling Islamic books, periodicals and audio-visual products was drawn up by the Party’s PropagandaDepartment, United Front Work Department, Press andPublications Bureau, Culture Department, Public Securi-ty Department and Nationalities Affairs Commission, therange of bodies involved giving a good idea of the impor-tance attached to the issue by the government of theAutonomous Region. The regulations stipulated that allpublications connected with Islam, whether for internalconsumption or wider publication, had to be vetted andapproved before they appeared.117

Party officials openly admitted that they had lost con-trol of many of the grassroots organizations in rural Xin-jiang to separatist and Islamist groups. ‘Some village-levelorganizations are but empty shells and are dominated andcontrolled by illegal religious forces. These localities haveoften become fortified villages of national splittist and ille-gal religious activities.’118

Reports of the effects on the ground of the clampdownwere patchy at first, and it was extremely difficult to assessthe degree of repression that it created in Xinjiang.Uyghur nationalist sources clearly had reason to empha-size the size and strength of the opposition to Chineserule, while, conversely, the official Chinese media havetried to demonstrate the success of its rule in Xinjiang andthe weakness and criminality of the independence move-ment. The authorities in Xinjiang were acutely aware ofthe parallels with the Chechen struggle for independenceagainst Russia, and gave the war in Chechnya as one oftheir reasons for clamping down so hard. On 29 April, Xin-jiang Ribao reported on the success of the crackdown,claiming that over 1,300 arrests had been made, 70 crim-inal organizations had been destroyed and large quantitiesof weapons, ammunition and money acquired during rob-beries had been seized. Two days earlier, the same news-paper had reported on the celebration of the Muslimfestival of Corban (Id al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice) bythe political leadership of Xinjiang in a show of ethnicunity, solidarity and stability.119

The CCP in Xinjiang was also becoming increasinglyconcerned about the influence of separatist as well asIslamic ideas within its own ranks. Its Discipline andInspection Commission issued a statement that Partycadres who persisted in taking part in religious activities,or produced books and other materials that promoted theidea of national separatism and religious education wouldbe punished, as would any who were found to have been

associating with criminals or terrorists.120

Another in the series of trials related to separatism inXinjiang was announced by the Chinese authorities on 1March 1999. Eight people were executed and 45 otherswere given suspended death sentences, or sentenced toimprisonment for what were described as ‘illegal religiousterrorist activities’.121 The execution of Abduhelil Abdul-mejit, described by the Eastern Turkestan InformationCentre as the chief organizer of the 5 February GhuljaUprising, was announced by the Centre on 22 October2000. It is alleged that he was subject to sustained inter-rogation and ill-treatment in the Chapchal Su detentioncentre in Yining county in the northwest of Xinjiangbefore he was killed and then buried secretly.122

At the time of writing, it is impossible to determinewith any degree of precision how many of the political andreligious activists of the 1990s are associated with the Sufiorders. But it is highly likely that much of the most activeresistance is connected with Sufism, and particularly theNaqshbandi order.

New religions

New religious movements have mushroomed in Chinasince the relaxation of central control in the 1980s.

Some have developed within established traditions, par-ticularly Chinese folk religions, but also in the ChristianChurch. Both the authorities and existing religious bod-ies in China have had the same problems as the rest ofthe world in attempting to distinguish between religionswhich are generally considered to be socially acceptableand cults which are not. The term xiejiao (‘heterodox andevil teaching’) has been used to distinguish undesirablegroups from zongjiao (‘religion’), a term which suggeststhe teachings of the clan and its ancestors. Followers andsupporters of the newer religions do not share these dis-tinctions and the case of Falungong is the most obviousof these.

Rural cults and secret societies in the Buddhist andDaoist tradition, which had been declared extinct by theCultural Revolution, began to re-emerge in the 1980s andthe newspaper Zhongguo fazhi bao (China Legal Daily)has reported many police actions against these groups.Among the revived groups which were reported to havebeen broken up by the Public Security forces were thequasi-Buddhist Shenmendao (Way of the Spirit Gate),Yiguandao (Way of Pervading Unity), Taishangmen (Gateof the Supreme Overlord) and Shengxiandao (Way of theSaints) of Jiangsu province, the Xiantiandao (Way of thePrior Realm) in Jiangxi. Two men who set up an under-ground Buddhist organization were executed in Xiangtan(Hunan).123 Similar societies emerged throughout Chinaaccording to an internal classified document published bythe Ministry of Public Security in Beijing in 1985. In manycases, elderly former leaders of these sects or their rela-tives were the focus of the revival, and the police com-plained that the sect leaders used their positions toswindle money and property, treated medical conditionswhen they were not properly qualified and molestedwomen.124 These are standard accusations against religiousand other unofficial leaders and, although they may have

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Major religions

some basis in reality, some are simply slanders.It was the rise of Falungong, founded by Li Hongzhi in

1992, which alerted observers to the emergence of newreligions in China. Falungong, or Falun Dafa as it is alsoknown, drew on Buddhist and Daoist traditions, medita-tion and qigong. To date it has been by far the most pop-ular of the new religions, and its success in attractingeducated urban dwellers, including senior members ofthe CCP, as well as people from all walks of life in bothtown and country, brought about a ferocious crackdown.Some estimates have put the number of Falungong prac-titioners as high as 70–100 million but it is impossible tosubstantiate this figure.

Falungong has posed particular problems for the lead-ership of the CCP, first, because it is Chinese in origin andinspiration. It could not therefore be dismissed as a for-eign import. Second, it is not even overtly religious(although it has a considerable body of doctrine) as itsmain public manifestation is the practice of qigong exer-cises which is commonplace in China. Third, its membersare, generally, urban, educated, often middle-aged, andinclude members of the CCP, armed forces and police. Itis seen as a political threat for these three reasons, andalso because CCP leaders are aware of the role that reli-gious secret societies have played in overthrowing govern-ments in history. There have been suggestions that qigongmasters were cultivated by senior CCP members and evenby the PLA as it was thought the practice might have somemilitary value.

Falungong came to prominence on 25 April 1999 whenover 10,000 of its supporters demonstrated outsideZhongnanhai (the headquarters of the CCP) in Beijing todemand that the movement be officially recognized. Thiswas the largest demonstration seen in the Chinese capitalsince the violent suppression of the Democracy Move-ment in the area round Tian’anmen Square in June 1989,and clearly brought back memories of that period toChina’s leaders. The Beijing demonstrations followed thepublication in Tianjin of an article by He Zuoxiu, a seniornuclear physicist, in which he criticized the group assuperstitions and anti-scientific. Demonstrations andarrests followed and the group decided to take theirprotest to the centre of power to demand recognition andthe release of those arrested.125

The founder and leader of Falungong, who was untilthen unknown outside the movement, is a former qigonginstructor, Li Hongzhi who, by the time of the demon-strations, had moved to live in the USA. His teachingswere popularized through his book Zhuan Falun and byInternet web-sites and videotapes. The movement, whichclaims to have over 100 million followers, is financed bythe sale of books, tapes and other products such as medi-tation cushions.

The local daily newspaper Beijing Ribao reported thedemonstrations in its 28 April edition in some detail,referring to the Tianjin journal that had published theoriginal criticism of the group. It also reported a govern-ment and police statement warning Falungong not tobelieve rumours and asking for complaints to go throughproper channels and for no actions to be taken that mightthreaten social stability.

There were further demonstrations in Beijing in June

1999 and again many Falungong members were arrest-ed.126 Initially the CCP denied that there was a crackdown,but police leave was cancelled and travellers entering Bei-jing by road and rail were stopped and questioned.127 By22 July the mood had changed and the Ministry of PublicSecurity issued an order banning the Falun Dafa Instituteand the Falungong movement. The order specifically pro-hibited the display of pictures, banners or other Falun-gong insignia, the sale of their books and audio andvideotapes, and gatherings of Falungong supporters.Police in Wuhan seized and destroyed 130,000 books and27,000 tapes containing Falungong material, and similarraids took place in Xinjiang and Tianjin.128

The extent of the involvement of members of the Com-munist Youth League, the CCP and of government offi-cials in Falungong gradually emerged and intensified theresolution of the CCP to break it up. In July police arrest-ed 1,200 officials suspected of involvement and People’sDaily instructed officials to have nothing to do with themovement.129

It was noticeable that support for Falungong came dis-proportionately from women. Reports of imprisonmentsand administrative detentions for following the teachingsof Falungong name more women than men although pre-cise figures are not available.

Beijing issued an arrest warrant for Li Hongzhi butInterpol was not prepared to act, on the grounds that thiswas a religious or political matter and not a criminal case.Police also raided a printing factory in Liaoning provincewhere Falungong books were being printed and broke upthe Falungong organization in Jilin.130 Li Hongzhi’s allegedluxurious lifestyle was attacked in the press.131 By August,People’s Daily was announcing that Falungong had beenstamped out, that 99 per cent of the 31,000 membersFalungong had in Beijing had left the group,132 and thatthe organization had already been smashed in variousprovinces.133 The response of the authorities was a returnto the mass campaigns of public condemnation. Falun-gong was compared in the Chinese press to Aum Shin-rikyo which was responsible for the Sarin gas attack in theTokyo underground and the Branch Davidians in Texas.People’s Daily published a long article entitled ‘MaoZedong, Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin on materialismand atheism’ as part of an anti-religious and pro-atheistcampaign that continued relentlessly throughoutAugust.134

The authorities confirmed that they would treat Falun-gong leaders as criminals but that ordinary memberswould not be punished in the same way.135 Human rightsgroups estimated that some 300 members of Falungongwere being held by the police so that they did not disruptcelebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Liberation.136 Sixof the main organizers of Falungong who were to becharged were named by China Women’s News in October1999. They are Xu Yinquan, who was also a former deputydirector of the Public Security Bureau in Changchun, FuLixin, who was involved in demonstrations in Tianjin, andZhang Haitao, who ran a Falungong website. The otherthree, Zhang Guoliang, Deng Jin and Lu Yuzhong, hadpublished Falungong books.137

Protests continued and there were more arrests nearthe Great Hall of the People in October. The term xiejiao

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Major religions

(‘cult’) was used for the first time in People’s Daily.138

Reports began to emerge of the ill-treatment of Falun-gong members in custody, sometimes resulting in thedeaths of the detainees,139 and in December 1999 and Jan-uary 2000 People’s Daily carried a series of recantationsfrom Falungong members who had left the group. Trialsresulted in lengthy prison sentences for Falungong sup-porters but protests continued and there were arrests atTian’anmen Square on 4 March 2000.

Hundreds of Falungong supporters were arrested afterdemonstrations in Tian’anmen Square at the NationalDay celebration on 1 October 2000. Instructions onwhere demonstrations were being held were conveyed byone of the Falungong’s websites in the USA.140 The officialpress continued its campaign against Falungong, a clearindication that it has not been wiped out as the authoritieshave stated.

Members of the Falungong and sympathizers, bothwithin China and abroad, not surprisingly take a com-pletely different view of the movement. Falun Dafa prac-titioners in the UK solicited support for nominating LiHongzhi for the Nobel Peace Prize ‘for his significant con-tributions to our society and for his profound teachings ofthe universal principle of Zhen–Shan–Ren or Truth–Com-passion–Forbearance’. Campaigners against the suppres-sion of Falungong by the Chinese government describe itas ‘one of the traditional Qigong exercises, aimed at healthimprovement and stress relief. There are moral principlesunderlying Falungong which encourage its members to betruthful, compassionate and tolerant.’141 Falungong litera-ture states unequivocally that ‘Falun Dafa is neither reli-gious nor political, as it does not have any political agendaor religious rituals.’142

Falungong claims that, during the repression of theirorganization, over 40,000 practitioners have beendetained and sent to education-through-labour camps(laojiao). People can be sent to these camps by the policeor government officials without a court appearance whichis necessary for the reform-through-labour (laogai)camps. They also report brutality by police, 24 deaths inpolice custody and that members are being held in men-tal hospitals.143 Five people set themselves on fire inTian’anmen Square on the eve of Chinese New Year 2001and one died. Although Falungong sources denied thatthere was any connection with the movement it is clearthat the self-immolation was a protest against the cam-paign against Falungong. Beijing mobilized opinionagainst the suicide protest. Leaders of the ChineseCatholic Patriotic Association, the Chinese Daoist Associ-ation, Chinese Islamic Association and the ProtestantThree-Self Patriotic Movement, and a leading Buddhistfrom the Guangji Temple in Beijing, condemned theactions of the five and argued that it confirmed the officialview that Falungong is a cult.144

Although Falungong received by far the greatest cov-erage because of the scale of its support and the ferocityof the government repression, it was far from the onlyqigong organization that arose in the 1990s and ChinaSports Daily announced that all qigong organizationswould have to register with official sports bodies andwould be banned from taking part in religious activities.

The Zhonggong movement, also classified by the Chi-

nese authorities as a cult, came under the spotlight in Jan-uary 2000 when its leader, Zhang Hungbao, applied forpolitical asylum in the US-owned island of Guam in thePacific. Over 100 offices of Zhonggong were closed downin a clampdown that began in November 1999; the head-quarters of the movement was also raided by police whosequestered assets to the value of US $6 million. Zhong-gong followers were originally accused of practising med-icine without a licence.145 Zhang faces serious charges inChina, including rape and robbery, but he claims that heis being persecuted as a political dissident and US immi-gration officials are considering the possibility that thesecharges have been fabricated.146

In the province of Hunan, Liu Jiaguo, the leader andfounder of a religious movement known as Zhushenjiao(Supreme Spirit), was arrested and charged with a rangeof crimes including multiple rapes. Other members of thesect have also been tried for fraud and rapes. Liu was sen-tenced to death and executed.147 Another qigong group,Bodhi Gong, protested its innocence of charges of givingillegal medical treatment and asserted its allegiance to theCCP. Many similar groups exist.148 Leaders of two othergroups – the Way of Compassion in Hubei and theNational Way – were arrested in late 1999.149 Police inSuzhou arrested Shen Chang, the founder of Shen ChangHuman Science, a qigong group which claims to have asmany as 5 million followers, and charged him with tax eva-sion and disturbing social order by assembling a crowd.150

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Major religions

On 26 September 2000 the State Administra-tion of Religious Affairs (SARA) issued newregulations designed to control religiousactivities by foreigners. Rules for the Imple-mentation of the Provisions on the Adminis-

tration of Religious Activities of Aliens within the People’sRepublic of China, a document which strengthens controlsimposed by legislation in 1994. According to Ye Xiaowen,director of the SARA, foreigners would only be permittedto take part in the religious activities in monasteries, tem-ples, mosques and churches that were registered with theChinese authorities. None would be allowed to run reli-gious organizations or schools of their own.151 Christiangroups in Hong Kong believe that these restrictions applyto them as well as to foreigners.

Despite this, there is no doubt there has been verymuch greater freedom for religious activities since the‘Reform and Opening’ policies of Deng Xiaoping began in1979. If these policies continue, and at the time of writingthat remains the most likely projection in the short andmedium terms, that freedom will continue to develop.However, unless there is a colossal and unpredictablechange in the nature of the Chinese political system,restrictions on that freedom will also continue. Marxist-Leninist-Maoist ideology no longer has any great influencein China, although some of the rhetoric remains, but theatheist element of it is still deeply ingrained among the rul-ing elite, in spite of the success that Falungong has hadwith some former government and military cadres. Mao-ism has effectively been replaced by a new kind of nation-alism which some commentators have described as apositive nationalism, pragmatic and rational but committedto asserting what are perceived as the national interests ofChina. Where religion appears to serve these interests itmay well be tolerated and even encouraged to a limitedextent. Where it appears to conflict with those interests itwill be restricted or even suppressed.

This study has concentrated on the major world reli-gions. Buddhism, Christianity and Islam all have strongsupport from communities outside China and, to a greateror lesser extent, receive funding and publicity from thosecommunities. There are many other minority religions inChina including shamanism, ancestor worship and localreligions practised by ethnic minority groups, particularlyin the central and southwestern provinces. These do nothave the presence on the world stage of the larger religionsand, because of this and the small size of their communi-ties, they are arguably under greater threat from CCP poli-cies of assimilation and the social consequences ofeconomic modernization. The fact that most of these reli-gions are not influenced by foreign organizations does,however, protect them to a certain extent from Beijing’snationalist response to the world religions.

The overriding political priorities of the CCP in thetwenty-first century are territorial integrity (maintainingand protecting the borders that China has had since the

eighteenth century, notably retaining control of Xinjiangand Tibet and reabsorbing Taiwan), reversing the humilia-tion of a century of poverty and subordination to foreignpowers, and asserting its right to be a world power ratherthan just a regional one. Religious activity that can bedefined as patriotic has a place in this scheme. Any activi-ties, including religious activities, that appear to under-mine the state by lending spiritual support to separatisttendencies or might be construed as advancing the inter-ests of other states, and the USA in particular, will beviewed with suspicion.

It is fairly safe to predict that there will continue to beconflict between the CCP-dominated state and leaders ofboth recognized and unofficial religious groups as the lat-ter attempt to push forward the boundaries for the reli-gious freedom to which they feel entitled. It is much moredifficult to predict when and where those conflicts willdevelop and which groups will be involved. The religio-political differences between Beijing and communities inTibet and Xinjiang clearly have the potential to be long-running conflicts and the CCP authorities have identifiedthese as the ones that cause them most concern as theyinvolve China’s national boundaries and relations withTibetan and Uyghur communities living outside China. Incontrast, the rise of Falungong was predicted by no one. Ithad been known since the early 1980s that religious groupsand secret societies were making a comeback in the ruralareas in spite of the fact that the CCP claimed to havewiped them out in the 1950s, but there was no warningthat a religion, drawing on Chinese traditions and appeal-ing to a largely urban and better-educated public, couldachieve the degree of support that Falungong enjoys. Thissupport is likely to continue in spite of the repression andthere could be further and more serious demonstrations byFalungong practitioners against state policy.

The rural areas just mentioned are a source of potentialconflict with Beijing. As China joins the World TradeOrganization and moves towards a more urbanized andindustrialized society there are bound to be large numbersof peasant farmers who are not willing or able to migrate tothe cities in search of new and modern employment andare likely to be left in dire poverty. If the history of Chinain the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is anything to goby, many of these may well be attracted to undergroundand secretive rural religious groups, some already in exis-tence and others yet to be formed. In the vast and alreadypoor countryside these groups could once again coalesceinto an opposition to the CCP in the same way that theTaiping Heavenly Kingdom (Taiping Tianguo) rose up inrebellion against the imperial Qing dynasty in 1851. Thearmies of the Qing eventually suppressed the rebellion butonly after 13 years, loss of life on a scale that changed thedemographic picture of China for generations and withconsequential damage to the economy from which Chinais still recovering.

23


Conclusion

1. The steps taken by China towards liberalization of soci-ety have brought it dividends in terms of increased inter-national cooperation in the diplomatic and tradedomains. Combined with its economic development,this should give the leadership the confidence to recog-nize the right to freedom of religion and association.China should allow, in fact and in law, religious organi-zations, including those not under direct control by thestate, to function freely, and recognize the right of all ofits citizens, including CCP members, to freedom of reli-gion and freedom of association. Any limitations to theserights should strictly adhere to international humanrights standards, including the right to a fair trial, and theright to liberty and security of person, with all the spe-cific protections which those rights entail, in keepingwith the International Covenant on Civil and PoliticalRights (ICCPR). This clearly also applies to ‘new’ reli-gions or movements such as Falungong (Falun Dafa).

2. The state should refrain from labelling organizations as‘patriotic’ or ‘unpatriotic’; not only may this have nega-tive consequences on rights to freedom of religion andassociation, guaranteed by international human rightsstandards, such as the Declaration on the Rights of Per-sons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious or Lin-guistic Minorities (UNDM) and the ICCPR, they mayalso serve to incite hatred among the wider populationand inappropriate acts by private individuals.

3. There is considerable overlap between ethnic and reli-gious minorities, and it is very important that Chinadevelops policies to allow ethnic minorities to asserttheir cultural identities in this multi-ethnic nation. Reli-gious identities are an important part of these identitiesfor many ethnic groups. The state should design andimplement laws to eliminate intolerance in both thepublic and private spheres, and implement educationprogrammes in schools and universities to promote theprinciples of tolerance of all cultures, ethnicities andreligions, in keeping with the Convention on the Rightsof the Child and the Covenant on Economic, Social andCultural Rights.

4. The state should allow religious communities and orga-nizations to maintain links with communities and organi-zations outside China, in keeping with internationalhuman rights standards such as the UNDM. These con-tacts can serve to promote international understandingand tolerance. At the same time, religious bodies outsideChina should be sensitive to local feelings when liaisingwith co-religionists in China. Many Chinese, not only thepolitical elite, are very sensitive to the issue of externalinfluence in their affairs.

5. The state should allow a greater role for participation ofreligious minorities and their representatives in public

life, in keeping with human rights standards. The partic-ipation of some religious groups in the Chinese People’sPolitical Consultative Conference (CPPCC) is to beapplauded, and the state is encouraged to open up par-ticipation in this body to a wide range of religious groups,including those not controlled by the state. The state isencouraged to view effective participation of religiousand other minorities in public life and increased free-doms of religion and association, within the frameworkof the law, as a mechanism for reducing tensionsbetween communities, mitigating the grievances, per-ceived or real, felt by communities who have traditional-ly felt excluded from mainstream life in China, andencouraging them to see themselves as true stakeholdersin society.

6. State development programmes should take intoaccount the interests of religious and other minorities.Programmes, especially those implemented in regionsstrongly populated by religious minority communities,should allow for the participation of those communitiesin all aspects of the programmes, from design, throughexecution, to evaluation.

7. The continuing repression in Tibet and Xinjiang has cre-ated an untenable situation of conflict and instability,and has placed China in the position of comprehensive-ly failing to fulfil its international human rights obliga-tions. As a first step towards resolving the conflict, Chinashould implement, in law and in fact, the full range offreedoms of religion and association, as well as otherfundamental rights. The international communityshould deploy full diplomatic efforts towards encourag-ing China to achieve this end.

8. China should take steps to implement the provisions ofthe UNDM, the Declaration on the Elimination of AllForms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based onReligion or Belief, and fulfil its obligations under theInternational Convention on the Elimination of AllForms of Racial Discrimination and other instrumentswhich it is a party to. China is also encouraged to com-plete the process it began in 1998 when it signed theICCPR, by ratifying and implementing the covenant.

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24


Recommendations

1. This Report does not include any discussion of thereligious situation in Taiwan. The island of Taiwan wason the margins of the Chinese Empire, became animportant trading base for the Dutch and had briefperiods of independence. It became part of the Japan-ese Empire in 1895 and remained a colony until 1945.The Guomindang established a base there during theCivil War of 1946–9 and continued their Republic ofChina government on the island after the CCP tookcontrol of the mainland in 1949. The social and politi-cal context of Taiwan is therefore completely differentfrom the PRC. Likewise, Hong Kong is covered onlybriefly.

2. Barnett, A. Doak, Cadres, Bureaucracy and PoliticalPower in Communist China, New York and London,Columbia University Press, 1967, pp. 198, 208–9.

3. Both Tibet and Xinjiang are within the borders of thePeople’s Republic of China, are under its administra-tive control, and are therefore de facto part of China.They are included in this Report although they arecontested territories with contested histories. Both aresubject to the laws and regulations on religion that areenforced by the PRC. There is considerable sympathyin the international community for the independenceof Tibet, but there is still a great divergence of opinionon Tibet’s status in international law.

4. Qigong is the art or science of deep-breathing exercis-es.

5. The concept of the three religions was popularized inthe English-speaking world by the Revd W.E. Soothill’sseries of twelve lectures, published in 1929 as TheThree Religions of China, London, Oxford UniversityPress. The Chinese phrase on which he drew was RuShi Dao sanjiao, ‘The three religions of Ru (Confu-cianism), Shi – from the first syllable of the Chinesetranscription of Sakyamuni, a name of the Buddha –(Buddhism) and Dao.’ ‘Dao’ and ‘Daoism’ are modernspellings, reflecting the pinyin system of romanizationused in China since the 1950s, ‘Tao’ and ‘Taoism’ arebased on the older Wade-Giles spelling.

6. Feuchtwang, S., The Imperial Metaphor: Popular Reli-gion in China, London, Routledge, 1992; Chesneaux,J., Secret Societies in China in the 19th and 20th Cen-turies, Hong Kong, Heinemann, 1971.

7. Dillon, M., China’s Muslim Hui Community: Migra-tion, Settlement and Sects, London, Curzon, 1999.

8. Bottomore T.B. and Rubel, M., Karl Marx: SelectedWritings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Har-mondsworth, Penguin, 1967, pp. 41–2.

9. Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing,Foreign Languages Press, 1954, p. 50.

10. Whyte, B., Unfinished Encounter: China and Chris-tianity, London, Fount (Collins), 1988, p. 342.

11. Yang, C.K., Religion in Chinese Society: A Study ofContemporary Social Functions of Religion and Someof Their Historical Factors, Berkeley and Los Angeles,University of California Press, 1967, pp. 180–217,393–4.

12. Chan, Wing-tsit, Religious Trends in Modern China,New York, Octagon, 1978, p. x.

13. Yang described Chan’s book as ‘an excellent account ofthe religious movements in the Republic’, Yang,

op. cit., pp. 354, 358, 367.14. Kampen, T., Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and the Evolu-

tion of the Chinese Communist Leadership, Copen-hagen, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2000.

15. An English translation of Document 19 can be foundin MacInnis, D.E., Religion in China Today: Policyand Practice, New York, Orbis, 1989, pp. 8–26.

16. Ibid., p. 15.17. Ibid., p. 17.18. Yang, op. cit., p. 394.19. MacInnis, op. cit., p. 20.20. Ibid., p. 22.21. Xinzhong Yao, An Introduction to Confucianism, Cam-

bridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 181–3. 22. Ibid., p. 191.23. Chan, op. cit., pp. 8, 19, 53.24. Swart, P. and Till, B., ‘A revival of Confucian cere-

monies in China’, in Julian F. Pas (ed.), The Turning ofthe Tide: Religion in China Today, New York, RoyalAsiatic Society in association with Oxford UniversityPress, 1989, pp. 210–14.

25. MacInnis, op. cit., p. 375.26. Chan, op. cit., pp. 146, 154–5.27. Schipper, K., The Taoist Body, Berkeley, University of

California Press, 1993.28. Chan, op. cit., pp. 153, 156.29. Gong Xuezeng et al. (eds), Minzu wenti yu zongjiao

wenti jiangzuo (Ethnic and Religious Issues), Beijing,Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao (CCP Central PartySchool), 1994, pp. 163–4.

30. MacInnis, op. cit., pp. 204–20; Hahn, T.F., ‘New devel-opments concerning Buddhist and Daoist monaster-ies’, in Pas, op. cit., pp. 79–101, Pas, J.F., ‘Revival oftemple worship and popular religious traditions’, inPas, op. cit., pp. 158–85.

31. Dean, K., Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of SoutheastChina, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1993.

32. Yang Zengwen (ed.), Zhongguo fojiao jichu zhishi(Fundamentals of Chinese Buddhism), Beijing,Zongjiao wenhua chubanshe, 1999, pp. 1–3.

33. Ch’en, K.K.S., Buddhism in China: A Historical Sur-vey, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1964,pp. 16–20, 40–1.

34. Ibid., p. 213.35. Brook, T., Praying for Power: Buddhism and the For-

mation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China, Cam-bridge, MA, Council on East Asian Studies, HarvardUniversity, 1993, pp. 188–91.

36. Ibid.37. The Boxer Rising was a popular anti-government

movement, successfully turned, by the Qing court,against foreigners, especially missionaries.

38. Chan, op. cit., pp. 91–2.39. Welch, H., Buddhism under Mao, Cambridge, MA,

Harvard University Press, 1972, p. 6; Gong Xuezeng,op. cit., p. 159; Yang Zengwen, op. cit., p. 71.

40. Welch, op. cit., pp. 2–7.41. Chan, op. cit., p. 84.42. Welch, op. cit., pp. 7–11, 389–407.43. Ibid., pp. 42–52.44. Ibid., pp. 52–83.

25


N O T E S

45. Ibid., pp. 340–63; Yang Zengwen, op. cit., p. 72.46. Yang Zengwen, op. cit., p. 73. Living Buddhas are the

reincarnated high lamas in the Mongolian tradition ofTibetan Buddhism.

47. Goldstein, M.C., A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State, Berkeley, Uni-versity of California Press, 1989, p. xix. The Seventeen-Point agreement is the document agreed by the newCentral People’s government of the CCP and aTibetan delegation signed in Beijing in April 1951,which formally incorporated Tibet in to the PRC andset out the parameters for the relations between Bei-jing and Lhasa and the roles of the Dalai Lama andPanchen Lama, the two most senior spiritual leaders ofTibet.

48. Goldstein, M.C., The Snow Lion and the Dragon:China, Tibet and the Dalai Lama, Berkeley, Universityof California Press, 1997.

49. Ibid., 1997, pp. 14–20.50. Ibid., p. 30.51. A translation of this document can be found in Shakya,

Tsering, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A Historyof Modern Tibet since 1947, London, Pimlico, 1999,pp. 449–52.

52. Ibid., pp. 163–211.53. Ibid., pp. 314–47.54. Goldstein, op. cit., 1997, pp. 61–75.55. Shakya, op. cit., pp. 381–2.56. Between 6 and 20 Tibetans are reported to have been

killed (Goldstein, op. cit., p. 79).57. Ibid., 1997, pp. 79–83.58. Ibid., pp. 100–11.59. SCMP (South China Morning Post) 29/6/00.60. PTI New Delhi 11/10/00 via Uighur-L (an Internet

news group for Uyghurs and people interested in theircause).

61. BBC on-line news.bbc.co.uk, 6/10/00 (all references tothe BBC are to on-line news unless otherwise indicat-ed).

62. Financial Times 9/1/00; BBC 8/1/00.63. Agence France Presse 27/8/00 via Uighur-L.64. SCMP 28/8/00.65. SCMP 30/9/00.66. Whyte, op. cit., pp. 49–78, 79–92.67. Ibid., p. 96 and passim.68. Chan, op. cit., p.177–8.69. Whyte, op. cit., pp. 200, 240.70. Ibid., p. 241.71. MacInnis, op. cit., pp. 313–59.72. Whyte, op. cit., pp. 217–18, 222.73. Ibid., p.122.74. Ibid., p. 233.75. SCMP 27/12/99.76. BBC 9/12/99; SCMP 10/12/99.77. SCMP 19/5/00.78. BBC 24/8/00.79. SCMP 5/9/00; BBC 4/9/00.80. SCMP 28/8/00.81. Xinhua News Agency 25/9/00.82. SCMP 23/9/00.83. MacInnis, op. cit., p. 264.84. Ibid., p. 289.

85. Tang, E., ‘A year of confrontations: the CatholicChurch in China in 1989’, in A. Hunter and D. Rim-mington (eds), All Under Heaven: Chinese Traditionand Christian Life in the People’s Republic of China,Kampen, Uitgeversmaatschappij J.H. Kok, 1992, p. 69.

86. Ibid., pp. 73–6.87. Ibid., pp. 76–9.88. SCMP 10/9/99, 13/9/99.89. SCMP 15/12/99.90. BBC 4/1/00.91. BBC 4/1/00.92. SCMP 27/6/00.93. Reuters 24/8/00 via Uighur-L.94. Uighur-L 29/5/00.95. SCMP 30/8/00.96. SCMP 5/9/00; HFP 1/9/00.97. BBC 5/9/00; SCMP 6/9/00.98. BBC 25/9/00.99. BBC 15/9/00.100. BBC 25/9/00, 26/9/00; SCMP 28/9/00.101. Vatican website; SCMP 2/10/00; BBC 1/10/00.102. This is based on an aggregation of the official census

figures for ethnic groups that are predominantly Mus-lim. Zhang Tianlu et al. (eds), Zhongguo Musilin renk-ou (China’s Muslim Population), Yinchuan, NingxiaPeople’s Publishing House, 1991.

103. Chan, op. cit., pp. 186–7; Fletcher, J., ‘Ch’ing InnerAsia c. 1800’, in J.K. Fairbank and D. Twitchett (eds),Cambridge History of China, Vol. 10, part 1 and ‘Theheyday of the Ch’ing order in Mongolia, Sinkiang andTibet’, in Fairbank and Twitchett, op. cit., Vol. 1, part1; Ma Tong, Zhongguo Yisilan jiaopai yu menhuanzhidu shilue (Brief History of Sects and the Sufi Path-way System in China’s Islam), Yinchuan, Ningxia ren-min chubanshe, 1983.

104. Dillon, op. cit., 1999, pp. 60–74; Lipmann, J.N., Famil-iar Strangers: A History of Muslims in NorthwestChina, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1997;Chu Wen-djang, The Moslem Rebellion in North-WestChina 1862–1878: A Study of Government MinorityPolicy, Mouton, 1966; Broomhall, M., Islam in China:A Neglected Problem, London, 1910.

105. D’Ollone, Commandant, Recherches sur les Musul-mans Chinois, Paris, 1911; Dillon, op. cit., 1999, pp.75–85.

106. Ibid., pp. 131–52. 107. For more detail see Ma Tong, op. cit., p. 107; Mian

Weilin, Ningxia Yisilan jiaopai gaiyao (Muslim Sects inNingxia), Yinchuan, 1991, pp. 19–21.

108. The ethnic composition of Xinjiang is complicated.The Uyghurs consider that they are the autochthonouspopulation of Xinjiang and are very closely related inlanguage and culture to the Uzbeks of Uzbekistan.Other Turkic-speaking communities include the Kaza-khs of northern Xinjiang, themselves related to themain ethnic group of Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyzwhose relatives are in present-day Kyrgyzstan.

109. Personal observation.110. The numbers are hotly disputed. Official Chinese

sources say that three or four people were killed;Uyghur exiles have said that hundreds were killed andhundreds more arrested.

26


N O T E S

111. Zhang Yuxi, ‘Xinjiang jiefang yilai fandui minzu fen-liezhuyi de douzheng ji qi lishi jingyan’ (The struggleagainst ethnic separatism in Xinjiang since Liberationand its historical lessons), in Yang Faren (ed.), FanYisilanzhuyi, fan tujuezhuyi yanjiu (Pan-Islam andPan-Turkism), Urumqi, Xinjiang Social Science Press,1997, pp. 333–4.

112. BBC SWB/FE (Summary of World Broadcasts FarEast) 0745, 0746 , 0747, 0748, 0749, 0751, 0753, 0763;all April 1990.

113. Zhang Yuxi, op. cit., pp. 338–41.114. BBC SWB/FE/ 26/10/90, 30/10/90, 22/12/90 citing

Xinjiang Ribao, 23/11/90.115. BBC SWB/FE 6/5/96.116. BBC SWB/FE 9/5/96.117. BBC SWB/FE 17/4/96.118. BBC SWB/FE 6/6/96.119. BBC SWB/FE 17/5/96, 22/5/96.120. BBC SWB/FE 28/5/96.121. BBC on-line News World: Asia Pacific 1/3/99.122. Eastern Turkestan Information Centre (ETIC) Report

22/10/00.123 SCMP 1/5/99; BBC News on-line 13/10/99.124. Munro 1989.125. SCMP 28/4/99–3/5/99.126. SCMP 7/6/99.127. SCMP 12/6/99.128. BBC 27/7/99.129. New York Times 27/7/99; SCMP 27/7/99.130. SCMP 4/8/99; People’s Daily 4/8/99.131. SCMP 6/8/99.132. BBC 8/8/99.133. People’s Daily 3/8/99.134. People’s Daily 10/8/99.135. BBC 9/9/99.136. Liberation (jiefang) is the term used to refer to the

establishment of the PRC in 1949. BBC 19/9/99;SCMP 20/9/99.

137. SCMP 13/10/99.138. BBC 28/10/99; People’s Daily 28/10/99.139. SCMP 14/12/99.140. BBC 1/10/00; SCMP 2/10/00.141. Letter from Falun Gong Association, UK, 21/8/00.142. Falun Dafa: Peaceful Journey of Truthfulness – Com-

passion – Forbearance, compiled by Falun Dafa practi-tioners, 1st edn, July 2000, p. 3.

143. Ibid., p. 4 and passim.144. Xinhua News Agency 31/1/01 via BBC Monitoring.145. BBC 3/1/00.146. SCMP 16/9/00; BBC 24/9/00.147. BBC 13/10/99.148. SCMP 27/7/99.149. BBC 2/11/99.150. SCMP 29/8/00.151. SCMP 27/9/00.

◗

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Shakya, Tsering, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A His-tory of Modern Tibet since 1947, London, Pimlico,1999.

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temporary Social Functions of Religion and Some oftheir Historical Factors, Berkeley and Los Angeles,University of California Press, 1967. (First published1961.)

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Zhang Yuxi, ‘Xinjiang jiefang yilai fandui minzu fen-liezhuyi de douzheng ji qi lishi jingyan’ (The struggleagainst ethnic separatism in Xinjiang since Liberationand its historical lessons), in Yang Faren (ed) Fan Yisi-lanzhuyi, fan tujuezhuyi yanjiu (Pan-Islam and Pan-Turkism), Urumqi, Xinjiang Social Science Press, 1997

◗

28


AFRICABurundi: Breaking the Cycle of ViolenceChadEritrea: Towards Unity in DiversityThe FalashasIndian South AfricansInequalities in ZimbabweJehovah’s Witnesses in AfricaThe NamibiansThe New Position of East Africa’s AsiansThe Sahel: The People’s Right to DevelopmentThe San of the KalahariSomalia: A Nation in TurmoilSudan: Conflict and MinoritiesUgandaThe Western Saharans

THE AMERICASAfro-Brazilians: Time for RecognitionAfro-Central Americans: Rediscovering the African HeritageAmerindians of South AmericaCanada’s IndiansThe East Indians of Trinidad and GuyanaFrench Canada in CrisisHaitian Refugees in the USInuit (Eskimos) of CanadaThe Maya of GuatemalaThe Miskito Indians of NicaraguaMexican Americans in the USThe Original Americans: US IndiansPuerto Ricans in the US

ASIAThe Adivasis of BangladeshThe Adivasis of IndiaAfghanistan: A Nation of MinoritiesThe Baluchis and PathansThe Biharis of BangladeshCentral Asia: Conflict or Stability and Development?The Chinese of South-East AsiaEast Timor, West Papua and IndonesiaForests and Indigenous Peoples of AsiaJapan’s Minorities – Burakumin, Koreans, Ainu, OkinawansIndonesia: Regional Conflicts and State TerrorThe Lumad and Moro of MindanaoMinorities in CambodiaMinorities of Central VietnamMuslim Women in IndiaThe SikhsSri Lanka: A Bitter Harvest (with 2001 Update)The Tamils of Sri LankaTajikistan: A Forgotten Civil WarThe Tibetans

EUROPEThe Basques and CatalansThe Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans

CyprusMinorities and Autonomy in Western EuropeMinorities in the BalkansMinorities in Central and Eastern EuropeNative Peoples of the Russian Far NorthThe North CaucasusNorthern Ireland: Managing DifferenceThe RastafariansRefugees in EuropeRoma/Gypsies: A European MinorityRomania’s Ethnic HungariansMinorities in Southeast Europe: Inclusion and ExclusionThe Saami of LaplandThe Southern BalkansThe Two Irelands

THE MIDDLE EASTThe ArmeniansThe Baha’is of IranThe Beduin of the NegevThe Copts of EgyptIsrael’s Oriental Immigrants and DruzesThe KurdsLebanonMigrant Workers in the GulfThe Palestinians

SOUTHERN OCEANSAboriginal AustraliansDiego Garcia: A Contrast to the FalklandsEast Timor, West Papua/Irian and IndonesiaFijiThe Kanaks of New CaledoniaThe Maori of Aotearoa – New ZealandMicronesia: The Problem of PalauThe Pacific: Nuclear Testing and Minorities

THEMATICChildren: Rights and ResponsibilitiesConstitutional Law and MinoritiesEducation Rights and MinoritiesFemale Genital Mutilation: Proposals for ChangeInternational Action against GenocideThe International Protection of MinoritiesThe Jews of Africa and AsiaLand Rights and MinoritiesLanguage, Literacy and MinoritiesMinorities and Human Rights LawNew Approaches to Minority ProtectionRace and Law in Britain and the USThe Refugee Dilemma: International Recognition and

AcceptanceThe Social Psychology of MinoritiesTeaching about PrejudiceWar: The Impact on Minority and Indigenous Children

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