How China's Communist Party licenses churches and jails pastors

Article 36 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China says that citizens enjoy freedom of religious belief. Read the rest of the article and you find the catch: the state protects "normal religious activities," and religion may not be used to disrupt public order, harm health or interfere with the education system. The word that does the work is "normal," and the Communist Party decides what it means.

That is the whole system in miniature. A right is announced, a qualifier is attached and the authority that grants the right also defines its limits. A right that the government may redefine at will is not a right. It is a license, and licenses can be revoked.

This post explains how the license works: the institutions the Party built to control religion, the rules that enforce them, one famous case of a pastor who refused to register and what international reports say about the treatment of other faiths.

Definitions and a method note

Define the terms. Registered religion in China means worship organized through one of the officially recognized, state-supervised bodies, one for each of five faiths the state recognizes: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. Unregistered, often called "house churches" in the Protestant case, means worship outside them. The law and the Party treat the second category as, at best, tolerated and, at worst, illegal.

A note on method. I am relying on the public reports of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) and the State Department's annual religious freedom reports, which are primary documents anyone can read, and on historical facts I can state with confidence. Where a figure is contested, I will leave it out. China denies most of the accusations below, and a fair account should say so: the government describes its policies as lawful regulation of religious affairs and denies that it persecutes anyone for belief. The reports tell a different story, and the evidence they cite is substantial.

Premise one: the Party built the cages in the 1950s

The Communist Party took power in 1949, and its attitude to religion followed from Marxist doctrine: religion was a relic to be managed until it withered away. The practical answer was control.

For Protestants, the vehicle was the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. The "three selves" are self-governance, self-support and self-propagation, a slogan borrowed from nineteenth-century missionary theory about independent national churches and turned into a tool of political control. A manifesto in 1950 committed Chinese Protestant leaders to cut ties with foreign missions, and the movement took its lasting form as the Three-Self Patriotic Movement in 1954. Catholics got the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, established in 1957, which was designed to run the Church under Party supervision, independent of Rome. Similar bodies were organized for Buddhists, Taoists and Muslims.

The logic of these bodies is easy to grasp. Instead of banning religion outright, which would produce a defiant underground, the state offered a bargain: worship legally, but under our roof, with our appointed leaders, our approved sermons and our supervision. Those who accepted became part of the system. Those who refused went underground.

During the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, even the controlled bodies were shut down, churches and temples were closed, and believers of every kind were persecuted. After the period, religion was allowed to return under the old framework, in a more relaxed form that allowed registered worship to grow.

Premise two: the rules tightened under Xi Jinping

In 2016, at a national conference on religious work, Party leader Xi Jinping pressed the line known as the "Sinicization" of religion, meaning that religions in China must adapt to socialist society and be led by the Party. The slogan is the guide to everything since.

The legal expression came in the revised Regulations on Religious Affairs, issued in 2017 and taking effect on February 1, 2018. Among other things, they strengthened registration requirements, expanded supervision of religious activities and venues, restricted religious groups' contacts with foreign organizations, restricted online religious content and placed limits on religious education and on the training of clergy. In 2018 the government also moved the state's religious affairs bureau under the Party's United Front Work Department, a body whose job is to manage groups outside the Party. The change signaled that religion was being treated as a matter of political management and not simply an area of administration.

Local measures tracked the national line. USCIRF and State Department reports, along with press coverage, describe campaigns in several provinces involving the removal of crosses from church roofs, the demolition or closure of unregistered churches, restrictions on minors attending religious activities and the installation of surveillance cameras in houses of worship. The campaign to remove crosses in Zhejiang province, from about 2014, is among the best-known.

In September 2018 the Holy See and China signed a provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops. It remains controversial. Supporters argue it heals a division among Chinese Catholics, while critics, including some Chinese Catholics and a number of Western observers, argue that it hands the Party a role in choosing the Church's leaders. I report the dispute without resolving it, because the question belongs to theologians and diplomats. What the dispute shows is that even a global church negotiates with the Party from a position of weakness.

The case: Early Rain Covenant Church

Principles are abstract until they are attached to a person. The person here is Wang Yi, a former rights lawyer who became a Protestant pastor and led the Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, in Sichuan province. The church was a prominent, unregistered congregation with a record of public engagement with questions of law and conscience.

In December 2018 the authorities detained Wang Yi, along with a large number of church members, and shut down the church's operations. On December 30, 2019, a Chengdu court sentenced him to nine years in prison on charges of "inciting subversion of state power" and "illegal business operations," and ordered some of his property confiscated. The second charge related to the church's printing of religious materials without a license, which tells you how the licensing system functions in practice: an unlicensed press is a business crime.

Before his arrest, Wang Yi had prepared a statement, to be released if he was detained, explaining that he was not a criminal and that he would resist the demand that he place his church under state control. That is the heart of the case. The regime did not accuse him of violence. It accused him of refusing to register, of preaching without permission and of printing without a license. USCIRF and the State Department have both cited the case in their reports as an example of the pressure on unregistered Protestants.

This is the pattern. The crime is not the content of the sermon, though that matters too. The crime is independence.

Other faiths, and the determinations

If this were only about Protestants, the argument would be narrower. It is not.

Uyghurs and other Muslims. The most serious case is in Xinjiang. Reports by the State Department, USCIRF, the United Nations human-rights office and independent researchers have described mass detention of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in internment camps, forced labor, restrictions on religious practice and intrusive surveillance. On January 19, 2021, the last full day of the Trump administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced a determination that China was committing genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang. The incoming administration's Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, said at his confirmation hearing that he agreed with that determination. The Chinese government rejects the finding and says the camps are vocational training centers.

Tibetan Buddhists. The Party has long sought to control Tibetan Buddhism, including the process of recognizing reincarnated lamas, a matter of the faith's own internal governance. Reports describe restrictions on monasteries, limits on the number of monks and nuns, and political education within religious communities. The State Department's reports on Tibet are a separate publication, and they document the pressure in detail.

Falun Gong. The Party banned Falun Gong, a spiritual movement of meditation practice and moral teaching, in July 1999, and later labeled it an "evil cult." Reports by USCIRF and the State Department have documented arrests, detention and torture of practitioners over the years, and the allegations of abuse remain a staple of the annual reports. The government says it has acted lawfully against a dangerous cult.

China has been designated a Country of Particular Concern under the International Religious Freedom Act in the State Department's designations, going back to the first years of the process. The 1998 law that put religious persecution on America's foreign agenda describes how that designation process works, and the reports are the primary sources for everything above.

The strongest objection, and the answer

Let me state the case on the other side, because it deserves respect. "China is a sovereign nation, and every government regulates religion. America, too, has laws about what churches may do. Beijing says it fights extremism and fraud. And in fairness, the number of Christians in China has grown a great deal under the current system, which suggests that the state is not stamping out religion."

Here is the answer, numbered.

1. Sovereignty does not cancel commitments. China is a party to international human-rights documents and its own constitution promises religious freedom. Holding it to its word is not an assault on its sovereignty.
2. Regulating fraud is not licensing worship. An American church that defrauds donors is subject to the law. It does not need a license from the government to hold a service, preach a sermon or print a hymnal, and it does not need to place its pastor under a political body. The difference between a rule that punishes crime and a rule that requires permission to pray is the difference between a free society and an unfree one. The First Amendment says Congress shall make no law "respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Beijing's system does both: it establishes a controlled church and prohibits the free exercise of everything else.
3. Growth under pressure proves the resilience of believers, not the tolerance of the state. That millions of Chinese believe despite the system is a tribute to them. It says nothing about the system.
4. The Party's own rhetoric states the aim. A policy that calls for the "Sinicization" of religion under the leadership of the Party is not hiding its purpose. The goal is control.

What the Founding teaches

The Founders had seen what an established church does: it creates a hierarchy of favored and disfavored believers, and it makes the state the judge of orthodoxy. James Madison, in his Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785, argued that religion is a duty owed to the Creator and that it must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted by Jefferson and passed in 1786, said no man should be compelled to support any religious worship or suffer for his opinions in matters of religion. Both documents reflect the principle that a government that licenses worship has claimed a power that belongs to God and the individual conscience.

The Chinese system is the opposite principle built into law, and it is worth seeing how different the American tradition is. Sixteen words on religion in the First Amendment, read phrase by phrase reads the clauses that guard against exactly this. And Blasphemy laws abroad and why the First Amendment refuses them shows how a different kind of regime uses the law against belief. The scale of what China controls also matters for the American economy, as The China shock was real, and what free traders and tariff hawks each get right and The NBA and China in 2019 and the Week a Tweet Cost a League Its Voice show: American institutions that do business in China have to decide whether the revenue is worth the silence.

For the other cases in which this series has examined the naming of persecution, see The 2016 genocide finding for Yazidis and Christians under ISIS rule and 1915, the Armenian genocide and the Christian peoples who perished with them.

How to read the reports yourself

You do not need to take my word for any of this. The State Department's annual Report on International Religious Freedom has a chapter on China, with separate sections for Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Macau, and USCIRF publishes its own annual report and country updates. Both are free on the agencies' websites. Read the legal-framework section first, then the government-practices section, and notice which claims are sourced to named cases and which to general reporting. A careful reader will find the pattern in the documents.

The case in brief

1. China's constitution guarantees belief but protects only "normal religious activities," and the Party defines the term, which turns a right into a license.
2. The Party built state-run bodies, including the Three-Self Patriotic Movement in the 1950s and the Catholic Patriotic Association in 1957, and tightened control through the 2018 religious affairs regulations and a policy of "Sinicization."
3. The case of Pastor Wang Yi, sentenced in December 2019 to nine years for inciting subversion and illegal business operations, shows that the crime is independence, not violence.
4. Reports by USCIRF and the State Department document pressure on Uyghurs, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong, and in January 2021 the State Department determined that China was committing genocide against Uyghurs.
5. The American answer is the First Amendment's refusal to license worship, and citizens can read the primary reports and press their representatives.

What you can do: read the China chapter of the State Department's most recent religious freedom report and send one sentence of it, with the source, to your member of Congress.