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Politics, power and religion in the Middle Kingdom

As President Xi Jinping consolidates his grip on the Party, the state prepares to implement new regulations on religions
Politics, power and religion in the Middle Kingdom

China's President Xi Jinping during the G20 Summit in Hangzhou on Sept. 5. It is currently unclear how aggressive Xi’s attempts to control religion will continue to be but early indications are so far hardly promising. (Photo by AFP)

Published: October 25, 2016 03:30 AM GMT

Religion has unusually taken on quite a role in technically atheist communist China this year and with it an unprecedented attention from the English-speaking world's major secular media outlets.

This month, two events have or will occur to show just where China is and where it's headed — the Communist Party Plenum that begins this week in Beijing and the latest draft of regulations for controlling religion.

The four day long plenum will identify who will control China during this period of transformation.

As for the raft of new rules and regulations around religion, they have now been passed from the draft discussion stage into the final stages of being set as new laws.

It's no coincidence that the implementation of the new rules, which are widely seen as handing authorities more legal leverage over religion, looms as the plenum commences today in Beijing's Great Hall of the People.

Meanwhile, there have also been talks between Beijing and the Vatican about a deal to normalize the appointment of bishops in China.

For some years in China, there has been the revival of practices more associated with the Cultural Revolution: the widespread use of extra-legal measures to keep religion in check including detentions, disappearances and various levels of house arrest.

But the persecution of religious people in China can quickly become a flashpoint for other countries.

Pressure has been mounting from the U.S. evangelical Christians who are the fastest growing part of a Chinese Christian community that numbers somewhere between 60 - 200 million people, according to various estimates.

And China's repression of about 10 million ethnic Muslim Uighur people in the state of Xinjiang has caught the interest of their long lost ethnic cousins in Turkey, other Muslim states and radical Islam groups.

The popularity of religion — and indeed other spiritual pursuits such as qigong — has surged in recent decades with hundreds of millions of people both openly and more secretly practicing Christianity, Islam as well as the more traditional Buddhism and homegrown Daoism.

The central reason is a collective national search for more meaning and spirituality in a culture ripped apart first by Mao Zedong's demolition of social structures and then their replacement by a rigid secular theocracy.

What followed was unfettered state capitalism let loose by Deng Xiaoping. This has enriched the elite and created a largely neutered middle class that has generally opted to focus on material comfort and political silence in a collective act of self-protection.

Meanwhile, about a third of the country remains in the grip of subsistence living and/or poverty.

The new rules and regulations represent a fresh level of official control and repression of religion in a state that is paranoid over popular organized religions.

The Party sees them as rival groups whose loyalty could be used to stir political and social dissent.

Religions are the latest example of sectors in China found guilty of independent and sometimes critical thought that has been targeted by President Xi Jinping.

This has come as Xi ruthlessly takes aim at critics both within and outside the Party as he attempts to consolidate a political power base and secure a second term as leader at the end of 2018. 

Rights activists, lawyers, domestic and international NGOs and academics have all seen a level of oppression not witnessed since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. 

It is against this backdrop that this year's Party summit will take place with its official theme of intra party discipline.

"[The] Plenum would focus on the internal political conduct of leading party institutions and cadres, especially members of the Central Committee, its Politburo and the innermost Politburo Standing Committee," the South China Morning Post reported last month.

It was decided that the Party "needed to enhance its ability in 'self-cleansing, self-consummating, self-innovating and self-enhancing' in new situations and to 'resist corruption' and 'withstand risks,'" it added.

All this is Xi's bid for a concentration of power through the underlying central theme of party politics in the four years since he was elevated to the Party's top position.

This year's plenum comes just 12 months before the next Party Congress that rubber stamps the senior leadership ranks of the world' single most powerful political party from its Central Committee of 205 people and 1,712 "alternates" and the elite Politburo Standing Committee group of seven men who run the country. 

Xi came to power originally as a compromise candidate as Vice President with a surprisingly limited powerbase within the Party, something that suited the Party's behind the scenes powerbrokers — largely former senior officials lead by one-time leader Jiang Zemin committed to protecting vested interests of the wealthy party elite and their cronies who were the effective arbiters of his ascension. Since then, Xi has moved to neuter their influence.

Popular policies such as the Party's anti-corruption campaign, has allowed Xi to replace senior provincial and ministerial officials largely — but not always — with supporters.

A nationalist foreign policy and acceleration of the military's modernization — and the promotion of supporters to senior roles in the People's Liberation Army — have seen the military emerge as Xi's effective powerbase as he seeks a second term, unencumbered by internal party dissent.

Xi's supporters argue that such power consolidation has been necessary to deliver fresh economic reforms promised three years ago but largely remaining undelivered. But the growing consensus amongst economists and other observers is that it is crushing China's nascent civil society.

Legal reforms of the type that helped Taiwan, for instance, move from dictatorship to democracy and economic success, have been cosmetic, at best — with the intent of extinguishing political reform that was cautiously experimented with by his predecessor Hu Jintao.

Yet as party politics has taken precedence at each turn these past few years, China's economy continues to slide into unchartered territory of mid single digit growth, with large swaths of the nation in effective recession. The leadership has, so far, no answers beyond fresh stimuli that are adding to the already alarming national and corporate debt levels.

Recent reports point to a rift in the economic policy between Premier Li Keqiang, a qualified economist and Xi, who had a reputation as something of a plodding bureaucrat who rose through the ranks on the back of his famous and admired father. With no discernable appetite for original thought, he leans instead on the discredited, destructive theories of Marxism and Leninism.

It is unclear at present how aggressive Xi's attempts to stuff the religion genie back into its bottle will be. Early signs — such as the cross removal campaign in Zhejiang province, restrictions of parents pushing their children toward their own religious choices — are hardly promising.

This year's Party Congress is expected to conclude with a rallying cry for the primacy of the Party, with the thought police standing by to punish the recalcitrant.

Freedom of thought, and that includes freedom to practice religion, has historically been the central plank of any nation's sustainable economic success. Xi's attack on these most basic freedoms, in all their guises, does not bode well for the vast majority of China's eternally put upon citizens.

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