Is China Repressing or Moulding Religion? 'Religious Freedom', Post-coloniality, and the Chinese State Building

Abstract

This article focuses on three conceptual lenses through which a better understanding of the politics of religion in contemporary China is expected to obtain. On the basis of a genealogical and discursive analysis of ‘religious freedom’ as a paradoxical concept and institution, and by identifying the ‘post-colonial’ condition of contemporary China, this article argues for a non-dichotomous understanding of the Chinese and Western political approaches to religion and religious freedom and attempts to further locate the real logic of the Chinese politics of religion in the Chinese Communist Party’s agenda for the ‘Chinese state building’. Four interrelated factors, i.e. China’s economic development, the Chinese nationalism, the authority of the Chinese Communist Party, and international relations and global competition, that are especially important for the Party and governments at all levels in their setting and implementing of policies on religion are considered, in order to provide an explication of the dynamic, multiple forms of negotiation between modern secular politics and its ‘heterodoxies’ that define the politics of religion in mainland China.