A jealous state: the Party and the faithful
Temples, churches and mosques — and a state that cannot abide a loyalty it did not grant.
What happened
A state that claims the whole of public life cannot abide a rival claim on conscience — which is why every communist government has sought to subordinate religion, and China's still does, under the banner of sinicization: faith permitted only in forms loyal to the Party.
- Buddhism. The Cultural Revolution's assault on the "Four Olds" wrecked temples across China; in Tibet, by most accounts almost all of the region's thousands of monasteries were damaged or destroyed. The state still asserts the right to approve reincarnations — it detained the six-year-old boy recognised as the Panchen Lama in 1995 and installed its own.
- Christianity. Worship is legal only inside state bodies (the Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the Catholic Patriotic Association); unregistered "house churches" are raided, and in a 2014–16 campaign in Zhejiang the authorities removed well over a thousand crosses and demolished churches.
- Islam. Since 2017 Xinjiang has seen the mass detention of Uyghurs and other Muslims — estimated by UN experts and independent scholars at more than a million people in "re-education" facilities, which Beijing calls vocational centres — alongside pervasive surveillance, restrictions on fasting, and, by one satellite study, roughly 16,000 mosques damaged or destroyed. A 2022 UN human-rights assessment found conduct that "may constitute crimes against humanity."
Falun Gong, a meditation movement, was banned in 1999 as an "evil cult," and its practitioners detained en masse.
Why it happened
The target was never theology; it was the loyalty. A church, a mosque, a monastery is an institution the Party did not build and cannot fully control — a place where people gather, trust one another, and answer to something above the state. That is exactly what a total state cannot permit. The campaign is the same impulse that produced the vanguard, the censor and the sealed border, turned on the oldest competitor for human allegiance.