China Page 1 of 88 CHINA: STATE CONTROL OF RELIGION Human Rights Watch/Asia Human Rights Watch Copyright © October 1997 by Human Rights Watch All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America ISBN: 1-56432-224-6 Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 97-77244 Listserv address: To subscribe to the list, send an e-mail message to [email protected] with "subscribe hrw- news" in the body of the message (leave the subject line blank). ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This report by Mickey Spiegel is based on official Chinese documents, interviews in mid-1997 with individuals involved in religious activities in China and Hong Kong, and a wide range of secondary sources. The report was edited by Jeri Laber and Sidney Jones. Tom Kellogg provided production assistance, and the Hong Kong office of Human Rights Watch gave important logistical support for much of the research. The report is the latest in a series of Human Rights Watch reports covering freedom of religion in China and Tibet. They include Freedom of Religion in China (1992), Religious Repression in China Persists (1992), Continuing Religious Repression in China (1993), Detained in China and Tibet: A Directory of Political and Religious Prisoners (1994), Persecution of a Protestant Sect in China (1994), No Progress on Human Rights (1994), Religious Repression Persists (1995), Cutting off the Serpent's Head: Tightening Control in Tibet, 1994-1995 (1996), and The Cost of Putting Business First (1996). This report would not have been possible without the assistance of numerous women and men who helped collect, confirm, and publicize information about many of the incidents described in this report. For their own security, we cannot mention them by name, but we are enormously grateful to them all. I. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS Religion is becoming more and more important in China. In a country that remains officially atheist, conversions to http://www.hrw.org/reports/1997/china1/ 12/15/2003 China Page 2 of 88 Christianity have risen sharply, the country's 19 million Muslims are attracting the attention of their co-religionists elsewhere, and Buddhism is the fastest growing religion of all. The Chinese government acknowledges 100 million believers of all faiths out of a population of 1.2 billion, but it has been using the 100 million figure since the mid-1950s. As interest in religion has increased, so has state control over religious organizations, in part because the Chinese government believes that religion breeds disloyalty, separatism, and subversion. Christianity and Islam in particular are seen as vehicles for foreign influence and infiltration by "hostile foreign forces," and religion is a critical element of the nationalist movements in Tibet and Xinjiang, where opposition to Chinese rule appears to be growing. Chinese authorities are keenly aware of the role that the church played in Eastern Europe during the disintegration of the Soviet empire. As a 1996 government document titled "Some Hot Issues in Our Work on Religion" illustrates, the Chinese government believes that Western countries are aiming to "achieve pluralistic political beliefs through pluralistic religious beliefs" and that they have used religion since the 1980s to subvert socialist countries. Government control is exercised primarily through a registration process administered by the State Council's Religious Affairs Bureau through which the government monitors membership in religious organizations, locations of meetings, religious training, selection of clergy, publication of religious materials, and funding for religious activities. The government also now undertakes annual inspections of registered religious organizations. Failure to register can result in the imposition of fines, seizure of property, razing of "illegal" religious structures, forcible dispersal of religious gatherings, and occasionally, short term detention. In Tibet, control takes the form of political vetting of monks and nuns and strict supervision of their institutions. While long-term imprisonment, violence, and physical abuse by security forces against religious activists still occur, they appear to be less frequent than they were at the time of the first Human Rights Watch study of religion in China in 1992. In 1997, we found isolated cases but no evidence of widespread or systematic brutality. When reports of these harsher measures do surface, they are increasingly denounced by central government officials as examples of the excesses of local officials and their failure to implement policy directives correctly. (It should be noted, however, that verifying reports of persecution and crackdowns remains very difficult, given restricted access to China.) Every important Chinese leader and religious official has stressed that no one in China is prosecuted for his or her religious beliefs but rather for suspected criminal acts. Tightening of control over religion, they maintain, has come only at the expense of illegal groups and illegal activities. There are two problems with that argument, however. One is that refusal to register and submit to the kind of intrusive monitoring outlined above is precisely what renders an organization illegal. The second is that for Chinese officials, religious belief is a personal, individual act, and they distinguish between personal worship and participation in organized religious activities. It is the latter that they go to great lengths to control, not the former. The whole concept of religious freedom, however, involves not only freedom of the individual to believe but to manifest that belief in community with others. The government's argument that its control of religion is strictly in accordance with the law is not new; it argues the same when confronted with protests over its treatment of political dissent. But several elements of its policy on religion have changed. While lessening its reliance on arrests and detention, the government is enforcing requirements on registration more strictly than ever before. It has narrowed the criteria it uses for identifying "authentic" religious groups, distinguishing between the five officially-recognized religions - Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam - and cults or sects practicing "feudal superstition." As illegal entities with no claim to protection, the latter are subject to a distinct set of penalties. Popular religion, a syncretic blend of Daoism, Buddhism and polytheistic elements that is central to the lives of millions of Chinese, is not even acknowledged as a religion. The government is also increasingly engaged in carefully planned mass campaigns promoting "socialist spiritual civilization" and inculcating patriotism as an antidote to religion. Political reeducation for the public at large is a http://www.hrw.org/reports/1997/china1/ 12/15/2003 China Page 3 of 88 prominent feature of the campaigns. Another new tactic is the government's increasing tendency to target the China- based representative of an "illegal" religious network (usually a foreign proselytizing organization) rather than individual members. It used to be that any local pastor or lay leader of an underground church linked to a foreign movement faced arrest; more and more, the Chinese government seems to be looking for an organizer at the district or provincial level. In the kind of intrusive control the Chinese government exercises over religious activities, it violates the rights to freedom of association, assembly, and expression as well as freedom of religion. Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides for the right to hold and express opinions and receive information and ideas "regardless of frontiers"; and Article 20 grants the right to peaceful assembly and association. Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance. The only limitations that a government can impose, according to the declaration, are those necessary to secure "due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others" and protecting "morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society." The peaceful gathering of unregistered groups is no threat to morality, public order, or general welfare; China's onerous registration requirements are clearly an unnecessary limitation on freedom of religion, particularly when failure to register results in some of the penalties outlined above. China's narrow interpretation of freedom of religion as equivalent to freedom of private belief is contrary to the much broader international standard. In 1991, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution called "Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Intolerance and of Discrimination Based on Religion or Belief." The declaration in Article 6 elaborates on the right to religious freedom, noting that it includes the following elements: a) to worship or assemble in connection with a religion or belief, and to establish 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 articles and materials related to the rites or customs of a religion or belief; d) to write, issue and disseminate relevant publications in these