Religious repression in China is no longer limited to demolitions and closures, as the Chinese government embarks on more subtle and comprehensive measures aimed at gradually eradicating faith from China, according to a new report from the advocacy group Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW).
“The Chinese Communist Party appears to believe it has outgrown the need for open confrontation,” China columnist Ansel Lee said in a report published by CSW on Monday, December 1. “The battle is over. Religion has been tamed. Now a quiet dismantling begins – not with fire but with acid. A slow and confident collapse. Religion seeks not the domination of religion, but the absence of religion. The ultimate goal is to create a godless nation.”
The report outlines laws enacted over the past few years that justify past repressions (raids, church closures, arrests) while suffocating religion with invisible regulations.
“Since the pandemic, machines have become more sophisticated,” Lee said in the report. “Where once the police and security forces were the blunt instruments of control, pressure now flows through more subtle channels, such as the Civil Affairs Bureau, the Ministry of Education, and the Department of Culture and Tourism. Repression has penetrated into the capillaries of everyday life.”
This strategy includes redefining faith itself through sinicization (conforming to Chinese culture and ideology), shrinking the physical and online space of religion through pseudo-legal maneuvers, desacralizing religion, and separating young people from religious language, culture, and memory, Lee wrote.
“What emerges is not just repression, but erasure, adjustment, and continuity,” he said.
The CSW report said President Xi Jinping’s government has codified authoritarian control, with crackdowns often occurring before the enactment of laws and regulations and functioning as an administrative siege aimed at repressing opposition and stifling religious expression.
The report noted, among other examples, that regulations such as Article 41 of the 2023 Measures on the Management of Religious Activities Venues helped imprison Mr. Ma Yan of Yinchuan House Church in Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region earlier this year. The measure prohibits religious activities outside of approved venues.
Ma was arrested by Jinfeng District Police on August 9, 2024, while conducting a Bible study at home with 10 other Christians. Mr. Ma and another person were held in administrative detention for 10 days before being remanded in criminal detention on August 20, 2024, for “organizing an unlawful assembly.”
Mr. Ma was arrested on September 29, 2024, indicted on January 27, and his trial began on February 10. He was sentenced to nine months in prison on March 24, but was released on April 17 due to his previous period of administrative detention.
“The important point in Mr. Ma Yan’s case is that Mr. Ma Yan and other Christians were found guilty of “organizing an unlawful assembly,” even though they were merely holding a regular Bible study and did not disrupt public order,” the report said. “This shows that the government fully encompasses unauthorized religious activities under the category of ‘illegal activities’ and that even religious communications can lead to criminal prosecution.”
Criminalizing private Bible study reflects the sinicization of Christianity, the report said.
“As a testing area for the sinicization of religion, the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (a small autonomous region) has in recent years expanded regulatory measures from administrative regulation to criminal enforcement, and expanded regulatory measures from Islam to Christianity, in accordance with the directive to ‘strengthen (Chinese Communist Party) leadership on religious issues,'” the report said. “The broader trend is that crime risks are increasing and house churches are facing a deepening existential crisis.”
From 2020 to 2025, ECLJ noted that litigation involving religious beliefs, activities, organizations, and venues escalated from individual incidents to systematic repression, involving sensitive regions such as Gansu, Hebei, Ningxia, and Tibet. The number of cases and geographical distribution have also expanded significantly, reflecting the full implementation of the Sinicization of religion, the report said.
“The shift from administrative penalties (such as fines and detention) to criminal convictions (such as for ‘illegal border crossing,’ ‘illegal assembly,’ ‘association with a cult,’ and ‘incitement to subversion’) and the strengthening of judicial measures indicate that the Central Committee’s ideology has penetrated deeply into everyday life and that religious activities have been brought under a framework of stricter legal control,” the report said. “The targets of repression have expanded from minority religions such as Islam and Tibetan Buddhism to Christian house churches, unregistered Catholic groups, and online churches.”
Under the September 15 Internet religious information service control measures and the “resistance to infiltration” policy, digital surveillance has become a core tool of religious sinicization, the report said. Local implementation in areas such as Gansu, Hebei, Ningxia, and Tibet is consistent with the central government’s mission of “maintaining national unity, ethnic unity, and social stability.”
“The imposition of religious Sinicization is particularly severe in ethnic minority and politically sensitive regions where local policies act as a direct extension of central directives,” the report said.
In 2023, religious associations in various countries rolled out five-year plans to deepen sinicization. For the government-sanctioned Catholic Patriotic Association, this meant a program to train “dual-skilled” clergy, trained in both religious doctrine and traditional Chinese culture.
“In Shanghai, the initiative is jointly run by the Catholic Church and Fudan University’s School of Philosophy,” the report said. “The stated goal is to ‘enhance the political consciousness and cultural literacy’ of priests, nuns, and mainstream laity. Simply put, the purpose of studying traditional culture is political adjustment, not spiritual enrichment.”
Both Catholics and Protestants are now subject to “Sinicized theology,” which effectively rewrites and distorts sacred texts, the ECLJ claimed.
“Churches across the country are concocting crude fusions of local folk culture and Biblical teachings, such as Fujian’s ‘Eight Fortune Theology’ (a satirical version of local good luck traditions), Northeastern’s ‘Thanksgiving Theology’, and Shandong’s ‘Awe Theology’,” the report said. “These are not developments in theology, but detract from the appearance of theology.”
Additionally, traditional hymns are being replaced by “Sinicized religious music” that praises the Chinese Communist Party with religious rhythms, the report said, noting that “wedding and funeral ceremonies now incorporate state-sanctioned ‘Chinese characteristics.'”
The Chinese Communist Party has sought to prevent young people from hearing about religion with “disturbing clarity,” the report says. Under the pretext of “protecting minors from religious influence,” they have implemented policies that isolate children from their own cultural and spiritual heritage through boarding schools, inland migration, and language erasure.
The report said the government imposed a policy of forcing children between the ages of six and 18 into a vast network of colonial-era boarding schools, where they were taught only in Mandarin in tightly controlled and militarized conditions.
“The goal is not education, but the reprogramming of an environment designed to erase familial and cultural memories,” the magazine said.
Inland migration not only removes children from their homes, but also moves them far away. Tibetan students are sent to “inland Tibetan classrooms” hundreds of miles from their homes in Hebei and Jiangsu provinces. Young Uyghurs are enrolled in “migrant classes” and sent to high schools far away.
“The strategy is blunt: remove the soil and the roots will die,” the report said.
Because language is central to memory, the use of the mother tongue is prohibited in all parts of the Chinese Communist Party’s ethnic education system.
“Classrooms preach a materialistic worldview and frame religious beliefs as ‘harmful to youth development,'” the report states. “Religion will not only become alien, it will become dangerous. If these policies continue, the outcome is not theoretical. Within a generation or two, an entire culture and its faith will disappear within China’s borders. Not through dramatic conflict, but through systematic oblivion. This is not assimilation. This is planned extinction.”
