China Law Blog

The post on religion was interesting.

The question of religious freedom is indeed a rather contentious human r1ghts issue in China, though to put the situation in perspective, the ongoing abuses that do occur have to been seen in the wider context of a general religious revival. According to official figures, Buddhism alone now claims over 100 million followers. Islam, the second most popular religion, has 20.3 million followers, Protestantism 16 million, Catholicism 5 million and Daoism 3 million. These five religious movements alone now claim a combined total of roughly 144 million followers, or 11 percent of the population. According to the political scientist Hongyi Harry Lai, in his paper on "The Religious Revival in China", folk religions are now thought to attract around 19 percent of the total population, ‘resulting in a marked rise’ in the number of new shrines and temples being built throughout the rural countryside. The economic and social changes that have swept through China since the late 1970s have combined to create considerable social stresses and raptures, dislocating millions, with many losing their free health care and guaranteed incomes. Religion, as Lai points out, ‘meets the population’s need for psychological comfort,’ helping them to cope more easily with their rapidly modernising world – a world, to paraphrase Marx, where all that is solid can, and often does, melt into air.

‘One indisputable cause of religious revival in China is the state’s lifting of restrictions on open religious activities, especially those that do not challenge the state directly,’ adds Lai. ‘In the post-Mao era, the state has openly acknowledged its extreme practice under leftist leadership, and has tolerated religious practice that does not pose a potential organised threat.’

Mindful of a long history of religious movements toppling dynasties in the past, China, as Randall Peerenboom acknowledges, nevertheless ‘imposes restrictions on religious beliefs and practices’, recognising only the five religions mentioned above, and requiring all religious groups to register with the State Administration of Religious Affairs. According to the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China Annual Report 2007, unregistered Protestant communities often continue to ‘face harassment and various forms of abuse’. A July 2007 report from a district within Shanghai for example, ‘called on authorities to strengthen control over grassroots religious activity and singled out private Protestant gatherings for monitoring and regulation.’ The China Aid Association, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organisation that monitors religious freedom in China, ‘recorded 600 detentions of unregistered Protestants in China during 2006. It noted that the figure represents a decline from over 2,000 detentions recorded in 2005, but attributed the decrease to a new strategy of targeting church leaders over practitioners and interrogating practitioners on the spot rather than formally arresting them.’
The Commission also noted ‘an increase in reported detentions of unregistered Catholics’ in 2005, after the Regulation on Religious Affairs entered into force. In June 2007 for example, ‘the public security bureau detained Jia Zhiguo, underground bishop of the Diocese of Zhending, in Hebei province, for 17 days. Authorities detained him again in August as he prepared to lead meetings to discuss a letter Pope Benedict XVI issued to Chinese Catholics in June.’ Catholic priests aligned with Rome, as Randall Peerenboom has noted, ‘have run into problems because of conflicts over issues where the views of the Pope conflict with government policy, most notably with respect to family planning, birth control, and abortion.’ According to a U.S. State Department report on China, back in 2006, authorities reportedly forced Catholics in Hebei Province, where more than half of China’s Catholics are located, to follow the Patriotic Church of face fines, job losses, detention, or the removal of their children from school.

Uighurs in China’s north-western Xinjiang Province are also unhappy with Beijing’s restriction of their religious activities, though it is also true that many independence advocates in Xinjiang operate under the banner of Islam. ‘Working as religious clerics,’ notes Lai, ‘they condemn the Chinese Communist Party and the government, interpret the Koran as advocating an Islamic state and militant jihad, and propose independence as the best way to preserve local cultures.’ As Nicolas Becquelin points out, Chinese official sources claim that explosions, assassinations, and other violent acts in the 1990s totalled a few thousand, and that in 1998 alone, over seventy serious incidents occurred, resulting in more than 380 deaths. (see: Becquelin, ‘Xinjiang in the Nineties’, The China Journal, Volume 44, July 2000, p.87.)

Although such findings are disturbing, it is important not to exaggerate the extent of them, as Randall Peerenboom has so rightly pointed out in my opinion. Human rights reports often depict the detention of political and religious dissidents as arbitrary because they allegedly involve persons engaging in political or religious activities, usually peacefully, that many would claim are protected by both domestic and international law. ‘Although human rights organisations regularly highlight the use of administrative detention to detain political dissidents, academic experts,’ explains Peerenboom, ‘have noted that the purpose of administrative detention has changed over the last two decades, and that education through labour and other forms of administrative detention are used primarily to deal with petty criminals. In fact, less than 1 percent of those subject to education through labour could be considered political prisoners.’ Not only this, but charges of endangering the state now account for less than 0.5 percent of all crimes, compared to almost 60% during the politicised Mao era, when the same crimes were classified as counterrevolutionary. ‘Simply put,’ says Peerenboom, ‘politics is generally not an issue in most criminal cases.’ Taking China’s population of 1.3 billion as the basis, and ‘erring on the high side by assuming as correct the Falan Gong organisation’s estimate of 20,000 prisoners of conscience, the total rate of detention would be 0.0015 percent.’ Twenty thousand likely overstates the actual number, but even this figure, while large in absolute terms, is relatively small given the size of the total population. ‘It is difficult to see how China can be described as a country in which execution, political murders, disappearances, brutality and torture “are a common part of life”, as required for a level four Political Terror Scale rating,’ as Peerenboom concludes. Even the general incarceration rate in China is lower than that of many other countries, including that of the United States: 184 per 100,000 for China, compared to 701 per 100,000 for the United States.

If we examine the 2005 findings of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Civil and Political Rights, including the Question of Torture and Detention, we see that 314 cases of alleged torture were reported between the years 2000 and 2005, involving around 1,160 individuals. Of these, 66 percent were Falan Gong practitioners, 11 percent Uighur separatists, 8 percent sex workers, 6 percent Tibetans, 5 percent human rights defenders, 2 percent political dissidents, and the remaining 2 percent were people either effected with HIV/AIDs or were of unregistered religious groups other than the Falan Gong. Most of these abuses occurred in pretrial detention centres, like police stations, and were perpetrated by police and other public security staff – reflecting the Rapporteur’s findings that when torture does occur in China, it is usually at the local level, and ‘because the police are often under great pressure from above to solve criminal cases.’

Without wanting to trivialise the severe harm caused to such individuals or to downplay the gross injustices they have suffered, it needs to be said, in the interests of gaining a realistic idea of the size and scope of the problem, that these 1,160 individuals make up only a minute percentage of China’s total prison population of roughly two million ( 0.116 percent) and an even smaller percentage of the country’s total population of 1.3 billion.

In short, it needs to be said that the persecution of political and religious dissidents constitutes only a very minute part of the China story. Once the lens is widened, and one is allowed to see the bigger picture, it becomes very clear that there is a great deal of religious freedom in today's China - enough to enable a strong and fast-growing revival of religion.

Regards,
MAJ