Religious Freedom in China

This report provides an overview of China’s state-controlled religious organizations and their role and function within the country’s institutional control of religion, demonstrating their complicity in the government’s systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom. Central to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) institutional control of religion are the seven state-controlled national religious organizations and their local subsidiaries, often known as “patriotic religious associations,” which are responsible for managing religious affairs of the five officially recognized religions—Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. These religious organizations are legally required to be politically loyal to the CCP and to work with the CCP and its government in promulgating, implementing, and enforcing state laws, regulations, and policies. That complicity extends to the CCP’s deeply coercive sinicization of religion policies that have led to severe religious freedom violations against the majority-Muslim Uyghurs and other Turkic groups, Protestant house church Christians, and Tibetan Buddhists.