Xi Jinping and Pope Francis battle for the church in Hong Kong

Religion has long been a contentious problem for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), offering alternative worldviews to the party’s Marxist-Leninist ideology and remaining a key source of resistance to authoritarian rule.

In 2018, Pope Francis and Beijing inked a controversial two-year deal that gave the Holy See oversight of the appointment of Roman Catholic bishops in China. However, Beijing violated the agreement last year by self-appointing a bishop, a move decried by the Vatican but which has not yet fully dented the agreement.

To further complicate matters, at the weekend Pope Francis fast-tracked the relatively new bishop of Hong Kong, Stephen Chow, promoting him to the College of Cardinals. Chow, 63, was plucked from relative obscurity for promotion by the pope in 2021, two years after the death of his predecessor, Bishop Michael Leung. He is now the only voting-age cardinal (the cut-off age is 80) in Hong Kong, which also has two retired cardinals, also known as bishops emeritus: John Tong, 83, and Joseph Zen, 91.

Zen is a thorny issue for the CCP. Originally from Shanghai, he fled to Hong Kong during the Christian purges of the 1950s under Mao and has remained a trenchant critic of the CCP. A vocal and active supporter of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, he has also been arrested, charged and fined for accepting foreign donations following the 2020 pro-democracy marches that roiled the city.

Tong, in comparison, has taken a very conciliatory line towards Beijing. So far, Chow — a Jesuit, like the pope — seems to be treading the delicate line between the two. His appointment is the Vatican’s subtle way of attempting to maintain the status quo for the Catholic Church in Hong Kong.

‘Underground’ churches threatened

In the heady authoritarian days of Mao Zedong, when China was largely shut off from the Western world until the early 1970s, the CCP brutally tried to eradicate religion. Yet despite religious leaders being locked up, tortured and driven out of the country, Protestant and Catholic churches continued to operate — and in certain areas flourished underground — amid the destruction of culture and identity.

The CCP has long allowed five “official” religions to operate under its auspices: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism. The two Christian “religions” are officially controlled by the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and the Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement. But the party is once again persecuting significant sections of its growing Christian population, estimated to be about 60 million. Winding back decades of relatively liberal and less controlling administrations, the current government is attempting to bring religious entities under approved “churches”. 

For decades, underground churches continued to flourish alongside official party-affiliated religious organisations, although they are generally subject to more harassment at local levels — often depending on the priorities or biases of local and provincial officials. But under Xi, religious freedom is being increasingly curtailed, with children younger than 18 effectively prohibited from participating in religious activities and receiving religious education, even in schools run by religious organisations.

The latest attack was on a pastor of an underground, or “house”, Protestant church near Xiamen in Fujian’s prosperous east coast province. Pastor Yang Xibo and his wife Wang Xiaofei — who run the Xunsiding Church, which has refused to come under Beijing’s control by joining state-run religious associations — have been fined 400,000 yuan (around A$82,000) for organising “religious activities”. The church had previously been officially banned but continued to operate, with its followers subjected to month-long harassment by police.

Christian leaders persecuted

A 2018 white paper released by the CCP said China has about 200 million religious citizens, the majority being Buddhists in Tibet and adjacent provinces. Others include 38 million Protestant Christians, 20 million Muslims and six million Catholic Christians, with the country having roughly 140,000 places of worship. The Catholic Church, however, estimates it actually has up to 12 million followers in China, while measures of the number of Protestants — whose practices are generally less formalised and services easier to conduct without attracting attention — range from 40 to 100 million.

The leaders of these organisations are part of the nation’s broader governance apparatus, which has dramatically expanded under Xi Jinping’s leadership. For instance, all businesses in China, including foreign businesses of a certain size, are now required to have an internal CCP cell that reports directly to the party. The same system applies to other key organisations and institutions such as schools and universities.

The US State Department’s annual report on international religious freedom, released in May, said authorities continue to arrest and detain leaders and members of religious groups. This is often especially true of those connected with groups not registered with state-sanctioned religious associations. Authorities reportedly use vague or insubstantial charges to convict and sentence leaders and members of religious groups to years in prison. Estimates of those imprisoned during the previous year for their religious beliefs range from the low thousands to more than 10,000.

The report also said the CCP has blocked religious websites and censored religious content from the popular messaging service WeChat. It has also censored Mandarin and Cantonese-language online posts referencing Jesus or the Bible, removed articles published by Christianity-related platforms, and removed the accounts (or instructed internet service providers and individual users to remove accounts) whose names contain the words “gospel” or “Christ”. 

“The government prohibited unauthorised online broadcasts of religious services. One NGO said the new rules concerning online religious content essentially treated Christian religious material on the internet ‘on a par with pornography, drug dealing, and inciting rebellion’,” the report said.

Despite Pope Francis’ relationship with Beijing, Rome would not like to see the church in Hong Kong fall under the direct control of the CCP. On the mainland, however, it’s too late for that, and Christian groups that continue to defy authorities look set for further persecution.