Communist Party investigators have warned officials in the eastern province of Zhejiang, where several Christian churches have been demolished or forced to remove prominent crosses over the past year, against practicing religion. The brief message was included in a statement from the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection describing its recent tour of the province.
The central commission, an antigraft body, recently concluded investigative tours of 10 provinces and regions, as well as a state-owned automaker, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the State General Administration of Sport.
The commission typically releases statements that broadly outline problems it has uncovered, but details emerge only later if cases against prominent officials are pursued. The Zhejiang statement, like those for other provinces, focused on issues of corruption and abuse of power. The mention of religion was brief and made no specific reference to a recent campaign against churches in the Zhejiang city of Wenzhou, which has a large number of Christians as well as Buddhists and Taoists.
“In terms of implementing political discipline, in some places a minority of party members participate in religious activities and believe in religion,” the statement said. It added that individual cadres’ participation in “mass incidents,” meaning large-scale conflicts or protests, had a “vile influence.”
Such warnings about religion have usually been made about Xinjiang and Tibet, two border regions with large ethnic minority populations where the national government faces sometimes-violent resistance to its control.
“Party organizations will be greatly weakened in the fight against separatism, as hostile forces at home and abroad are doing what they can to use religion for their separatist activities in the areas inhabited by ethnic groups,” Zhu Weiqun, a senior official of the party’s United Front Work Department, wrote in 2011.
Last month, party investigators mentioned the issue of religious belief, from which Communist Party members are prohibited, in a statement on Aksu Prefecture in Xinjiang, a northwestern region with a large Muslim population.
The Communist Party has issued similar pronouncements about Buddhism in Tibet and about followers of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader. In an article that was published on Wednesday on the front page of Tibet Daily, the regional party secretary, Chen Quanguo, warned that members of the party who “have delusions about the 14th Dalai Lama, follow the 14th Dalai Lama group and participate in and support splittist activities” would be “strictly investigated and punished.”
In Zhejiang, at least a dozen churches, including some that were approved by government religious oversight bodies, have been torn down this year or had prominent crosses forcibly removed. As Ian Johnson of The New York Times reported in May, an internal government document revealed that “the demolitions are part of a strategy to reduce Christianity’s public profile” in the province.