Party Ideology and the Changing Role of Religion: From “United Front” to “Intangible Cultural Heritage”

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, religious policy in China has faced an increasingly dynamic panorama of religious actors. The implementation of particular policies has proven to be at times pragmatic, at times incoherent and arbitrary. This may be interpreted as an intentional strategy that allows for a certain flexibility arbitrarily to tolerate or to suppress religious activities. At the same time, it can just as well be a result of institutional incoherence and incompetence. As this incoherence has the potential of endangering the legitimacy of religious politics, authorities resort to ideology as a means to solve these contradictions by integrating religion as a growing social factor, while still leaving space for flexible and sometimes inconsistent administration. The present paper shows that religious policy is framed into two directions: on the one hand, the inherited United Front approach is modified by a gradual revaluation of religion. On the other hand, what used to be labeled “superstition” is transformed into a resource for propagating cultural nationalism and patriotism.