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WION Edit: China's clamp down on religious activities

WION
New Delhi, Delhi, IndiaUpdated: Dec 28, 2019, 12:22 PM IST
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File photo: Chinese President Xi Jinping Photograph:(ANI)

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Mixing religion with politics is like fighting a losing battle and China is indulging in this nefarious game. Beijing is manipulating many religions to suit the needs of the Chinese communist state and its politics.

China has an uneasy relationship with the idea of religion. On WION Edit, we discuss how far can the government meddle in the matter of faith?

In one of the earlier works of Karl Marx, the ideologue of modern communism, there is a powerful passage. "Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions."

Mixing religion with politics is like fighting a losing battle and China is indulging in this nefarious game. Beijing is manipulating many religions to suit the needs of the Chinese communist state and its politics.

Recently, Beijing revised its religious affairs regulations which has restricted right to freedom of religion. According to the new rules, you can have your religious belief, but you cannot propagate it.

In other words, the government is going after religious organisations. The rules say religious organisations cannot be profit-making.

Even the religion of the majority community, Buddhism has struggled under the communist regime. Unlike Taiwan, China has not produced a spiritual leader of significance in decades.

Under Xi Jinping, Chinese Buddhism gets state support, but the religion functions for a reason.

The communist government demands religious leaders to unite believers to be patriotic and disseminate religious teachings with patriotic values.

The biggest mistake that communism in China does is to mix the political with the personal - the same mistake that the Soviet Union did for several decades.

Faith or belief is a matter of personal choice. China's abuse of religion as a tool to achieve political homogeneity is deplorable. Using religion as a tool to attract people to a political ideology, like in China, is downright unethical and can only lead to disastrous consequences.

(Disclaimer: WION Edit is the channel's take on the big events of the world)