United Front Work and Religious Affairs Institutions

What are the origins of religious tolerance and repression? How do frontline religious affairs officials decide who should be punished and who should be approved or rewarded? This chapter provides historical and institutional details relating to theory and interpretations on these important questions. In short, the Chinese Communist Party created a religious affairs system to operate an army of religious establishments (the opportunists) that have monitored, divided, and co-opted independent religious organizations (the protestors) since the 1950s. Relying on the discourse of anti-imperialism, this system fostered a rigid religious affairs policy and then hostility from the system toward transnational activism. The functionality of two mechanisms, backdoor listing and minority–majority alliance, is to overcome these two barriers by promoting uneasy collaboration between foreign advocates and local activists.