Mick Hartley

A new Chinese crackdown on Christians reinforces the view that Xi Jinping is Mao version 2, only with more sophistication. Bob Fu at Tablet:

For 40 years, since the end of Mao Zedong’s bloody Cultural Revolution, China’s unregistered Protestant and Catholic congregations have operated in a precarious gray zone—technically illegal but often tolerated. That uneasy equilibrium shattered in October.

Zion Church’s founder and senior pastor, Rev. Mingri “Ezra” Jin, was taken from his home in Beihai, Guangxi Province. Within hours, police swept through multiple cities, arresting at least 22 pastors, preachers, and lay leaders, including Pastors Wang Cong, Yin Huibin, Liu Zhenbin, and Sun Cong. Two detention centers in Beihai now hold 13 women and nine men; others have been placed under house arrest or disappeared into China’s labyrinth of “residential surveillance” facilities.…

During the Cultural Revolution, the party sought to eliminate all religious expression as “superstition.” But under Xi Jinping, the persecution has taken on a more sophisticated, ideological character—what he calls the “sinicization of religion.” Churches are not merely destroyed; they are forced to submit, to rewrite Scripture, to display portraits of Xi alongside crucifixes, to teach loyalty to the party before loyalty to Christ.

This crackdown thus represents a return to Maoist absolutism cloaked in modern technology. Surveillance cameras monitor house gatherings. Artificial intelligence scans sermons for “illegal religious content.” Christian WeChat groups are infiltrated by state security. The party has learned that total control in the digital age requires both coercion and algorithmic precision.

The reasoning behind the suppression is the same as ever: under totalitarian rule there can be loyalty only to the party. As it was with Mao, so it is with Xi. For a while, after Mao, it looked like China might be undergoing some kind of liberalisation – but it wasn’t to be. The country was structured to follow a totalitarian line. There was a Mao-shaped hole, which Xi has now filled.