Religion in China has survived Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and revived in the reform era under Deng Xiaoping and his followers. Since his accession to the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 2012, Xi Jinping has ushered in a new era of religious repression that is rapidly approaching the worst level since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Thomas Farr said during a recent congressional hearing, “the assault on religion in China under President Xi Jinping…has justly been called a Second Cultural Revolution.” I would call it the Cultural Revolution 2.0 for its upgraded, high-tech measures of repression in the digital age.

China in recent years has been on a spree of issuing new regulations that impose harsher restrictions on religious institutions than at any time since the Cultural Revolution. What are these regulations, why has Beijing issued them, and how significant are they? Answering these questions requires an awareness of the social and political context within which these regulations have come about, and an understanding of the power structures regulating religion in Communist China generally. What follows is an outline and preliminary analysis of the public-legal ways in which China aims to control religion and, in particular, subjugate religious institutions in the country. 

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