Call for law to protect religious freedom

A senior Chinese academic has warned his country urgently needs a formal religious law to prevent conflicts escalating with  Christian Churches, writes Jonathan Luxmoore.

Professor Liu Peng, director of Beijing’s Pushi Institute for Social Sciences, was speaking as a campaign continued to remove crosses from Catholic and Protestant churches in Zhejiang province, in what many observers see as a hardening of government attitudes to Christianity. “In the current situation, religious people aren’t happy, the Government isn’t satisfied and China is being criticised abroad. We must decide whether we’re going to be positive, negative or neutral towards religion,” Professor Liu told a European Catholic China Colloquium, organised in Poland by Germany’s Catholic China-Zentrum and the Polish Church’s Sinicum Institute.

He said that the lack of legal provisions had caused conflict within China’s five officially recognised confessions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism and Catholicism. He added it had also enabled local officials to “make their own rules” at a time when tension was acute between state-approved and underground religious communities. “It’s often hard to see whether bodies like the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association represent religious communities or Government,” said Professor Liu.