The Chinese Communists have tried relentlessly to stop Christianity from spreading, but the harder they have pushed back the more it has grown. Once scarcely over a million adherents in 1949, tens of millions of Chinese are becoming Christians between all the various denominations.
However, the Chinese government has responded to this by instituting a full-scale persecution of all religions, including the state enforcement of communism. Muslims have suffered greatly in Xinjiang Province, and Christians all over the nation have suffered and continue to suffer.
The idea of communism as a state religion is not a new concept. It was experimented with in the USSR, and North Korea does such with the enforcement of a combination of the worship of communism and the Kim family as a state religion. Christianity suffered greatly in the USSR, and it suffers today in North Korea.
While persecution is far from new to the People’s Republic of China, a new development has arisen in China’s southeastern Jiangxi Province, which is not only the persecution of Christians, but the emergence of a near formal declaration of worship of communism as the state religion.
…local officials and public authorities are doubling down on a directive instructing private Christian congregations to instead worship the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) itself.
Jiangxi, while not China’s province with the greatest Christian demographic, does boast a comparatively sizable Christian population. House churches may be found in numerous places across the region and in good numbers.
In response to the rapidly growing numbers of Christian converts, the United Front Work Department, the CCP’s instrument of maintaining national unity and popular loyalty to itself, passed an order in Jiangxi Province to repress and dissolve local Christian gatherings in urban and rural settings… (source)
The enforcement of these provisions has grown rapidly. Churches of all forms, be they formal building or “house churches”, if they are not being disbanded immediately, the congregation will be given some limited choices. They can choose dismissal and closure of their place of worship, or “rectification” with the state. This “rectification” process is something called the “Three-Self Church,” which has no autonomy from the government. The Three-Self Church frames selected elements of Christianity in such a manner as to keep its adherents in line with the “party ideology”.
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