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On the eve of a major U.S.-China meeting in Washington, the Chinese government has circulated rigid new regulations to control religion in China. The new policies make illegal several dozen specific kinds of religious activity, including evangelistic outreach outside officially permitted church buildings.

Hu Jun-tao, the man picked by Communist Party leaders to be the next top leader of China, will arrive in Washington on Monday to meet with President George W. Bush. When Bush was in Beijing, Hu hosted Bush at a university where the president told students and a national television audience about the importance of his Christian faith. Hu has been one of the key government leaders in planning religious policy in China.

Christianity Today has obtained a confidential advance copy of the new rules that will be issued by the Jiangsu Religious Affairs Bureau to take effect in June. The new guidelines are evidently part of a centrally directed implementation of uniform religious rules throughout China.

Sources who have read them in other provinces say that all the guidelines appear to be identical. Some knowledgeable observers in China say government leaders have opted to issue the rules only on the provincial level, not nationally, in order to keep a low profile and to distance themselves from any protests of the new clampdown.

These rules give government officials license to disregard objections from religious believers. In Section 3, Article 21, the government declares that religious groups must "accept the people's government's administrative management."

Both official and unofficial religious groups have complained in the past that "administrative management" has meant that whatever government officials arbitrarily wanted to do in managing religious affairs had the force of law.

Experts say this wording appears to be a direct rebuke of those complaints from religious leaders. It sweeps aside objections and tells the religious groups that they should obey or face drastically increased fines or worse.

"Any time the government uses the term 'administrative management' it gives them carte blanche to run the show," says Jason Kindropp, a Brookings Institute expert on Chinese religious policy. "To say point blank that all religious groups must accept the relevant government departments and their actions is a key statement buried in these regulations."

The government is drastically increasing the fines that can be leveled against religious believers who don't hew to the government line. It doubles the maximum fine to the equivalent of $2,500 for a variety of offenses. That is more than the average annual income in China.

It appears that the official religious organizations have lost ground. Up to now, the government required that Protestant Christian churches must be under the control of the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM). Although there are many evangelical pastors in this official church, its top leaders are either agnostic or overtly Marxist in their ideology.

As a consequence, most church leaders in China have refused to register with the TSPM. The new rules appear to open up the possibility that the unofficial churches may register. If this is indeed the situation, then the TSPM may be the big loser.

"If the new regulations mean that Christian churches no longer have to register through the Three Self Church, then that will be the end of the Three Self," says a nationally respected Chinese scholar who studies churches in China.

Chinese house church leaders, however, are sharply divided on whether to risk registering directly with the government under the new policies. In a recent meeting of several of the major unofficial house church networks, some leaders applauded the opportunity to open independent of the TSPM.

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April (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46