ABSTRACT
It may not be self-evident that a nation governed by a declaratively atheist political party would engage in ‘religious work’ (zongjiao gongzuo), but the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as numerous official documents state, ‘has always attached great importance’ to it (Gong 2004). This is as true now as in the early period of the regime, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sought to make a New China out of decades of invasive and civil war, political instability, and the legacy of two millennia of imperial rule. These factors influenced the nature and scope of the Party’s ‘religious work’ during the 1950s in ways acknowledged in the Party’s own analysis, though not always well understood by those who carried out the work or those at whom it was aimed. Today, in the heady environment of post-reform socioeconomic development and change, the place of religious work has gained in significance, at least according to the rhetoric of senior Party officials, who have embedded religion into their vision of China’s development for the twenty-first century under the guiding principle of ‘mutual adaptation of religion and socialist society’ (yu shehuizhuyi shehui xiang shiying).
