No-cult zone
A murder at a McDonald’s has given the party a pretext for attacking an old foe
Aug 30th 2014 | BEIJING | From the print edition
ON AUGUST 21st five members of a banned religious sect known as the Church of the Almighty God went on trial for a murder that has gripped the country. One evening in May, in front of stunned customers at a McDonald’s in the eastern city of Zhaoyuan, in Shandong province, the suspects allegedly beat to death a woman who had refused to give them her phone number. The brutal attack was caught on smartphone video, which spread virally online.
The authorities have seized on the incident as an opportunity for venting against an old foe: “evil cults”. The Communist Party tolerates organised religion when its houses of worship are registered and its doctrines do not challenge the party’s authority. Its attitude toward unregistered congregations and foreign missionaries is much less tolerant, and has recently shown signs of hardening even further. Fenggang Yang of Purdue University says this reflects the rising influence of “militant atheists” in the party.
A fear of religious sects is deeply ingrained in the party’s thinking. In the mid-19th century a popular sect known as the Taiping, whose leader claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, launched a bloody rebellion that nearly toppled the Qing dynasty. Mao tried to ban superstitions, disdainful of their hold on the popular imagination—if not of the Mao cult that arose in their place. More recently the emergence in the 1990s of the Falun Gong spiritual movement surprised the party leadership both with its popularity (its following of millions included officials and intellectuals) and its organisational skills. The party dispatched many adherents to labour camps and others to psychiatric wards to “cure” them of their sectarian obsessions. The movement withered.
But the party still fears the appeal of cults, which offer an alternative system of belief and authority. In the past two years, officials have been making a renewed effort to eradicate them; waging propaganda campaigns everywhere from rural townships to universities and even in primary schools. In July an urban district in the northern province of Jilin said it had distributed 10,000 copies of a “Campuses Against Cults” pamphlet to teachers and students in primary and secondary schools. The district’s political-legal committee, which oversees the party’s powerful security apparatus, staged song-and-dance shows. Officials produced what they called “fun” anti-cult propaganda posters. Similar campaigns elsewhere have sought to create “no-cult zones”. In one rural part of the northern mining city of Baotou, school students took part in an anti-cult essay contest and anti-cult quizzes. They took home anti-cult “guarantee” forms for their parents to sign.
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21614243-murder-mcdonalds-has-given-party-pretext-attacking-old-foe-no-cult-zone