i wrote this on december 29th and never posted it. after reading a post at the china beat called “a bible for beijing” i remembered my own post and have come back to hit ‘publish’. i also highly recommend you read the china beat post if you’ve even a morsel of interest of religion in china. here’s the link again.

my own post on chinese bibles follows

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i’ve just finished, as in two minutes ago, re-reading “provisional regulations on the administration of religious activities in the xinjiang uighur autonomous region”, which would normally be about as interesting as the name would imply but for whatever reason, here i am reading it a second time. to my knowledge it was drafted at the 96th executive meeting of the seventh autonomous regional people’s government, or at least that is how it was credited in a 1992 report by human rights watch. someone asked me a while back if people were allowed to worship as they saw fit. at the time my answer was yes, but i didn’t really have any knowledge of the legal background that would make this the case.

the document covers what is and is not permitted in xinjiang as far as religious activities. persons are not permitted to incite ‘holy war’, nor is it permitted to import reactionary pamphlets or preach against the state. however my favourite is that it is not permitted for the state to force a person to believe or not believe in any religious ideas, nor is it permitted for the state to force people to attend or refrain from attending religious services. there are of course rules on when and where religious activities can take place, which means you do end up with mosques having built-in bars as is the case in my city. i was looking for some of the regulations that i had heard about but never read. i knew that mosques and temples couldn’t just be set up anywhere and that religious activities were only to be held in certain places, but that’s about all i knew.

i guess i should go back a bit. a few years ago while i was still in college i worked in a hospital as a nurse aide. one of the nurses was talking about coming to china (a place at which time i had absolutely no interest in going) to smuggle bibles and teach christianity to the poor lost souls of communist china. as someone who fervently distrusts and dislikes missionaries and evangelism, i didn’t have the best response, but also not the most well-researched one. a couple years later when i was to come to china, i found it surprising that the students at the school in shanghai where i was studying were reading the bible for their western civ classes. by this time i knew it was possible to buy bibles and qur’ans in china, with a roommate having gone the year before and bringing back a chinese language qur’an. but to have it actually be read by people… actually, perhaps that’s a good way to dissuade the masses. i’ll add that the area in which i was working is notoriously christian and nurses tend to be more conservative in general at least in my experience.

now, years later, i’m going through all the documents and laws i can find, trying to figure out exactly what the situation really is. i’d guess most chinese people don’t care one way or another, as long as they can retain their family traditions/superstitions which they have been following for decades. afterall guanyin is no counter-revolutionary. so to answer my questions i turn to the “regulations on the supervision of the religious activities of foreigners in china” and the “regulations regarding the management of places of religious activity”, both signed into existence by li peng in 1994.

the relevant parts:
- places of worship must be registered and approved of by the government at at least a the county level.
- “no one may use these places to engage in activities that harm national unity, the solidarity of ethnic groups, social stability” etc.
- religious institutions may not be controlled by parties outside the borders of china. so no puppet churches.
- foreigners freedom of religion is to be respected. preaching is not.

and, finally, you can have any religious texts or other miscellanea so long as it’s not something that otherwise breaks the laws of china and that you only have enough for your own use. me walking in to china with a bible under my arm, sure. trying to enter with leaflets talking about why jesus will save you, all written in simple chinese, that’s going to be a problem.

there are not many times i fully agree with governments. i’m no anarchist, but i find little evidence that government officials are actually looking out for the good of the people, with some exceptions. but i must say, i’m pretty ok with these regulations. and in my experience they’re pretty much followed by all parties. again, there are exceptions.

if you’re interested, you can find all these documents online in various locations. the ones referenced here are available on google books.

only slightly off topic, i also rather liked the point that says anyone using the temple for a hotel has to register as you otherwise would at a hotel or private residence. i admit i’ve thought about sleeping in the mosque before (though not a chinese mosque), and more than once, but i never took the idea seriously enough to look into the legality of such a thing.