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Authoritarian Containment: Public Security Bureaus and Protestant House Churches in Urban China

Online ISBN:
9780190698126
Print ISBN:
9780190698089
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Authoritarian Containment: Public Security Bureaus and Protestant House Churches in Urban China

Marie-Eve Reny
Marie-Eve Reny

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Université de Montréal
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Published online:
23 August 2018
Published in print:
30 August 2018
Online ISBN:
9780190698126
Print ISBN:
9780190698089
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Since the early years of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese state has sought to regulate the practice of religion. The institutions it created for that purpose were meant to ensure that religious practice would not happen outside the supervision of the state. Since the 1990s, however, unregistered religious sites have proliferated in China, and those include Protestant house churches. China is said to have more unregistered churches than registered ones. Unregistered churches have, for the most part, deliberately chosen not to register with the State Administration for Religious Affairs, and they have also bypassed a number of other central government regulations on religious activities. Despite the fact that they are illegal, local public security bureaus have tolerated those churches. The book argues that they have done so to contain the influence of Protestantism in Chinese cities. It conceptualizes containment, explains why public security bureaus have contained house churches, and discusses the strategy’s impact on authoritarian regime resilience. Autocracies other than China have similarly contained informal religious groups. The book delves into the Mukhabarat’s containment of jihadi Salafists in post-Zarqawi Jordan, and Anwar al-Sadat’s containment of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1970s Egypt.

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