Shandong: religious personnel to be scored for loyalty to the Party
On a trial basis, the eastern Chinese province is scoring religious personnel to enhance their “ideological awareness". Meanwhile, in several provinces, Buddhists and Taoists are not allowed to celebrate the “superstitious" Ghost Month.
Jinan (AsiaNews/Agencies) – China’s Communist Party has set up a credit evaluation scheme to assess religious personnel with five criteria: excellent, good, discreet, poor, and very poor, ChinaAid reports.
This classification system will be fed by reports sent in with the clear goal of enhancing the ideological awareness of religious personnel.
This is part of President Xi Jinping's campaign to sinicise religions. The first trial will be in Shandong, a province in eastern China, with religious personnel scored by government authorities.
The Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee of Shandong Province met on 21-22 August to discuss how the new policy was progressing. More than 30 people from different cities and counties in the province attended the event. Shandong is home to substantial Protestant communities.
Government-controlled Christian associations in Jinan City (Shandong) had already met on 17 March 2023 at the Jingsi Road Church to launch the credit assessment programme.
This process involves collecting and credit information ordering it into three types: basic information, adverse information, and honorary information. Each local religious affairs department then enters the data based on the assessments by their officials, starting with ideological criteria.
The goal is to advance the spirit of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China and President Xi Jinping's directive of an imposing “strict governance of religion".
Ideological loyalty is also one of the cornerstones of the rules on places of worship that will officially come into force tomorrow across the country.
Those responsible for such venues must “love the motherland and support the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the socialist system”.
Meanwhile, the Ghost Festival, celebrated by Buddhists and Taoists in China and Southeast Asia, has come in the crosshairs of Chinese authorities.
Local governments across the country have been clamping down on this folk practice, Radio Free Asia reports. Calling the practice "uncivilised”, they have issued bans on burning spirit money and making other offerings during the celebration.
“We must consciously resist worship activities with feudal superstitions, [and] break old habits,” reads an advisory posted by the authorities in Yongren, a county in Yunnan, on its website on 20 August.
In Langzhong (Sichuan), local officials are instead encouraging people to make digital offerings.
"For more civilised ways to make memorial offerings, you can use the Cloud Offerings linked to the WeChat public account of the Langzhong Cemetery Management Office," reads the official statement.
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25/04/2016 15:17
