I think this is nearly entirely wrong. It's entirely about power and god.
Xi Jinping has cracked down on Christianity shutting down many churches. China has other ethnicities besides the Han, which don't speak Mandarin. If the Uyghurs had no faith they would be safe.
There is little room for religion unless the religion is centralized and submissive to the state. In some sense religion undermines the state.
In the 21st century, especially under the CCP, they're just competing forces more than direct adversaries, they both strive to do the same thing. And for most of History, the Church was the State.
It's parallels are quite visible, and now most wars are fought not for the deliberate imposition of deities, but rather for the new pantheon of self-declared god's: political leaders.
>And for most of History, the Church was the State.
Would you agree that the "Party" in CCP is something entirely different from what this term means in the west, and that it's closer in its meaning to a secularised version of a centralised church?
People wash away the misdeeds of the CCP during COVID because it suits their agenda, all the while their were was dissent fomenting during lockdowns. Han Chinese have been starved in Shanghai, those make shift hospitals were a joke and they under reported the deaths etc...
No, I'm very open about my disdain about the CCP, it's a cancer on the World and it should be seen for what it is.
Thank you; we might disagree on moral judgement of CCP (I'm not sure if I even have any consistent opinion), but the reason I've asked is that knowing about that semantical difference - bordering on mistranslation - makes it much easier to make sense of the situation, and I found it non-obvious.
> And for most of History, the Church was the State.
This is wildly false. The Church of England is about as close as things get. What historical periods are you thinking of in which the Church and the State were identified?
The Spanish crown during it's imperial rule, Isabella was called the Catholic FFS. Greece and Rome were all driven by their deities will as well. The Holy Roman Empire, and the Byzantine Empire...
In short most of the impactful societies, specifically in the West have had hardcore religious zealotry.
> The Spanish crown during it's imperial rule, Isabella was called the Catholic FFS.
It would be difficult for Isabella to be called the Catholic without being religiously subordinate to the Pope.
> Greece and Rome were all driven by their deities will as well.
This is a bizarre claim. Pagan Greece and Rome didn't have organized religion at all, not in any sense we would understand. And both were riddled with mystery cults. The Church was unified with the classical Greek State only in the same sense that it was unified with the olive oil industry, or that the modern American Church is unified with the modern American State.
Xi Jinping has cracked down on Christianity shutting down many churches. China has other ethnicities besides the Han, which don't speak Mandarin. If the Uyghurs had no faith they would be safe.
There is little room for religion unless the religion is centralized and submissive to the state. In some sense religion undermines the state.