Exactly, centralized religion has historically been a source of power in competition to the government, military and so on. So authoritarian governments either try to co-opt it or get rid of it.

In the West, centralized religion historically was the government. They collected taxes, managed large scale projects, handing down justice, maintained postal networks, etc.

There's a reason that England's split from the Catholic church lead to a civil war and eventually the 1689 Bill of Rights: it was a coup.

> In the West, centralized religion historically was the government.

Only in the Papal States. Most of the rest of Europe had Dukes and Kings and such, which may have had some friction with Bishops and the Pope.

The reason is divorce.

Centralized religion has historically never existed or even anything close to it in China. And Xi has actually been a big booster for revival of the religious traditions that they do have.

Every one of these threads is full of people doing a ctrl-f find/replace Russia/China on their cold war propaganda lessons.

China's a different country, with a billion and a half people and a few thousand years of history that most Americans are completely ignorant of, but that doesn't stop them from being supremely confident in their takes.

Centralized religion doesn't need to exist in China.

Islam is worldwide. Christianity is worldwide. Judaism is worldwide. And many other faiths are worldwide.

And none of them are super-prevalent in China. They have a non-abrahamic tradition that's a weird localized mashup of buddhism, taoism, local city-gods and crazy statues.

This thread is full of people who've never seen any of it confidently asserting How China Feels About Religion.

The fastest growing community of Christians on the planet was in China for the last 20 years or so. China is large, so it's hard to argue how that equates to prevalence.

But in the next five years, the number of Chinese Christians is projected to grow to half the population of the entire United States—150 million. That may only be 15% of the population, but that's still significant.

> And none of them are super-prevalent in China.

I wonder why. [1]

[1] https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/essays/freedom-of-relig...

It's hard to put the blame solely on Communist China when Christianity's main attempt to take hold led in the Eight-Nation alliance invading China and massacring Christians.

Well the fact that they're killing Muslims is pretty telling about how they feel about other religions.

Stop trying to white wash crimes against humanities

> And Xi has actually been a big booster for revival of the religious traditions that they do have.

Tell that to the Uyghur's.

The Uyghur situation and the road to Europe being built over them will need to be resolved in Europe in the future.

Religions can create allys. Saving this Islamic branch may go a way to reconnecting/reunderstanding the west and Islam.

CCP-as-a-religion has definitely played a huge role in the stability of the Chinese regime, tremendously in the past and certainly a substantial amount in the present.

Wealth inequality is crazy in China (not as crazy as the States in terms of standard deviation, but crazy in terms of the scale: as of 2020 China has over 600 million poor with 140 USD monthly income[1] i.e. almost twice the population of the States)

Since I was young, my parents (both born and raised in mainland China in the 50~60s i.e. had experienced Mao before he died as well as the Cultural Revolution) would tell me that back in those days this whole communism bullshit managed to operate itself in such a large popullation because it was like the religion of the people. And properganda [2] is the way to reinforce that, in those time as well as in today.

You will immediately start seeing giant properganda billboards about how great Xi Jingping is when you visit countrysides in China. The poorer the places the more billboards there are, and the more worshipping you would see.

Even to these days you would find espeically among long-distance driviers little Mao Zedong ornaments in their cars as protective talismans because people (esp the older generation) actually thought of Mao as some kind of deity, one which they would seek blessings from. (It's often hard to tell if they are joking or they actually believe it. That's one aspect of this CCP-as-a-religion culture. And the true victims are the poor and uninformed.)

[1]: https://www.thinkchina.sg/600-million-chinese-earn-1000-rmb-...

[2]: In tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai, you would certainly find less properganda today simply because it doesn't really work against the well-educated. But dezinformatsiya is still rampant. If you can read Chinese, you would see that so many news articles people consumed on WeChat, Toutiao, Douyin, Baidu, etc, are just full of shit. Sometimes they are state-sponsored (showing false information about HK during the protests), and sometimes it's just sensationalism in its worst form (e.g. reporting on covid protests in the States and in EU with gifs that were not from those protest but somewhere else)