Evidence of spiritual ferment is everywhere in China, from the rapid growth of evangelical churches and online Bible study groups to the luxury mediation retreats and yoga masters catering to wealthy urbanites. A widespread yearning for meaning and serenity has renewed interest in traditional folk religions and sparked curiosity about new-age practices and self-cultivation exercises.

These spiritual pursuits provide comfort and relief from the stress and unpredictability of life in China at a time of breakneck change. Internal migration and rapid urbanization have weakened community life and family ties, creating a sense of social isolation. A highly competitive education system, bleak employment prospects, and the pressures of the 9-9-6 work culture leave young people feeling hopeless. Some have begun to question the scramble for status and material wealth encouraged by the single-minded pursuit of economic growth.

This malaise, and the spiritual resurgence accompanying it, has raised alarms in Beijing. China’s leaders have long been determined to suppress emerging religious movements they see as a threat to social order — a view they believe is validated by reports of religious fraud, counterfeit clerics, and cult-like pyramid schemes. Beijing sees cases like these as an alarming sign of social disruption and looming chaos, as well as a potential threat to national security. But legal and bureaucratic measures to counter the perceived religious threat have not been effective in reining in these scams, and government propaganda increasingly focuses on warning citizens about them.

China’s administrative system for regulating religious activities — requiring that they be conducted under the auspices of state-sanctioned organizations¹ — was set up early in the Communist era to manage the vast religious infrastructure built up before 1949. It is a relic from a simpler time, before the internet and social media, when people had to gather in person to worship and pray. Recent surveys have found that more people in China are identifying as Christian, but many are evangelicals who do not worship in the state-sanctioned churches, where attendance has stagnated. Even journalists from official media outlets comment on the advanced age and relative poverty of the congregants in the official churches they visit. 

As people in China opt out of the official channels for religious life, their unmet needs have inspired a thriving black market. Religious content has proliferated inside China’s great firewall: officials claim there are more than 300,000 websites promoting religion in some form. Stuck at home during extended COVID lockdowns, many sought comfort in this burgeoning marketplace, where a new breed of online religious entrepreneurs promise a sense of peace, well-being, or financial success. Some underground religious groups saw the lockdowns as an opportunity to expand and savvily took advantage of new digital tools to recruit members. People who browsed Christian content on social media received invitations to join church groups or buy a succession of training courses. Some who responded to these online solicitations found themselves victims of fraud or were pulled into cult-like organizations.

The widespread use of social media has led to an alarming rise in online crime in China, including fake investments, employment scams, and phishing attempts, all of which are endemic. In 2023 alone, domestic law enforcement agencies cracked more than 400,000 cases of telecommunications fraud. With the growth in interest in religion, sophisticated criminal networks that specialize in online scams created new schemes to chisel money from people seeking spiritual guidance or blessings for good fortune.

Religious fraud is an age-old problem in China, but in recent years, scams involving fake clerics and self-proclaimed spiritual masters have proliferated. Reports of scammers impersonating religious figures became so common that the National Religious Affairs Administration set up online registries for officially recognized monks and clergy. Citizens are urged to check their spiritual leader’s credentials before making an offering.

In March 2024, China’s Ministry of Public Security announced that police handled 77 major cases involving “spiritual cultivation” training centers in the previous five years, confiscating assets worth over $30 million. The ministry’s announcement was timed to capitalize on the mainland box office success of The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon 《周处除三害》, a film made in Taiwan that depicts how a fugitive-turned-spiritual master carried out a cult-like scam, convincing followers to give up all their wealth to join his commune.

Soon after, official media publicized a crackdown on what it called “the real-life spiritual cultivation organization from The Pig, the Snake, and the Pigeon.” Police in Xiamen arrested the leader of a multi-level marketing scheme built around “spiritual healing” and “soul shaping.” Operating under a number of registered companies, the well-organized scam included franchises in multiple cities. People who joined the organization were pressured into paying for endless training courses, with the more senior members who recruited them getting a 15% cut of the fees. Members were fined for failing to learn a lesson or address the leader with appropriate respect. Some turned over their life savings and even sold their homes to maintain their position in the organization’s hierarchy. Police arrested 46 people connected with the group, and more than 3,600 victims across 20 provinces reported losses totaling over $1.5 million.

Anti-cult propaganda has long been ubiquitous in China, and as Beijing steps up efforts to counter the country’s religious ferment — and the fraudsters trying to take advantage of it — the anti-cult campaign now reaches into every township and village. Widely advertising official policy, and the penalties for not toeing the line, has a long history in China as a means of social control. The anti-cult propaganda campaign is primarily meant as a prophylactic measure to draw a clear line around religious activity that Beijing deems unacceptable.

With the end of strict COVID lockdowns, authorities were able to take the anti-cult campaign back into the streets and into schools, churches, parks, and other public spaces. Articles on the China Anti-Cult Network, a website launched by the Ministry of Public Security in 2017, show police officers and local officials from a host of government agencies attending public events to remind citizens to “oppose cults, uphold science.” These short, catchy slogans have been a distinctive feature of Chinese propaganda since the Mao era, and they are repurposed for each new campaign. “Family planning is everyone’s responsibility” morphs into “opposing cults is everyone’s responsibility.”

Every holiday and festival provides an opportunity to distribute anti-cult propaganda: Labor Day, International Women’s Day, Arbor Day,² Consumer Rights Day, and — obviously — National Security Education Day. The message is hammered home in lectures and videos and on posters and souvenirs: “say no to cults.” In the run-up to the Lunar New Year, local artists’ associations in cities across China hold public demonstrations where calligraphers create anti-cult-themed chun lian, the couplets used as doorway decorations for the holiday.

Government staff are given training on the importance of “anti-cult work” and the need to set an example by not taking part in prohibited religious activities. To show that they are being proactive in maintaining social order, local officials come up with imaginative ways to disseminate the anti-cult message. Some localities have staged events with a virtual reality program that immerses users in a simulation of what it is like to be approached by a cult. According to promotional material from the company that developed the program, it not only trains users in the correct response when encountering a cult but can also “establish a correct and scientific outlook on life and values, improve the ability to resist cults, and avoid being brainwashed.”

In another innovation, one with echoes of the past, some villages have reinstalled loudspeaker systems like the ones common in Mao’s time — but with an upgrade for the digital era. Local officials can now activate announcements with their mobile phones.

The ongoing anti-cult campaign has its roots in the April 1999 Falun Gong sit-in outside the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing, an act of confrontation and defiance that made headlines around the world. Alarmed by the demonstration and the global media attention it attracted, the Chinese government worked quickly to counter the perceived threat from xiejiao, a term that is usually translated as “cult” or “evil religion,” but traditionally referred to heterodox thought or doctrines opposed to traditional teaching. As Beijing uses it today, “cult” is shorthand for any religious belief or activity other than those conducted under the auspices of one of the state-sanctioned religious organizations.

Falun Gong may have been the initial impetus, but from the outset, the anti-cult crackdown aimed to suppress communities practicing a variety of religions. An anti-cult law enacted in October 1999 banned nineteen groups designated as cults; aside from Falun Gong, this included fifteen unofficial Christian churches and three independent Buddhist sects. During the early days when Beijing was desperate to manage its Falun Gong crisis, local officials were given wide discretion to crack down on all forms of independent religious expression and often did so capriciously, targeting many groups that had not been officially labeled as cults. Every private religious gathering potentially attracted the wrong attention from authorities, and many informal congregations were caught up in the crackdown.

Although the 1999 anti-cult law could only be used against groups designated as xiejiao, authorities had other ways to harass and suppress unsanctioned religious movements. A 1997 revision of China’s Criminal Law included the new crime of “organizing and using a sect, cult, or superstition to undermine implementation of the law,” which could include holding meetings, distributing literature, or posting information online. More routine criminal charges were also used. Some leaders of house churches who sold books were accused of illegal business activity, and others were charged with economic crimes on the basis of fundraising, such as collecting money for church repairs or youth camps. Parishioners who handled donations for their congregations were convicted of fraud. 

The Chinese Communist Party has struggled against religion throughout its history, periodically cracking down hard on what it considers superstitious and irrational beliefs opposed to science and progress. After decades of using law enforcement measures to harass unofficial religious groups — many of which were benign and had track records of charitable service to their congregations and local communities — China now faces an outbreak of genuinely nefarious criminal activity involving religious fraud and spiritual scams. The stepped-up propaganda war shows that Beijing is increasingly concerned about it getting out of control.

At the start of the reform era, when China was still reeling from the moral disaster that was the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping called for the construction of a “socialist spiritual civilization” to address concerns that improving economic conditions would lead to excessive materialism, lax moral standards, and the rejection of Communist ideology. The spiritual civilization campaign was revived in the early 1990s, after domestic turmoil and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, when the leadership once again saw a need to inspire faith among the people and instill moral standards to fill a growing spiritual vacuum.

When Xi Jinping began his second term in office in 2017, he announced a renewed focus on the importance of “building spiritual wealth.” It was important, he said, to improve the people’s ideological consciousness and moral standards, and he called for extensive education about ideals, beliefs, and socialism with Chinese characteristics. A line from Xi’s speech — ”when the people have faith, the country has strength, and the nation has hope”³ — has been a regular feature of government propaganda ever since.

To realize Xi’s vision of a strong state, and out of a paternalistic concern about the dangers that the leadership believes religion poses for society, controls over religious life have tightened during Xi’s rule. The regime has restricted free expression and demanded ideological conformity as part of a broad drive to enforce allegiance and obedience, but the stubborn persistence of religious scams and other types of fraud shows how much Beijing struggles to enforce standards of behavior, let alone control what people think. Unless Beijing begins to recognize the value of tolerance and religious pluralism — and has more faith in its own people — it will have to sustain its anti-cult propaganda indefinitely.

The author would like to acknowledge the fellows and staff of the Center for China Analysis who took part in a lively internal discussion of the issues discussed in this paper, as well as those who offered incisive comments on the text and who worked so diligently to prepare it for publication. He also would like to thank Jing Qian, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Center for China Analysis, for his wise counsel and advice. In a wide-ranging discussion with the author about religion in contemporary China, Jing asked what was going on with the many Chinese media reports of people being scammed by “cults,” a question to which this paper attempts to provide a provisional, but hopefully well-informed, answer. Forthcoming papers from the Center for China Analysis will examine the relationship between faith and China’s party-state in more detail.

1. There are five officially recognized religions in China — Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism — and seven “patriotic religious associations,” which are supervised by the United Front Work Department and the National Religious Affairs Administration: the Buddhist Association of China, Chinese Taoist Association, Islamic Association of China, Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, Bishops’ Conference of the Catholic Church in China, and the Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement and China Christian Council.
2. Arbor Day propaganda encourages citizens to “plant anti-cult trees, advocate science and civilization” (种植反邪绿树，倡导文明科学).
3. The original reads “人民有信仰，国家有力量，民族有希望.”