China’s policies toward religion have changed radically during the Xi era. The state has sought to Sinicize religious practices and bring them under tighter bureaucratic control, while stricter regulations have curtailed public discussion of faith and spirituality on the Internet and social media. Nonetheless, more Chinese than ever are turning to spiritual pursuits in search of comfort and relief from the stress and unpredictability of life in China at a time of economic uncertainty, social disruption, and eroding trust in the Party-state and its secular materialist ideology.

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. A widespread yearning for meaning and serenity has renewed interest in world religions as well as traditional folk beliefs, leading to the proliferation of local religious associations, house churches, and online Bible study groups.

This crisis of faith — and the spiritual resurgence accompanying it — has raised alarms in Beijing. China’s leaders remain determined to crack down on unsanctioned religious expression and enforce ideological conformity, and they have stepped up efforts to shape people’s beliefs along the lines of their own civic morality. But for millions of Chinese, the quest for spiritual fulfillment is deeply personal. Join the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis (CCA) for a virtual discussion on the battle for the hearts and minds of China’s faithful featuring Pulitzer Prize–winning author Ian Johnson, Duke Divinity School Professor Xi Lian, and Whitman College Assistant Professor Yuan Xiaobo. The discussion will be moderated by CCA Fellow G.A. Donovan.

Speakers

Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, researcher, and 2024-2025 fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. He is the author of The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, which tells the story of one of the world’s great spiritual revivals. He is also the founder of the China Unofficial Archives, a repository for hundreds of books, samizdat magazines, and underground films banned in China. He lived in China for more than 20 years and worked as a newspaper correspondent for The Baltimore Sun from 1994 to 1996 and the Wall Street Journal from 1997 to 2001. He returned to China in 2009, living there until 2020 and writing regularly for the New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and other publications. From 2021 to 2024 he was a senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Leipzig on Chinese religious associations.

Xi Lian is David Steinmetz Distinguished Professor of World Christianity at Duke Divinity School. His research focuses on China’s modern encounter with Christianity and the emergence of Protestant elites and their role in the search for civil society in today’s China. His most recent book, Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao’s China, is the first authoritative biography of the most important political dissident in the Mao era, whose open opposition to Communism was sustained by her Christian faith. He is also the author of The Conversion of Missionaries, a critical study of American Protestant missions against the backdrop of rising Chinese nationalism in the early twentieth century, and Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China, winner of the 2011 Christianity Today Book Award, which examines the development of missionary Christianity into a vibrant, indigenous faith of the Chinese masses. 

Xiaobo Yuan is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Religion at Whitman College and a cultural anthropologist whose work explores the intersection of global Christianities. Her first book, Converting China: Urban Christianity and the Politics of Futurity (to be published by Bloomsbury's New Directions in the Anthropology of Christianity series), examines the future-making practices of state-sanctioned and underground Chinese Protestant churches. She has published in Asian Anthropology, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, The Comparatist, and the Boston Review, and has co-edited a special issue of China Perspectives on “Interrogating Futurity in Contemporary China.” She received a PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a BA in English and anthropology from Johns Hopkins University.

G.A. Donovan (moderator) is a Fellow on Chinese Society and Political Economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Columbia College, and the St. John’s College Graduate Institute, he served as a Foreign Service officer covering a broad portfolio of foreign policy and economic issues as an American diplomat in Beijing, Chengdu, and Kathmandu. Subsequently, he was appointed senior researcher and assistant director at the Harvard Business School Asia-Pacific Research Center, traveling throughout China to conduct field research on a range of business and management topics. He was also communications director and speechwriter at Hong Kong’s securities commission, a researcher and writer for Let’s Go: India, and a foreign teacher at universities in Beijing. His writing has appeared in the South China Morning Post, China Economic Quarterly, Far Eastern Economic Review, and other publications.