Conclusion and Future Prospects
Late in 2016, the Chinese government made public the planned revisions to its ten-year-old Religious Services Law.[82] This law governs the acceptable practice and parameters of religion, and the proposed revisions revealed a growing concern with issues such as fraud and online recruiting, but far less so with religious violence.
Apart from the standard injunction that ‘no organisation or individual shall use religion to harm national security, disrupt social order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the national educational system, or otherwise harm national interests, public interests and the legitimate rights and interests of citizens', there is little to suggest that the Chinese government currently sees any existential threat in religion or religious violence, at least no threat that is unique to religion. This stance is not surprising. Although imperial era Chinese regimes may have understood the danger of religion in intrinsic terms (the fear, for example, that rebel invincibility magic might actually work), the predominant political concern since at least the time of the Boxer debacle has been the ability of religion to organise and energise people who are already marginalised, violent or disaffected. Certainly this would be the view of China's current government, which is externally confident that religious violence, and religion itself, will fall away as Chinese society grows ever more wealthy and stable.But even now, such confidence is not absolute. China does remain highly concerned about ethnic violence carried out through or in the name of religion, particularly Islam, and keeps exceedingly close guard over any manner of religious education, or communication with potentially restive Muslim regions such as Xinjiang. It also keeps the threat of religious violence available as a potential policy card of its own. Whatever threats it may or may not continue to see in groups like Falungong, the Chinese government certainly recognises the ancillary benefits of its own past campaigns against evil cults, and would undoubtedly be able to produce a similar threat, if the need again arose.