Material Politics, Violence, and Religion: A Comparative Study of Islam and Buddhism in the People's Republic of China

In the People’s Republic of China, religious politics has taken the shape of material politics. The Republic’s religious administrators borrow from the ‘world religions paradigm’ to outwardly promote an image of religious tolerance and freedom, while simultaneously fully employing the disciplining potential of the world religions paradigm. When we look at both Buddhism and Islam, we see how these authorities are gaining control over the religious infrastructure in China and define how this infrastructure encodes religious realities. The study of contemporary religion in China, and the study of Islam a forteriori, has over the past decades increasingly become a locus of an epistemological rift between Western ‘critique’ of PRC policy in Hui and Uyghur territories in China, and the ‘Chinese perspective’, which has generally retreated from studying Islam in China. Over the recent years and since the rise of Xi Jinping, a new political ideology has taken shape in the PRC, which attempts to be a fusion of Maoism-Leninism, the economic and cultural vision of Deng Xiaoping, and the future looking new Maoist authoritarianism of Xi Jinping himself, with the increased adoption of native Chinese cultural elements, such as Confucianism. This ideology is exercised by a form of structural violence, which becomes visible at the material level. Not only do they control which religious buildings are allowed, as part of local urban planning policies, but the Chinese authorities also initiate religious architectural projects on their own, including mosques, Buddhist academies and Tibetan temples. It employs what Walter Benjamin has called a ‘mythical violence’. This is done not only by cultural control, but also by developing and investing in a communist-sanctioned religious infrastructure of Buddhist schools, temples, ‘vocational training camps’, high-speed rail links to regions of religious interest, but also by targeted demolition of religious sites that are unwelcome.