As a result of anti-religious campaigns carried out between 1950 and 1979, churches, mosques and temples were closed and reeducation was coerced upon clergy. The Cultural Revolution also criminalized the possession of religious texts. Monks were beaten or killed.
The Chinese government, under the leadership of Jiang Zemin, sponsored the persecution of Falun Gong; it called for the "education of Marxist materialism and atheism" to counter that faith.
The most recent antireligious campaign has been instated by current General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, Xi Jinping, who reemphasized that members of the Communist Party of China must be "unyielding Marxist atheists" and also "instituted a broad campaign to suppress all forms of dissent." Journalist Ian Johnson noted that officials have targeted Christianity and Islam with particular intensity because of their perceived foreign ties. In the Chinese province of Zhejiang alone, over 1200 Christian crosses have been removed from their steeples since 2013. In August 2017, a number of Catholic Christian priests, as well as laypeople, were injured when trying to prevent a government bulldozer from demolishing their historic church in the Shanxi province. In February 2018, government authorities in Kashgar, "launched an anti-religion propaganda drive through local police stations", which included policemen erecting a banner proclaiming “We Must Solemnly Reject Religion, Must Not Believe in Religion”. As of November 2018, in present-day China, the government has detained estimates of a million people in what it refers to as "training centers" as part of a thought reform campaign, "where Uighur Muslims are remade into atheist Chinese subjects". For children forcibly taken away from their parents, the Chinese government has established "kindergartens" with the aim of combating 'three evil forces', and "converting future generations of Uighur Muslim children into loyal subjects who embrace atheism". Chinese officials have not acknowledged any sort of detention camps. They have stated that Uyghur Muslims are sent to train to gain valuable skills and education to prevent extremism and increase employability. The U.S. government estimates that about one million people are held in the re-education camps, mainly Uyghur Muslims. In December 2018, officials raided Christian house churches just prior to Christmas and coerced them to close; Christmas trees and Santa Clauses were also forcibly removed. In 2018, the United Front Work Department initiated a crackdown on large outdoor religious statues. In September 2019, the UN Human Rights Council was informed that the Government of China "is harvesting and selling organs from persecuted religious and ethnic minorities on an industrial scale". The tribunal concluded that some Uighur Muslims, Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhists and Christians are being “killed to order... cut open while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale”. According to the Christian Post, fingerprinting and facial recognition technology is being installed in churches, temples, and other religious meeting places throughout rural areas of China by 2020. The government of China continued its persecution of Christians throughout the 2019 COVID-19 pandemic, demolishing Xiangbaishu Church in Yixing and removing a Christian Cross from the steeple of a church in Guiyang County. In the Shandong Province, "officials issued guidance forbidding online preaching, a vital way for churches to reach congregants amid both persecution and the spread of the virus".
