Questions which can seem merely academic in American religious studies are clearly political here. Witness this from this morning's China Daily, the Foreign Ministry articulating a government policy supporting and respecting religious traditions. The "freedom of religion" language is newish but government intervention is itself traditional here.
Slavoj Zizek, of all people, wrote about this already seven years ago in the New York Times, with his usual delight puncturing the pretensions of liberal observers to be above the fray. "It is all too easy to laugh at the idea of an atheist power regulating something that, in its eyes, doesn’t exist. However, do we believe in it?" (Read the whole article here.)
