(TibetanReview.net, Feb06’24) – Signalling full onslaught on Sinicization of religion, China’s top leader on religious and minority affairs has on Feb 5 called on the country’s religious leaders to be more purposeful in serving the overall work of the Party and the country to strengthen their communities’ identification with the motherland in his Chinese New Year greetings. Both the Chinese New Year, called the Spring Festival, and the Tibetan New Year, called Losar, fall on Feb 10 this time.
Addressing a meeting with leaders of national religious groups ahead of the Chinese New Year, Wang Huning, a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, called on the country’s religious groups to be more purposeful in serving the overall work of the Party and the country, reported China’s official Xinhua news agency Feb 5.
He has called on them to “find their location and direction over the course of the country’s modernization drive, and rally more religious figures and believers around the Party and the government.”
In particular, Wang has urged the religious groups to “stay committed to the principle that religions in China must be Chinese in orientation, follow the guidance of core socialist values and cultivate in religious figures and believers a growing sense of identity with the motherland, the Chinese nation, the Chinese culture, the CPC, and socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
He has also said the Party and the government attached importance to the religious work and cared about religious figures, and asked localities and authorities to strengthen their communication with religious figures and believers while ensuring they enjoyed a happy and peaceful Spring Festival.
Earlier, it was reported by the Tibetan service of rfa.org Jan 31 that Party Secretary Liu Yan of Palyul (Chinese: Baiyu) County in the historically Tibetan region of Sichuan province had called on leading monks in each Tibetan monastery to “consciously enhance national awareness, legal awareness, and citizen awareness” and “deeply expose and denounce the divisive nature of the Dalai Lama and the Dalai clique” while safeguarding “unity of the motherland.”