Ye Xiaowen | |
|---|---|
| 叶小文 | |
 | |
| Director of the Bureau of Religious Affairs | |
| In office July 1995 – 1998 | |
| Preceded by | Zhang Shengzuo |
| Director of theState Administration for Religious Affairs | |
| In office 1998–2009 | |
| Succeeded by | Wang Zuo'an |
| Party Secretary of the Central Institute of Socialism | |
| In office 2009–2016 | |
| Preceded by | Lou Zhihao |
| Succeeded by | Pan Yue |
| Personal details | |
| Born | August 1950 (1950-08) (age 75) |
| Nationality | Han Chinese |
| Political party | Chinese Communist Party |
| Alma mater | Guizhou Academy of Social Sciences |
| Occupation | Politician |
Ye Xiaowen (Chinese:叶小文;pinyin:Yè Xiǎowén; born August 1950) is aChinese politician who held various top posts relating to state regulation ofreligion in China from 1995 to 2009.
In 1995, Ye became the director of the Bureau of Religious Affairs under theState Council. At the beginning of his work in the Bureau, he held a view to minimize the influence of religion in the socialist China.[1][2] There, he worked to prevent religious unrest, select the11th Panchen Lama, and ban thecontroversial Falun Gong group. In 1998, the Bureau of Religious Affairs was renamed theState Administration for Religious Affairs, while Ye Xiaowen remained its director. He acknowledged presiding over religions in China, and changed policy to say that religion has a place in society, although he persecuted groups that he thought brought foreign control to Chinese churches, like theRoman Catholic Church. In 2007 he declaredState Religious Affairs Bureau Order No. 5, which attempted to reduce the influence of the14th Dalai Lama and other foreign groups on thereincarnations inTibet. All the while, he traveled often to the United States to defend his religious policy against criticism. Ye was relieved of his religious post in September 2009 to direct the Central Institute of Socialism.
Ye Xiaowen was born in 1950 to a teachers' family inNingxiang County,Henan,[3] although he grew up inGuizhou.[4] He joined theChinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1975.[5] Ye was one of the few Chinese students to studysociology after the discipline was suppressed for 20 years, becoming vice director of theGuizhou Academy of Social Sciences. In 1985, afterHu Jintao was promoted toCCP committee secretary of Guizhou, he was made Secretary of the GuizhouCommunist Youth League. As part of his mandate in 1992, he traveled toNorthwest China to find out why some young people were religious, and to try to convert them to the Youth League instead. The reflective article he wrote earned him the attention of religious and CCP leaders in China.[4]
The article criticized the CCP leadership as regarding religion as "backward and fatuous", and for simply hoping that young people would becomeatheists. It acknowledged that religion "has mass appeal and is going to be around for a long time", and that it is "compatible with asocialist society." He condemned theanti-religious excesses of theCultural Revolution, and recommended that China loosen its grip on religion as part of thereform and opening up. On the other hand, Ye vindicates the CCP's suspicions about foreign missionaries in Europe's colonial past with China, and religion's role in overthrowingcommunist states in theRevolutions of 1989. Therefore, he argues, the state must stress "self-governance, self-support, and self-sufficiency" in Chinese religious organizations. This greatly influenced Chineseparamount leaderJiang Zemin's reformist attitudes on religion, which were attacked on both the CCPright andleft for being too restrictive or not restrictive enough. Ye later reflected that he had to quoteKarl Marx on religion in order for the CCP members to listen to his ideas.[4]
In July 1995, Ye was appointed director of the Bureau of Religious Affairs under theState Council of the People's Republic of China.[6][7] One of his first tasks was to make sure that the 1995CCTV New Year's Gala contained nothing offensive to religious people. When he saw that 100 children were set to dance with lanterns shaped as pigs' heads (pigs areritually unclean in Islam), and that it was too late to change the routine, he orderedChina Central Television to take onlylong shots to obscure recognition.[4] That same year, Ye presided over the enthronement ofGyaincain Norbu, the controversial government choice for the11th Panchen Lama ofTibetan Buddhism.[8]
TheMinistry of Civil Affairs of the People's Republic of China banned the controversialFalun Gong belief system in July 1995. Ye gave a press conference three months later, accusing Falun Gong of being adoomsday cult,antiscientific, anti-medicine, of harassing people en masse, and oftax evasion. He insisted that the government had to act against Falun Gong on behalf of science, civilization, and human rights,[9] although he promised that the police would not persecute people who practiced alone in their homes.[10]Slavoj Žižek argues that Ye and the CCP banned Falun Gong not for their general antipathy towards religion, but for Falun Gong's insistence on "independence from state control", a commonality with Tibetan Buddhism.[11]
The Bureau of Religious Affairs was renamed theState Administration for Religious Affairs in 1998, and Ye remained its director.[12] Here he worked to implement the doctrine of theThree-Self Patriotic Movement, or Chinese churches' independence from foreign influence.[13] In practice, this meant the attempted eradication ofChinese Catholicism loyal toRome (which he considered "colonial") and not to theofficial Catholic Church in China.[6] This crackdown was received poorly by international audiences, so he held a press conference inLos Angeles in 2003. He was received with hostility, but was said to have answered questions "like atire salesman".[13] When he was asked how he, as an atheist, could regulate religion in China, he replied, "In China, the director of sports does not play sports; the director of tobacco does not smoke; and the director of religious affairs does not believe in any religion".[4] He said that the Protestant population in China has grown from 10 million in 1999, to 15 million in 2003 and further to 16 million in 2009.[14]
In the same week in 2006 of theWorld Buddhist Forum, Ye Xiaowen "rejected decades of state ambivalence toward religion" by tellingXinhua News Agency that religion in general, andBuddhism in particular, has a "unique role in promoting aharmonious society",[15] acknowledging the rapid revival of religiosity following China's economic reforms.[15] In 2007, Ye announcedState Religious Affairs Bureau Order No. 5, a regulation to take force in September about the reincarnation ofliving Buddhas in theTibet Autonomous Region. It increased vetting of temples that handlereincarnations and affirms that reincarnations done without state approval were illegal. His administration then affirmed that the government would only intervene in religious issues "related to national and societal interests".[16] Some interpreted this order as a renewed assertion of power to choose the nextDalai Lama.[17] The current14th Dalai Lama responded in an interview with a Japanese newspaper, threatening to break with tradition and choose his own successor while he was still living.[18][19]
In the runup to the2008 Beijing Olympics in February, Ye Xiaowen traveled to the United States to addressBush administration concerns about Chinese religious policy. He met with Undersecretary of StatePaula Dobriansky, ambassador for religious freedomJohn Hanford, and retiredArchbishop of WashingtonTheodore McCarrick. He said that China respects religious belief, criticized theU.S. State Department's last annual report on religious freedom, and explained the muted response over theDalai Lama's Congressional Gold Medal. There, he expressed hope for reconciliation with the Vatican, with whom the People's Republic does not currently have ties because it recognizesTaiwan.[20]
After the2008 Tibetan unrest, Ye published an opinion piece in a December edition ofChina Daily. Entitled, "Shangri-La has changed and Tibetans know it", he criticized those who thought themselves "'experts' [about Tibet] after reading a mere handful of texts". Quoting fromLost Horizon, the work that introduced the concept ofShangri-La, he said that Tibet would only become "an everlasting peaceful land" if separatist agitation were quashed and all ethnic groups in Tibet developed equally.[21]
Ye was promoted in September 2009 to the Secretary of the CCP committee at theCentral Institute of Socialism, replacingLou Zhihao.[22] Former Deputy DirectorWang Zuo'an was promoted to Director, a routine move that is not expected to effect changes in policy.[23] TheCatholic Church-affiliatedAsia News was especially critical of Ye's legacy, calling him "a perfect representative of the idea that religions should be subservient to the power and supremacy of the Party".[6]
{{cite web}}:Missing or empty|url= (help)| Political offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Director of the Bureau of Religious Affairs 1995–1998 | Succeeded by Post abolished |
| Preceded by Post created | Director of theState Administration for Religious Affairs 1998–2009 | Succeeded by |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by | Party Secretary of the Central Institute of Socialism 2009–2016 | Succeeded by |
