Doctoral Dissertation Research: Control in Authoritarian States

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Why do authoritarian states choose to limit religious freedom? What explains the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)'s decision to repress certain Christian churches while allowing other Christian churches to operate? Currently, the CCP officially permits Christian churches to operate contingent on registration with the government. However, recent accounts reveal that the CCP has repressed both registered and unregistered churches, suggesting that registered churches are not safe from repression, and not all unregistered churches are targets of repression. The CCP's position as both the guarantor and repressor of religious freedom calls into question which aspects of religion the CCP finds permissible or threatening. Despite the broad relevance and timely importance, this topic has remained largely unaddressed due to China's restrictive environment. Through intensive fieldwork in China, this project seeks to explain the thought process behind the CCP's selective treatment of churches, thereby shedding light onto both the Party's broader political objectives and the decentralized decision-making process of the authoritarian state. At a broader level, this project speaks to historical legacies, state-society relations, human rights, and international relations. Why do authoritarian states choose to limit religious freedom? The CCP's position as both the guarantor and repressor of religious freedom calls into question which aspects of religion the CCP finds permissible or threatening. This project addresses these questions by explaining the variation in the CCP's treatment of Protestant churches in China. It examines how local threats (domestic factors) and the concern for foreign influence (international factors) explain the Party's repression of Protestant churches. Due to China's restrictive environment, studies on this topic have suffered from limits in data collection and research methodology. Through a combination of interviews, surveys, and archival research in China, this project fills this gap by, first, developing a comprehensive, on-the-ground index of government treatment of churches, and second, collecting observations of domestic and international factors that may influence the CCP's treatment of churches. Understanding which churches the government chooses to repress sheds light onto the Party's objectives and the decentralized decision-making process of the authoritarian state. In addition, the project highlights the topic of religion, which itself has often been mistreated and underemphasized in existing political science. This project ambitiously, but justifiably, aims to fill important gaps in literature by building upon existing knowledge and paving new intellectual and methodological roads through intensive field research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.