Beijing and the Vatican

Abstract

As China exerts increasing influence on the world stage and particularly in the Asia Pacific region, the issue of religious freedom will become one of greater urgency. The struggle for religious freedom for China’s Catholic population provides a window into the impact that religious pluralism is having on the Chinese state, and the tensions between China’s leadership and the Vatican over freedom of religion for China’s Catholics provides an important test case for how China negotiates church/state relations within its own society. This article argues that the differing viewpoints on religious freedom found in the Catholic Church’s Vatican II documents, and China’s 1982 Constitution, are the origin of these tensions. The article then examines Huntington’s Third Wave theory of democratization, updated by Philpott, to examine how the tensions between the Chinese state and the Catholic Church, which has a successful history of challenging communist states, are being played out.