Thoralf KLEIN
Atheism has had an enormous effect on the religious policy of the Chinese state ever since Western ideologies reached China around 1900. Since 1949 the officially atheistic Chinese Communist Party has sought to control rather than eliminate religion.
Because religion has been woven into the fabric of Chinese social life since ancient times, the rise to power of modern political forces, especially the avowedly atheistic Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, was likely to have a
