From classrooms to living rooms, the Party is closing every path by which a child might believe in anything but the state.

This week, Chinese language media Baodian Times exclusively disclosed two internal Chinese Communist Party documents. One is a five-year plan for the suppression of so-called “evil cults.” The other is titled “Opinions on Preventing and Addressing Religious Proselytization Among Minors”

Together, the two documents reveal that in CCP-ruled China, where “freedom of religious belief” is written into the Constitution but genuine freedom of belief does not exist in practice, the authorities are tightening the noose even further.

Not only is the regime expanding the scope of what it can label an “evil cult” to include businesses and virtually any type of organization, but it is also invoking the pretext of “preventing and addressing religious proselytization among minors” in an apparent effort to ensure that all religious faiths in China are eventually deprived of their next generation.

A Five-Year Plan to Destroy Reputations and Seize Wealth

According to Baodian Times, the five-year campaign against so-called “evil cults” was launched in late June, when the General Office of the CCP Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council once again ordered a new, five-year nationwide special operation aimed at making such repression “further institutionalized and long-term.”

When Chinese people hear the word “evil cult,” many probably first think of the overwhelming propaganda campaign launched by the CCP’s state media against Falun Gong in 1999.

For the millions of Falun Gong practitioners who have been sentenced, detained, or sent to labor camps under CCP rule, Article 300 of China’s Criminal Law—concerning “organizing or using secret societies, evil cult organizations, or superstition to undermine the implementation of state laws and administrative regulations”—has also been one of the legal provisions most frequently used against them, even though the law itself never clearly defines what constitutes an “evil cult,” and Falun Gong practitioners themselves have committed no unlawful acts.

Today, however, the “evil cult” label is poised to be attached, without hesitation, to far more organizations and social networks across Chinese society.

In other words, anything the CCP dislikes—particularly an organization that has gained social influence or accumulated a certain economic foundation—can first be branded an “evil cult” and then subjected to a two-pronged assault: destruction of reputation and confiscation of wealth.

Destroying the target’s “heart and mind” means, of course, discrediting and demonizing it publicly. Seizing its wealth means cutting it off economically and taking its assets.

In the case of Falun Gong practitioners, there was also a third element: physical destruction.

Under the CCP’s latest five-year plan, many groups may now find themselves subjected to similar treatment. The personal-development organization “Creating Abundance,” which has already been comprehensively dismantled, appears to be only the tip of the iceberg.

The CCP Itself Is the Largest Evil Cult

In fact, if one compares the CCP itself with the six basic characteristics it once cited when attacking Falun Gong as an “evil cult”—worship of a supreme leader, mind control, fabricated doctrines, extraction of money, secret organization, and harm to society—the similarities are striking.

Take leader worship.

Cai Qi, a member of the CCP’s Politburo Standing Committee and widely regarded as Xi Jinping’s de facto No. 2, has demanded that the study of Xi Jinping Thought must enter people’s “hearts, minds, and souls.” If that is not leader worship, what is?

During the Cultural Revolution, the entire Chinese population was required to perform “morning requests for instructions and evening reports” to Mao Zedong. Was that not leader worship?

There is no need to go through every one of the remaining characteristics individually.

The CCP itself began, of course, as a secret organization. In its own propaganda films, are not the so-called “underground Party members” portrayed as heroic figures?

The reality is that the CCP is not merely a political party. It is the largest cult-like organization in the world.

Political parties in normal countries advocate political positions and engage in political activities. They do not seek to control people’s thoughts, souls, or inner lives.

The Communist Party, by contrast, demands that people surrender their lives, souls, thoughts, and consciences to it. If people do not volunteer them, the Party seeks to seize them by force—violating the independence of the human mind and demanding that individuals abandon their own thinking and simply follow the Party.

What the CCP has established in China, therefore, is not merely a fusion of cult-like ideology and tyrannical rule. It has also preserved many of the habits of a criminal gang.

Blocking Every Path by Which Minors Might Encounter Religion—At School, in Society, and at Home

The second document, “Opinions on Preventing and Addressing Religious Proselytization Among Minors,” is equally alarming.

First, it calls for “strengthening schools as the principal front of ideological education” and incorporating the prevention of religious proselytization on campus into official performance and evaluation systems.

Students are not merely expected to study Xi Jinping Thought. The document also demands vigilance against “religious teachers,” stating that teachers who preach religion to students or encourage them to participate in religious activities should be removed from teaching positions and that such conduct must be “severely punished according to law.”

Second, the document calls for a harsh crackdown on what it describes as religious “infiltration” targeting minors.

In effect, religious ideas are not to be spread to minors through virtually any venue or activity: training courses, summer or winter camps, psychological counseling, social gatherings, friendship activities, sports and cultural events, online games, videos, literary works, livestreaming platforms, social networks, educational apps, and more.

It further demands the establishment of a comprehensive enforcement mechanism against religious proselytization among minors, creating a workflow of:

“monitoring and early warning — lead verification — categorized handling — review and assessment — follow-up and accountability.”

The document also instructs propaganda, cyberspace, broadcasting, culture, and tourism authorities to “purify the social and cultural environment” and establish corresponding mechanisms for supervision, reporting, and punishment.

It calls for increased censorship of television dramas, variety shows, concerts, livestreams, and online audiovisual programs, as well as tighter control over online introductions, links, and redirects involving public figures’ religious beliefs, supposedly to prevent religious content from having a “negative influence” on minors or “misleading their understanding.”

In other words, from schools to the broader society, the CCP seeks to block virtually every possible channel through which minors might encounter religion.

The third component is even more disturbing.

It is given the pleasant-sounding title “Strengthening the Construction of Civilized Families,” but in substance it extends the Party’s control directly into the home.

Parents who teach their own children about their religious faith may be deemed to have crossed the CCP’s “legal and policy bottom lines and red lines.”

The document goes even further:

“Primary and secondary schools should guide students to proactively report situations in which families compel them to practice religion and promptly report such cases to united front and education departments for coordinated handling. Women’s Federation organizations should strengthen positive guidance, encouraging religious women to educate their children through correct actions, correct thinking, and correct methods, and not to instill religious ideas in their minor children.”

In other words, if parents are religious, the CCP wants schoolchildren to report them.

Nor does it stop there.

The directive also requires schools to “educate” parents and to “prevent minors from accompanying religious grandparents or other elders into places of religious activity simply because no one else is available to care for them.”

The CCP understands very well that children are their parents’ greatest vulnerability. Using schools to pressure and intimidate parents is therefore one of the regime’s more calculated methods of control.

Finally, the document, issued by the CCP’s United Front Work Department, declares that authorities must “strengthen the Party’s overall leadership” and establish a system in which, under the unified leadership of Party committees, “departments fulfill their respective responsibilities, schools play an active leading role, families proactively fulfill their duties, and society provides effective support.”

What this means in practice is that the CCP seeks to shut down, through schools, society, and families alike, every avenue by which minors might embrace any belief system other than communism and Xi Jinping Thought.

At the same time, it seeks to turn students into monitors and informants against their own parents.

If these measures succeed, then once the current generation of religious believers passes away, CCP-ruled China may be left only with the ideological descendants of communism.

The Noose Tightens — and Indifference Has a Cost

To rescue its economy and its hold on power, the CCP once raised the banner of “reform and opening” and “aligning with the world.” Yet in the civilized world, parents who bear the duty of raising their children also have a natural right to decide what religious tradition and religious education their minor children first receive—including baptizing infants only weeks old and, as a matter of course, bringing those infants into the church.

As children grow into adulthood, of course, they acquire the right to decide for themselves what they believe—or whether they believe at all.

This is a tradition that has existed across civilizations for thousands of years.

Even the emperors of ancient China generally did not extend the hand of state power into the family home to dictate whether children could follow their parents in burning incense or bowing before a Bodhisattva.

Across five thousand years of history and across the vast expanse of the world, it is difficult to find another regime as shameless and unreasonable as the CCP—an evil cult-like political power fused with the methods of a gangster organization.

Yet this regime today rules approximately 17 percent of the world’s population.

Is that not tragic?

There is another deeply tragic aspect to this story.

When the CCP first branded Falun Gong a “cult,” how many people responded with the attitude that it was none of their concern?

For twenty-seven years, the CCP accumulated methods and experience in persecuting Falun Gong. Today, those methods are being expanded and applied to more groups—and increasingly to society as a whole.

There are now fewer and fewer people who can truly stand outside the system and say that it has nothing to do with them.

If people only begin to feel the pain now, is it already too late?

Perhaps not.

Even as the CCP tightens the noose step by step, perhaps that very tightening is also awakening more people.

Perhaps it is allowing more Chinese people to recognize the true face of what may be the largest cult-like political organization in modern history—to reject it, withdraw from it, and resist it.

And perhaps, before the CCP drags still more people down with it, some will still have the opportunity to save themselves.

9/9/2026