Honor Thy Father and Mother, but Obey Xi

hina’s Communist Party is playing a long game against Christianity, using the young to target the old; both separating children from faith and telling them to turn against their parents for a few dollars or snacks.

It’s one more totalitarian turn for a country that has long fought against any belief system that does not include the CCP.

Xi Jinping is known for touting “traditional Chinese values,” calling for a renewal of filial piety in Chinese society, a central tenet of Confucian philosophy. Xi says that Beijing should promote “family harmony, encourage people to take on family responsibilities, cultivate fine family traditions, and take care of the elderly.” Perceptive observers may notice the similarity this idea bears to the Fifth Commandment, “honor your father and mother.” 

And yet, even as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pays lip service to the inseparable bond between parents and children, it actively works to undermine it by ensuring the Party always comes first, even before family. Pursuant to ensuring that there is no institution above the CCP, in China it is illegal for parents to pass their religion on to their children. Christians who send their kids to Sunday school risk imprisonment. 

The CCP has a well-developed legal basis for this insidious repression. In 2017, when the CCP revised the Regulations of Religious Affairs, China’s principal religious governance law, it mandated that non-religious organizations, non-religious schools, and non-religious venues may not conduct religious education or training.

Then, the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA), the CCP organ that controls religious practice, issued the Internet Religious Information Service Measures in 2021. The law forbade online religious education and explicitly banned “inducing minors to believe” or organizing religious activities for minors. 

In 2025, SARA issued the Online Code of Conduct for Religious Personnel, which tightened the 2021 rules by making the restrictions apply directly to individual clergy and broadening the definition of online criminal activity. Some of these new restrictions include rules prohibiting clergy from “disseminating or inculcating religious ideas” to minors and arranging religiously themed summer or winter camps. 

This past May, Chinese police in Kaili City, Guizhou Province, arrested six house church leaders in connection with a children’s Sunday school the congregation ran. Authorities charged them with “organizing minors to engage in activities undermining the public order” and “fraud.” The latter charge is nothing new; Beijing often attempts to justify its repression of benign Christian worship with trumped-up financial charges. The former charge, however, has historically been employed against adults engaged in kidnapping or child labor rings, and so its use against Christian families is a troubling development.

While these regulations include a plethora of other restrictions on Christian worship, it is worth highlighting the evolution of the CCP’s draconian laws dealing with children. While China’s stated objective is the “Sinicization” of Christianity, entailing the conversion of faith in an otherworldly power into political support of the government, the CCP tolerates Christianity because it has grown too large for the Chinese state to stop it. 

Beijing’s evolving body of laws surrounding children reveals its true desire: the subversion, cooptation, and ultimate elimination of all religion. This evil aim should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Marxist doctrine, which cannot tolerate alternative sources of not only political legitimacy, but also of moral authority.

It’s difficult to know precisely how many Christians there are in China today, with some estimates putting the figure at over 100 million. But regardless of the exact number, what’s clear is that there are far too many adherents to Christianity for the CCP to crush through overt repression alone. 

Instead, the CCP is playing the long game, planning generations ahead. In Xi’s view, if he manipulates Chinese children to value the Party over God, he can eventually turn back the Christian tide sweeping China.

To accomplish this, the CCP is weaponizing primary and secondary education to attack the basic bonds holding families together. 

At a middle school in Yongdeng County, Gansu Province, police addressed roughly 1,500 students and teachers and told them, “If anyone discovers someone who believes in God, you have to report them to the Public Security Bureau immediately… if your mom or dad believes in a religion, report them to us immediately.” Officers reportedly offered 1,000 RMB (around $150) for every “common believer” reported and between 10,000 and 40,000 RMB ($1,500 to $6,000) for a “church head.”

In Bozhou, a city in Anhui Province, police officers reportedly offered money and snacks to first- and second-grade children if they reported parents or other students who believed in God. A middle school headmaster in the same region threatened to expel students who themselves believed or were related to believers. A primary school in Inner Mongolia showed a video to its students teaching them how to report the faithful.

What once might have been dismissed as unconnected anecdotes now represents official CCP policy. In September 2025, an internal document attributed to the CCP’s Central United Front Work Leading Group instructed schools to “guide students to proactively report” parents who attempted to “instill religious ideas” in them. Local authorities have gone even further. One directive in Henan province declared that minors “cannot believe in religion” and instructed parents to educate their children to not believe. 

Xi’s invocation of traditional Confucian values notwithstanding, these policies are anathema both to the Fifth Commandment and to the filial piety he claims to endorse. An environment where children are required by the state to report their parents is reminiscent of the worst totalitarian regimes. 

Xi’s version of filial piety, then, comes with a qualification: honor thy father and mother, so long as familial relationships do not compete with the Party. 

To combat this, Washington should impose new restrictions under the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) specifically targeting the persecution of religious children, rather than continuing to rely on legacy sanctions. The State Department should identify religious-affairs authorities, and local public-security organs responsible for these policies and restrict U.S. exports of goods, technology, and services to implicated agencies. It should simultaneously impose IRFA visa bans on officials responsible for particularly severe violations and publicly identify the agencies carrying them out.

Congress should also require the State Department to identify Chinese officials and entities involved in suppressing minors’ religious freedom in its annual religious-freedom reporting. The goal should be simple: hold the officials who design and enforce Beijing’s campaign against Christian families personally accountable.

There is a deeper logic behind Beijing’s campaign against Christian children. The CCP may tolerate believers it cannot easily eliminate and may even cynically allow state-controlled religious practice, but it is absolutely determined to undermine faith in Christ professed by millions of Chinese. Xi believes that if Chinese Christians cannot teach their children about Christianity then the CCP need not eradicate Christianity today, but can instead wait it out over generations.

Samuel Ben-Ur is a research analyst focusing on the Middle East at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).