Studies on Religion and China’s National Security in the Globalization Era

Abstract: Since the 1970s, the global resurgence of religion, the politicization and internationalization of religion, as well as the raging violent religious extremism, have posed a severe challenge to national sovereignty and international order. The impact of religion on national security has become an inevitable problem facing the world. For more than 60 years since the founding of the PRC, religion has always been an important issue in its national security considerations, while “anti-foreign religious infiltration” and “combating the three forces of terrorism, national separatism and religious extremism” have become the official guidelines of discussions concerning religion and national security. In the context of the global resurgence of religion, changes in China’s religious security situation and the development of non-traditional security studies, research on religion and China’s national security has begun to break through the conventional pattern of “anti-filtration study” and started to become more academic and empirical. This paper has outlined the history and current situation of studies about religion and China’s national security and discussed some basic issues of this research area.