{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreia5nx57tagrazlm7eonuiebbc56lvrtftwgkhigpc63xud2d5lqcm",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:rzxm2r7lop5f2v5ssp345vgu/app.bsky.feed.post/3mnxzbjghnm62"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreiffdqipjhqe5ui2b2vmhkudhsbgxap5b7j6r5fytzlmtozb2rrfky"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/png",
    "size": 1324431
  },
  "path": "/2026/06/1-democracy-under-heaven-taiwans-religious-politics-in-the-shadow-communism/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-06-10T15:41:02.000Z",
  "site": "https://providencemag.com",
  "tags": [
    "China",
    "Communism",
    "Taiwan",
    "The Latest",
    "current visit",
    "Taiwan’s fate",
    "unstoppable force",
    "declared",
    "insisted",
    "conspicuous warmth",
    "shake",
    "television and online",
    "Observers",
    "She wrote",
    "embraced it",
    "enlightening and affirming",
    "Han Kuoyu",
    "no longer tolerate",
    "deeply religious",
    "18,000",
    "religious diversity",
    "perspectives",
    "transactional",
    "pragmatic",
    "lacks the moral doctrine",
    "Buddhist and Christian organizations",
    "vocabulary of the common good",
    "Robert Weller",
    "coping with anxiety",
    "CCP’s influence",
    "Scholars",
    "Mazu associations",
    "temple-led tour groups",
    "new measures to deepen cross-strait ties",
    "Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council",
    "religious revival",
    "superstitious",
    "2015",
    "PRC system",
    "first principles",
    "said"
  ],
  "textContent": "In the wake of Kuomintang (KMT) chairwoman Cheng Li-wun’s current visit to the United States, speculation is growing over how her “peace” diplomacy might shape Taiwan’s fate. On Xi Jinping’s side stands a carefully drafted narrative of a “shared Chinese civilization,” presented as an unstoppable force driving toward unification. Xi has declared that “people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family” and that cross‑strait affairs are “family matters” to be handled within the family; he has also insisted that resolving the Taiwan question and achieving national reunification is China’s internal affair, “not subject to interference by any foreign force.”\n\nOn Taiwan’s side of the strait, the drama has taken an unexpected turn. Taiwan’s future now appears tied not only to Cheng’s conspicuous warmth toward Xi’s agenda, but also the events of Lunar New Year’s Eve, when a shaking red rope at Dharma Drum Mountain was read by many Taiwanese as a dire warning from the gods not to place Taiwan’s future in Beijing’s hands.\n\nAt a crucial moment when Taiwan’s democracy faces persistent pressure, many Taiwanese do not see themselves as entirely alone. They still trust in their gods and that the divine will act when necessary. In Taiwan, religion still disciplines political power. Yet, across the strait, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has spent years trying to eliminate one of the only lasting forces that any regime cannot fully control—religion—and to claim that role for itself.\n\n**A rope, a temple, and a very public tremor**\n\nOn Lunar New Year’s Eve, Cheng Li-wun took part in what should have been a routine ritual at Dharma Drum Mountain, one of Taiwan’s most revered Buddhist monasteries, pulling a red rope to ring the great bell to usher in the New Year. Then the rope in her hands began to shake—visibly, repeatedly, and seemingly on its own. On live television and online, millions watched as she stiffened, looking disturbed and unsteady, while officials beside her reached out as if to keep her from falling.\n\nWithin hours, the “red rope incident” jumped from an odd New Year clip to a symbol of Taiwan’s contentious debate about religion, politics, and the island’s future. Observers quickly spoke of a “divine moment,” proclaiming that ghosts or gods had visited Cheng.\n\n**Heavenly blessing or ghostly warning?**\n\nLiu Bojun, a former spirit medium turned social media influencer, described it as a spiritual encounter. She wrote that “dirty spirits” do exist and can affect Taiwan—while impossible to eliminate, they can be restrained. Thousands echoed “men act, Heaven watches” (人在做，天在看), an ancient proverb that whatever one does, good or bad, the gods are watching, good deeds will be rewarded, and evil deeds will be punished. Many insisted that Cheng had done such harm by cozying up to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that even the gods had to intervene.\n\nCheng did not deny the spiritual oddity. Instead, she embraced it, calling the experience enlightening and affirming: she felt a strong “response” from the divine, a surge of “positive energy,” as if Heaven were acknowledging her vows and, by implication, her party’s efforts. KMT Legislative Yuan President Han Kuoyu went further, telling temple crowds that the incident shows “men act, Heaven watches, and three feet above your head there are gods,” and that “the deities are urging everyone to do good deeds.”\n\nConversely, Cheng’s opponents from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) quickly flipped the script: for them, the rope was not a blessing but a warning. Commentators joked that “even the gods” could no longer tolerate what Cheng and the KMT had been doing, compromising with the CCP and harming Taiwan’s future. The contemporary Kuomintang, despite the legacy of Chiang Kai-shek’s opposition to the CCP, is today more reunification-oriented than the DPP, the other major Taiwanese political party.\n\nWhether Cheng’s religious statements were sincere professions of belief or mere political performances is beside the point. What matters is that both her supporters and detractors turned to religion to make sense of an unusual political event, underscoring religion’s significance in shaping public perception in Taiwan.\n\n**Religion as a powerful political force**\n\nTaiwan is a deeply religious society. Roughly three-quarters of the population practices some combination of Buddhism, Taoism, or Chinese folk religion; another 5–7 percent are Christian; and even among those who claim no affiliation, belief in fate, ghosts, the afterlife, and unseen forces is common. In a land about the size of Maryland, there are about 18,000 registered religious organizations, including around 12,000 Buddhist and Taoist temples and nearly 3,000 churches.\n\nSuch religious diversity informs Taiwanese perspectives on risk, obligation, politics, ethics, and social order. Investors visit temples to ask for blessings for new ventures. Students seek help on exams. Men and women rely on deities to find love; mothers pray to cast out “evil spirits” so babies can sleep. Politicians burn incense to secure votes. Temples and churches provide disaster relief and host medical clinics in disadvantaged communities.\n\nSome have criticized the transactional and pragmatic nature of Taiwanese folk religion, which lacks the moral doctrine of a Judeo-Christian society. Yet Taiwanese democracy functions within a landscape thick with altars, temples, churches, and religious networks—whether pragmatically to meet worldly needs, as political performance, or in genuine piety—under a pervasive sense that their actions are judged by both men and gods.\n\nBuddhist and Christian organizations have underpinned the island’s democratic transition by cultivating civic virtues, interpersonal trust, and a vocabulary of the common good. Robert Weller and others describe religious discourses as creating alternative moral worlds, giving ordinary people concrete languages of good and evil with which to judge state action, coping with anxiety caused by social change and unrest.\n\nThe red rope incident shows how religion, catalyzed by public criticism, enforces accountability. “Men act, Heaven watches” resonates as a cultural intuition that no leader can escape moral scrutiny.\n\n**When the gods can be co-opted**\n\nBecause temples and religious institutions are central to Taiwan’s public life, they are also attractive to those seeking to manipulate faith.\n\nSome temples that mobilize voters and provide social services have become targets—and partners—of the CCP’s influence work. Scholars have documented how certain temples are tied into business ventures or platforms supported by the CCP. Pilgrimage routes, Mazu associations, and temple-led tour groups have long been channels for cultivating pro-Beijing elites, advancing cross-strait economic agendas, and shaping public opinion.\n\nAfter Xi rolled out new measures to deepen cross-strait ties following Cheng’s visit, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council immediately warned that many “religious exchanges” had become vehicles for united front work, using appeals to “shared roots” and religious ties to shape Taiwanese political allegiances. In other words, temples are not only sites where “men act, Heaven watches” in a good way; under pressure, the gods can be used to deliver an authoritarian “heavenly mandate.”\n\n**When the Party declares itself Heaven**\n\nAcross the Taiwan Strait, the phrase carries a starkly different connotation. In mainland China, decades of communist governance, atheistic education, and tightened religious regulation have pushed beliefs such as “men act, Heaven watches” out of the public sphere. Although the post-1979 era has witnessed a remarkable religious revival—including rapid Christian growth and the reopening of temples—grassroots religious practices remain closely controlled. The CCP wants to manage not only religious activities but also eradicate “superstitious” beliefs, including “men act, Heaven watches.”\n\nThe long-term effect has been a moral and spiritual vacuum that the Party has tried to fill with its own ideology. In official discourse, “Heaven” is invoked as if it were another name for the Party. In a speech on Party discipline in 2015, Xi quotes “men act, Heaven watches” and asks, “What is Heaven?” His answer is blunt: “Heaven is the Party and the People.” It is not the gods, but the Party, that is watching you. Accountability is redescribed not as a moral mechanism but as political supervision inside a surveillance system.\n\nThe Temple of Heaven tour during the Trump–Xi summit made this dynamic even starker. Long regarded as the place where emperors, as “sons of heaven,” affirmed that their power rested on a Heavenly Mandate, the site cast Xi’s rule in quasi-sacred terms. Read into Taiwan, that symbolism is even more unsettling: Beijing could frame unification not just as a strategy for national revitalization, but as the fulfillment of the inevitable course of Chinese civilization and what it portrays as the “Mandate of Heaven.”\n\nWhile religion provides the backdrop for much public discourse in Taiwan, the PRC system works to reshape the discourse of religion and morality around Party ideology. “Men act, Heaven watches” becomes “cadres act, the Party watches.”\n\n**What Taiwan can teach us**\n\nFor Western audiences, the concept of “first principles” in a democratic society may parallel, in a way, the role of “men act, Heaven watches” in Taiwan. It points to constitutional fundamentals or civic values that stand above day-to-day policy bargaining, reminding citizens that democratic resilience depends on something deeper than politics.\n\nThe landscape of Taiwanese democracy is colorfully dotted with deities, omens, fate, and rituals. Religious beliefs and moral norms, protected by the rule of law, provide a baseline against which political actors are judged.\n\nAfter decades of Communist eradication of religion and “superstition” in mainland China, Taiwan may not be an exact model for China. But the principle would still hold—an open political future in China would likewise require drawing on principles rooted in Chinese religion and culture: that moral standards still matter for democracy, that politicians must be accountable to constitutionally protected public opinion, and that institutions must uphold freedom and human dignity—all grounded in a society’s own cultural and spiritual convictions.\n\nIn the three decades since Lee Teng-hui became Taiwan’s first elected president in March 1996, the island has navigated its political identity under Heaven’s gaze, whether the vocabulary is drawn from Christian or Buddhist faith to from temple omens. Toward the end of his life, President Lee, a devout Christian, said: “The things I did in my life—was God pleased? … This is not for me to judge. In the end I must hand it over to God and see what He says.”\n\nPower alone cannot justify itself, and rulers, too, stand under a higher judgment. This points to a politics where religious and civic life can both flourish, and where politicians listen to the voice of the people and respect the gods their citizens trust.",
  "title": "Democracy Under Heaven: Taiwan’s Religious Politics in the Shadow of Communism"
}