Beijing and the Vatican

As China exerts increasing influence on the world stage andparticularly in the Asia Pacific region, the issue of religious freedom will become oneof greater urgency. The struggle for religious freedom for China’s Catholic populationprovides a window into the impact that religious pluralism is having on the Chinesestate, and the tensions between China’s leadership and the Vatican over freedom ofreligion for China’s Catholics provides an important test case for how China negotiateschurch/state relations within its own society. This article argues that the differingviewpoints on religious freedom found in the Catholic Church’s Vatican II documents, andChina’s 1982 Constitution, are the origin of these tensions. The article then examinesHuntington’s Third Wave theory of democratization, updated by Philpott, to examine howthe tensions between the Chinese state and the Catholic Church, which has a successfulhistory of challenging communist states, are being played out