Go Beyond Religion and China

The goal here is to further test the theory beyond religion and China. First, I address the key body behind the two mechanisms highlighted in this study: registered organizations. The goal is to find evidence of a correlation between a stronger presence of registered organizations and greater religious freedom at the provincial level. In the absence of better data, I assess the possibility of this correlation by comparing the numbers from government-sanctioned social organizations with the number of political prisoners in a national dataset of political prisoners. The dataset is formally collected by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) and it provides details of people who were arrested for religious and political reasons from 1989 to today. Second, the chapter also explores the external validity of the theory outside the Chinese context. Christianity in Vietnam, including Protestantism and Catholicism, is used to show that transnationality, not the faith, is what authorities are most concerned about. Similarities between Vietnam and China help to differentiate the true impact of transnational activism and its limitations.