Quanzhen: How China Weaponizes Taoism for Global Propaganda. 1. International Outreach

The global expansion of the Quanzhen sect of Taoism and how the CCP has used it as a tool of influence through the United Front Work Department.

By Mattias Daly

August 1, 2025

Article 1 of 4.

Note: “Bitter Winter” publishes, with the authorization of the author, excerpts from the new book “Infiltrating the Tao: China’s Influence Operations Targeting Quanzhen Taoist Communities in Taiwan and the West,” published by Religioscope, Fribourg (Switzerland), 2025.

Mattias Swenson Daly’s new book, “Infiltrating the Tao.”

The United Front Work Department (UFWD)’s involvement in religious Taoism’s spread beyond the PRC’s borders has the potential to come under scrutiny in a growing number of countries in the coming years. Hot on the heels of the World Federation of Taoism (WFT)’s founding in late 2023, delegations of China Taoist Association (CTA) monks and nuns traveled to Switzerland, Mexico, and Australia the following year. In the former two countries, they took part in multi-day rituals consecrating temples founded by western converts to Taoism, while in Australia a group led by CTA chairman Li Guangfu 李光富 hobnobbed with local Taoists of both Chinese and non-Chinese descent, academics (including a former director of the University of Sydney Confucius Institute, Hans Hendrischke), and members of the overseas Chinese business community at the “2024 Australia-China Taoism Culture Festival” (Mu, Qing 牝青, “‘2024 China-Australia Taoist Culture and Arts Festival’ International Taoist Culture Forum Comes to Completion [2024中澳道教文化艺术节”国际道教文化论坛圆满落幕], “Daoisms” [道教之音], published April 13, 2024, accessed February 7, 2025).

This event, hosted in the City of Willoughby in Northern Sydney, was officially co-presented by the Willoughby City Council and attended by Deputy Mayor Nic Wright, and even received a formal congratulatory letter from politician Peter Dutton, current Leader of the Opposition in the Australian parliament (Su, Gary, “2024 China-Australia Taoist Culture and Arts Fair Opens: Various Activities Show Off the Culture and Arts of Taoism” [2024中澳道教文化藝術節開幕 各項活動展示道教文化藝術], “Australian Chinese Daily” 澳洲新社, April 15, 2024, accessed February 7, 2025).

A source who spoke to “Religioscope” on condition of anonymity who was involved in the orchestration of one of the three international events mentioned above said that the Chinese government’s recent willingness to support the globalization of religious Taoism stems from a desire to find new means of generating soft power. According to this source, in the wake of the Confucius Institute’s fall from grace in numerous western countries and the ill sentiments generated by years of wolf warrior diplomacy, Taoism presents the PRC government with an opportunity to drum up positive feelings by promoting a cultural export that is already viewed favorably in the West thanks to popular translations of the “Tao Te Ching” and associations with tai chi and traditional Chinese medicine. This source further posited that the UFWD may be anxious to insinuate the Chinese Taoist Association into overseas Taoist groups before the religion has a chance to grow much bigger “because it’s a religious movement the CCP thinks they can actually control abroad.”

Centre Ming Shan, a Taoist education center and shrine in Bullet, Switzerland in September 2024. Credit: Mattias Swenson Daly.

In late 2024, “Religioscope” interviewed Sarah Blanc, co-founder of Centre Ming Shan, a Taoist academy located in Bullet, Switzerland, and Hervé Louchouarn, founder of the Mexican Taoist Association (la Asociación Mexicana de para el Desarrollo del Daoísmo) and the Eternal Spring Temple (Templo de la Eterna Primavera) in the Mexican state of Morelos. Continuing a trend that stretches back to the 2010s, the CTA dispatched contingents of monks and nuns to both locations last year to officiate shrine consecration rituals. The group that traveled to Switzerland in May 2024 was led by Zhang Gaocheng (張高澄), a Quanzhen monk and CTA vice chairman, while the group that traveled to Mexico in November 2024 was led by Wu Chengzhen (吳誠真), and Quanzhen nun and CTA vice chairwoman.

Blanc and Louchouarn both asserted that the Taoist troupes paid for their own international travel, were adamant that the CTA does not provide them with any financial support, and emphasized their organizations being free from Chinese oversight in spite of their affiliation with the World Federation of Taoism. According to Blanc, “We are not dependent, they don’t tell us you can do this, you can’t do that… we’re completely free to do what we want, and we only use local money.” Louchouarn reported receiving 33,000 yuan (approximately USD 4500) worth of donations from private parties in China for the Eternal Spring Temple, but added, “I received some help because it’s traditional to receive some help. But nobody buys the temple and says ‘this is our temple.’ It’s on private land and the building is our home.” Louchouarn went on to add that, at present, neither the CTA nor the WFT have tried to establish rules meant to govern the behaviors of foreign religious Taoists, saying, “the only thing I have to accept is a rule created by my [Quanzhen Taoist] master, that my temple should have a special place with food for visiting monks.”

Blanc and Louchouarn offered differing perspectives on the World Federation of Taoism’s origins. According to Louchouarn, in 2011 he and representatives from seven other countries attended an international meeting for Taoists held by the CTA on Mount Heng in Hunan province. There, they met with the then-head of the CTA, the late Quanzhen monk Ren Farong (任法融), and a minister from the State Ethnic Affairs Commission (later renamed the National Ethnic Affairs Commission國家民族事務委員會, absorbed into the UFWD in 2018; see Joske, Alex, “Reorganizing the United Front Work Department: New Structures for a New Era of Diaspora and Religious Affairs Work,” “China Brief” 19, no. 9, published May 9, 2019, accessed February 7, 2025). The group submitted a petition requesting clarity on whether or not foreigners would be allowed to become Taoist initiates in China, and were granted this permission during the meeting. Louchouarn believes that the WFT grew from the 2011 meeting in Hunan. He said, “We began it. We began it because foreigners wanted to go to temples, we wanted to take courses, and we wanted to receive some formal education. We needed an answer from the government: can we or can we not be Taoists?”

The late chairman of the CTA, Quanzhen monk Ren Farong (1936–2021). Very active in politics, Ren also served as vice minister of the State Ethnic Affairs Commission. He was a member of the 8th, 9th and 10th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference as well as the 11th and 12th Standing Committees of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. When he died in 2021, the UFWD issued a communique calling him an “intimate friend of the CCP” and demanding that “individuals in the Taoist community learn from Taoist Monk Ren Farong’s patriotic spirit, and gather tightly around the CCP with Xi Jinping at its core” (Niu, Yong 牛鏞 and Yue Hongbin 岳弘彬, ed., “Taoist Monk Ren Farong Has Died” [ 任法融道長逝世], People.cn 人民網, published October 31, 2021, accessed February 18, 2025). Credit: J. M. Hullot, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It may have been foreigners who approached the Chinese Taoist Association in 2011, when the PRC was still under Hu Jintao’s leadership. By the 2020s, however, the CTA moved from passive interactions with foreign pilgrims to proactive engagement with the international Taoist community. This shift toward outreach coincides with the UFWD’s 2018 restructuring, which, according to Alex Joske’s research for the Jamestown Foundation, has meant that the United Front’s religious divisions have taken on “international responsibilities, seeking to influence religious activities around the world” at the same time as there has been “an extreme turn in the CCP’s approach to religion” (Joske, op. cit.).

Sarah Blanc’s recollections reveal the effects of the UFWD’s reorientation. Speaking of the period leading up to the WFT’s inception in 2023, Blanc recalled, “Europe has many Taoist associations that were all looking for help from China, and they wanted to do something more coherent by confederating.” In 2023, she said, when these European Taoist groups began to create a formal affiliation, the Chinese side offered to help by bringing them into the WFT’s fold.

Source: bitterwinter.org