Quanzhen: How China Weaponizes Taoism for Global Propaganda. 2. International Ambitions
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It is not about religion only. There are investment programs and direct pro-Chinese political action abroad.
By Mattias Daly
August 4, 2025
Article 2 of 4. Read article 1.
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.
Martin Palmer, a sinologist and former secretary-general of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, was FaithInvest’s CEO until 2023 and currently serves as its founding president. Speaking to “Religioscope” in an interview in January 2025, Martin described how the Chinese Taoist Association actively sought out FaithInvest: “As a consequence of the work I’d done with [the CTA] for years when I was at the Alliance for Religions and Conservation, they came to me as the doorway to the West, but also as somebody who understood at quite a deep level what Taoism actually is. They know me from the early 90s, when they were looking to come back into the world.”
Martin explained the Daoist Investor Hub’s role in detail: “It already has two different levels. Within China, the hub’s role will be to advise the SOEs [Chinese state-owned enterprises] who are investing around the world, causing huge problems because of their arrogance and their exploitation of resources. The hub’s role there will be to advise the Bank of China on Chinese cultural values underlying investment, because there is a massive problem with the Belt and Road, that this is being done essentially by individuals with their own companies who claim to be part of the government, who undertake vast programs, regularly fail to deliver, and therefore the debt falls back onto the Bank of China. Basically, much of the Belt and Road Initiative has failed monumentally, and it’s costing China a huge amount in debt relief. Yes, there’s the land that they’ve taken, but it’s gone badly awry, so there’s a huge reform program of the Belt and Road Initiative, putting a major focus on greening the initiative. So, part of that is that they have looked to the Taoists to guide traditional cultural values. Then there’s the second level. The business world is looking to the Taoists for guidance. Jack Ma [a Chinese entrepreneur who co-founded Alibaba Group, among other venture] is a very devout Taoist who has poured money into Taoist events. The [CTA] estimates that there are at least a thousand millionaires in China who are Taoists, and probably a quarter of the billionaires are Taoist or Taoist-influenced. So, part of the role of this hub is to speak to them. Outside of China, where you have Taoist organizations that have got very substantial investments — take Hong Kong, Singapore, Laos, or Indonesia — then we are looking with them to join in with the Multi-faith Just Transition Fund, which essentially is an instrument for really serious investments. No organization is going to be looking at investors that can put in less than $100 million. Smaller religious investment houses, Taoist ones in particular, don’t have that amount of money. If they join the Multi-faith Just Transition Fund, then they could put in $10 million, and then you’ve got another twenty organizations, and that makes an investment pot possible that could put half a billion into a prospect in sub-Saharan Africa or wherever it is.”
By his own telling, that the Chinese Taoist Association would choose to approach Palmer’s organization stems in part from his longstanding relationships with members of the UFWD. Speaking of his early collaborations with former CTA vice chairman and Zhengyi sect Taoist priest Zhang Jiyu (張繼禹), he said, “many of the minor officials I worked with [in the early 2000s] are now in charge of the United Front.”
It is well beyond the scope of this paper to predict what, if anything, will come of a nascent investment program that will theoretically draw together the Chinese Taoist Association, the United Front, the Bank of China, Hong Kong University, the Belt and Road Initiative, and Taoism-friendly millionaires and billionaires looking for places to put their money. What the FaithInvest project does tell us, however, is that Taoism’s spread beyond China is potentially entering a new phase, one in which the Chinese government may attempt to use the religion for much more than simply generating soft power abroad and feel-good propaganda at home. In fact, there is reason to believe that, under the restructured UFWD, the CTA may even be called upon to participate in attempts to exercise “sharp power,” defined by Christopher Walker of the National Endowment for Democracy as “an approach to international affairs that typically involves efforts at censorship, or the use of manipulation to sap the integrity of independent institutions… [thereby] limiting free expression and distorting the political environment” (Walker, Christopher, “What is Sharp Power,” “Journal of Democracy” 29, no. 3 [2018]: 11).
A former Johns Hopkins University teaching fellow described to “Religioscope” how, in 2020, an ordained Quanzhen Taoist priest from the PRC who was studying in the US as an undergraduate was asked by the CTA to organize a direct political action on the university’s campus. This scholar, who asked to remain anonymous, reported that he and the Taoist undergrad “had many conversations in which he explained a lot about the role of the Party in the Taoist community.”
In February 2020, in the midst of the tumultuous Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong, high-profile HK political activists Nathan Law Kwun-chung (羅冠聰) and Joshua Wong Chi-fung (黃之鋒) were invited to speak at a Johns Hopkins Foreign Affairs Symposium event. The anonymous lecturer told “Religioscope,” “My Taoist friend was the key organizer of a pro-CCP mob who stormed the meeting… the Chinese Taoist Association asked him to be a patriotic activist,” as a result of which “he agitated an aggressive mob to intimidate pro-HK students” (Scenes of the protest can be seen at 00:01:59 in Xu Xiangyun 許湘筠 and Yu Guang 鬱崗,“Dozens of Students from the PRC Protest During Nathan Law Kwun-chung and Joshua Wong Chi-fung’s Talk at American University” [羅冠聰黃之鋒美校園演講數十名中國學生抗議], “Voice of America,” published on February 22, 2020, accessed on March 10, 2025).
Notably, the Taoist student “was careful not to criticize the CCP, but made it clear that he was not a communist. He was also careful to distance himself from the senior Taoist leaders in China, whom he called hardline nationalists.” Though the Taoist student typically wore traditional Quanzhen attire with his hair in a monks’ topknot while on campus, he dressed as an unremarkable college student on the day of the protest. Afterwards, he told the teaching fellow that “he was not proud of his role, nor ashamed.” The lecturer reflected that the Taoist university student “always said his commitment was to Taoism, Chinese medicine, and to alleviating the suffering of people in the world, so it seemed so incongruous that he led an aggressive group of young people behaving eerily like the Red Guards of the 1960s… He clearly acted as though his place in the ‘organization’ depended on playing a public role, thus passing a loyalty test.”
If the student’s denials of ideological commitment to the CCP and pro-PRC nationalism are to be believed, this incident gives insight into a way in which even independent-minded Quanzhen Taoists may find themselves compelled by CTA leadership to actively participate in politics. Regardless of the student-monk’s actual political leanings, this anecdote drives home the need to regard the CTA and WFT as being far more than simple religious organizations.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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