China's Confucian Revival Forms A National Church

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Decades after the Cultural Revolution's denunciation of Confucius, Zhou Beichen founded the first Holy Hall of Confucius congregation in Shenzhen in 2009, part of a wider revival of Confucian academies and reopened temples that had been building steadily since 2000. What had scattered into independent local congregations over those years still lacked a single organised structure able to unite them under one name.

That changed on 1 November 2015, when Confucian scholars including Jiang Qing, Kang Xiaoguang, Zhang Xianglong and Sheng Hong gathered in Shenzhen to formally establish a national and international Holy Confucian Church, bringing the previously independent congregations together under one body. The new church registered itself as a cultural organisation rather than as a religious one.

What this founding changed for Confucianism's spread was the return of organised congregational structure to a tradition that had been denounced by the very state that now permitted its revival, within living memory of the people carrying it out. A revival that began with scattered local halls in 2009 became, six years later, a single named church claiming national and international reach, built by the same generation of scholars who had themselves lived through the campaign against Confucius.