At a pastoral training meeting in Changchun, Jilin province, Pastor Kan Baoping, Vice Chairman of China’s Three-Self Patriotic Movement, told assembled clergy that their “major task” was to transform the “successful experience of the Sinicization of Christianity” into “a great contribution made by Chinese Christianity to world Christianity.” “We will change the face of world Christianity,” he reportedly declared. It was, as Georgetown’s Berkley Center observed in its 2026 analysis, the first documented instance of the Chinese Communist Party openly declaring its intent to export a state-controlled version of Christianity as an international influence tool.
The declaration deserves to be taken seriously. But it also deserves to be analyzed carefully — because the way we frame the threat will determine the adequacy of our response.
Two framings dominate the current conversation, and both are inadequate. The first treats sinicized Christianity as a sophisticated ideological project that will gradually colonize theologically underprepared SEA churches through doctrinal infiltration. The second dismisses the concern as geopolitical paranoia, noting that Chinese Christian missionaries active in Southeast Asia are often house church evangelists whom the CCP would rather suppress. Both framings miss the actual mechanism of influence — and both miss the more important theological question underneath it.
The Berkley Center’s analysis, based on direct engagement with SEA church leaders, points to a subtler process. The entry point is not doctrine. It is resources: well-funded programs, modern facilities, partnership networks, and conference culture that draw ambitious local leaders into dependency relationships long before any explicitly CCP-aligned theological content is introduced. The structural parallel to the Soviet Union’s Cold War use of the “peace church” movement is instructive here. The Soviets did not capture global Protestantism through propaganda; they captured it through the ambiguity of sincere believers who had made their peace with the state and were then positioned in influential ecumenical roles. That ambiguity — not overt ideology — was the mechanism. The CCP’s project is more sophisticated technologically; the mechanism is the same.
This is not incidental to the Belt and Road Initiative; it is integral to it. Religious diplomacy is an interagency effort in China’s BRI strategy, and what that means for the church is straightforward: infrastructure investment and Christian partnership are designed to create the same kind of dependency. The congregation that accepts the facilities may, in time, find that the cost was its theological independence.
But here we must make a distinction the threat-assessment literature consistently fails to make. The Chinese Christian presence in Southeast Asia is not monolithic. House church missionaries — precisely the communities the CCP most wants to suppress domestically — number in the hundreds in the region and represent a genuinely different theological tradition. To treat all Chinese Christian influence in SEA as CCP soft power is not only analytically sloppy; it risks doing harm to Christian communities whose witness is, in fact, a form of resistance to the very project we are concerned about.
The deeper problem, however, is the one the field has not yet named. Every major voice in this debate — Western governments, USCIRF, religious freedom organizations, security analysts — frames Southeast Asian churches as targets: communities to be warned, protected, inoculated. The implicit ecclesiology is one of passivity. And this framing, however well-intentioned, reproduces a paternalism with deep roots in the history of Western missionary engagement with Asian Christianity.
The political-theological question this situation actually poses is more demanding. What does it mean for a church to be a church when both the threatening power and the protecting power are instrumentalizing Christian identity for their own ends? The SEA church does not need to choose between Beijing and Washington. It needs a theological account of ecclesial independence grounded in its own christological and missiological tradition. Western religious-freedom frameworks have their place; they are not the foundation the SEA church needs.
The theological resources for this account exist. Filipino, Indonesian, and Malaysian Christianity have all navigated encounters with state power, colonial pressure, and religious competition across several centuries. Those traditions have generated their own accounts of what it means to be a confessing church under pressure; at their best, they have simply not been mobilized for this particular conversation. That is the research-and-teaching gap that matters most.
The actionable insight for political theology is therefore this: resource the conversation about ecclesial independence in SEA seminaries, church networks, and pastoral training programs — not by importing a Western threat-assessment framework, but by helping SEA churches excavate and articulate the theological resources they already possess. The Berkley Center is right that theological formation is the most important defensive strategy. But theological formation in this context means something more than better doctrinal literacy. It means a church that knows who it is and whose it is, with enough historical and theological depth to recognize capture when it begins — and to say no, not because Washington told it to, but because ecclesial identity is not a geopolitical variable.
The question that matters most: what theological resources within SEA Christianity are already available for resisting ecclesial capture by state power, and how have those resources been activated — or neglected — in previous encounters with authoritarian pressure? Answer that question, and the entire framework of the debate shifts from threat management to ecclesial formation.
Notes on Southeast Asia 
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