A Comparative Study Of Canada's And China's Current Religious Policies

In recent years,religion plays an increasingly crucial role in international society,exerting great influence on politics,economy and national security in the world.How to better deal with religious issues is imperative to enhance harmony among all religious groups,maintain social stability and safeguard national unity.Canada and China are both multi-ethnic and multi-religious countries.They have common concerns in the management of religious affairs.Comparison of Canada's and China's religious policies will be able to provide suggestion for the two countries to improve the domestic religious relations.Moreover,our Chinese president Xi Jinping had ever mentioned the idea of promoting intercultural exchanges and learning in his speech at the UNESCO headquarters.He claimed that "cultural exchanges and mutual learning form an important drive for human progress and global peace and development".It is necessary in contemporary world to enhance intercultural exchanges and learning among different nations.Absorbing and drawing experience from the excellent achievements of other cultures could promote our own prosperity and development.This thesis interprets Canada's and China's religious policy from an intercultural learning perspective.It first adopts method of historical review to depict current religious situations in the two countries and overview the historical development of Canada's and China's religious policies.After that,by employing textual analysis and method of comparative analysis,it compares the regulations of Canada's and China's religious policies from two aspects:religious freedom,and the relation between the state and religious institutions.Finally,similarities and differences of both religious policies are found out.Through the perspective of intercultural learning,this study provides valuable and constructive suggestions of amending religious policy for the two countries to better administrate religious affairs within their countries.In this thesis,it is contended that both Canada and China could learn from each other in adjusting their religious policies.Canadian religious policy has good experience in improving the relations among religious groups.China has a lot to learn from Canada in the adjustment of its religious policy:On the one hand,on the basis of Canadian multiculturalism,China could enhance the recognition of cultural and religious identity and further incorporate the concept of harmony into its religious policy.On the other hand,concerning function of religions in society,China can draw experience from Canada.It can make good use of the social function of religious institutions to provide social services for the public and increase mutual trust and understanding among different religions.In this way,it could encourage religious individuals and groups to cooperate together and devote themselves in facilitating national unity and harmony among different religions.In addition,Canadian multiculturalism embodied in Canada's religious policy emphasizes more on individual differences while the Confucian idea of "harmony in diversity" reflected in China's religious policy focuses on the interest and harmony of the whole group.In this respect,Canada could combine Canadian multiculturalism with the Confucian idea of"harmony in diversity" and incorporate them into its religious policy,in order to further promote harmony among diversified religious individuals and communities.