Abstract

After the brutal beating of a woman in a McDonald’s restaurant in the eastern Chinese city of Zhaoyuan, the situation quickly went from a tragedy and homicide investigation to the renewing of a nationwide assault on unregulated religious practice. The Church of Almighty God, a banned Christian heterodox movement, was quickly blamed. What followed was a scene all too familiar to religious practice in China: widespread crackdowns on practitioners and a public media campaign against the group. In this way, the “McDonald’s murder” serves as a fitting case study for what happens when religious violence occurs in the midst of an atheist regime adamantly opposed to religious practice. This paper retraces the steps taken by the Chinese Communist Party in the days, months, and years following the murder, revealing an organized and carefully executed strategy to further its ultimate agenda of a secular, centralized society.