Church of the Highest Supreme

These two religions "energetically revived" in rural Hebei since the late 1970s,[3] with the tacit approval of the local government,[4] after pressures from campaigns against some sects in the 1950s and the cessation of any public religious activity in the years of the Cultural Revolution.

[4] The Church of the Highest Supreme and the other sects of north China provide ceremonies for public and private religious life of local populations, and their ritual specialists are portrayed as moral exemplars and earnest sources of knowledge about the sacred.

[9] This changed with the establishment of the People's Republic of China after 1949, when political project deeply penetrated village society.

[9] Yiguandao and other primarily urban religious movements were seen as alien teachings by village populations, and many were happy to see them eradicated.

[12] Although they were never purged completely, the effects of this ten years-long hiatus shaped the revival of the Church of the Highest Supreme and other folk religious groups during the 1980s, which required reinvention of rituals and restructuration of social roles.