The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) recently added the Chinese group “Create Abundance” to its Victims List, identifying it as a persecuted religious organization. The designation is significant and welcome. It reflects growing awareness in Washington that Beijing continues to repress belief communities. 

Yet the label actually risks missing a deeper and more troubling reality: “Create Abundance” is not, in any conventional sense, a religion. For that reason, its persecution signals a dangerous expansion of China’s ideological control.

“Create Abundance” (创造丰盛) emerged nearly three decades ago as a loose network centered on personal development, moral reflection and mutual support. Its founder, Zhang Xinyue, promoted a set of ideas that emphasized self-improvement, gratitude, emotional awareness, and the pursuit of happiness through inner growth. Its teachings encouraged participants to draw from diverse traditions – religious or otherwise – on the premise that belief systems can help individuals live better, more ethical lives. But the group itself did not prescribe doctrine, clergy, rituals or exclusive truth claims. In fact, its membership has included Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, and others, coexisting within a shared framework of personal cultivation. 

In practice, “Create Abundance” functioned less like a church than like a hybrid of a book club, wellness network, and civic association. Its affiliated “Luxury Living Art Galleries” offered reading sessions, lectures, tea gatherings, travel programs, and discussions on philosophy and life improvement. The group’s guiding materials – such as “The Wisdom of Growth” and “The Growth of Heart and Spirit” – are, by any ordinary standard, closer to motivational literature than theological texts.

Yet it is precisely these features that made the group intolerable to the Chinese Communist Party.

While “Create Abundance” has been accused of defrauding members and operating like a pyramid scheme, that’s not what the Chinese authorities are concerned about. The legal cases against the group make that clear.

In 2025, a court in Liaoning Province convicted eight individuals associated with the network of “using superstition to undermine the implementation of the law,” sentencing them to prison terms and imposing heavy fines. Authorities shut down more than 1,000 affiliated venues across over 500 cities, confiscated massive assets and placed dozens of individuals on wanted lists. 

The evidence presented in court reveals the true nature of the prosecution – and its profound arbitrariness. The central “proof” against the defendants was an expert report commissioned from a state-affiliated think tank, which concluded that the group’s books promoted “idealism,” “superstition,” and “distorted worldviews” inconsistent with Marxist materialism. In other words, the crime was not fraud, violence, or coercion. It was the expression of ideas.

Even more striking, the judgment offers no concrete details – no victims, no specific criminal acts, no demonstrable harm. It provides vague assertions that the defendants “promoted positive energy,” traveled abroad, or obtained funds improperly. The confiscation of property – reportedly amounting to hundreds of millions of yuan and affecting even non-defendants – appears wildly disproportionate and detached from any proven wrongdoing. 

The campaign against “Create Abundance” is not simply religious persecution. It is the criminalization of non-state-sanctioned ways of thinking.

The Communist Party has long been wary of any organized group that operates independently of its control, particularly one that attracts a large and educated following. “Create Abundance,” with hundreds of thousands of participants and a nationwide presence, fit that profile.

The group’s social composition appears to have heightened official anxiety. A significant portion of its participants were women – many from elite or politically connected families – who turned to the network as a space to process personal trauma, including experiences tied to corruption, abuse, or inequality within China’s power structures. Such networks of shared experience carry an inherent political risk. 

In modern China, revelations by women – whether in corruption scandals or high-profile cases like that of tennis star Peng Shuai and former senior official Zhang Gaoli – have demonstrated how private grievances can destabilize public authority. A community that fosters awareness, solidarity and voice among such individuals is, from Beijing’s perspective, potentially subversive.

In addition, the group reportedly provided emotional and communal support to “shidu” families – parents who lost their only child under China’s one-child policy and cannot have another. These families represent a quiet but deeply aggrieved population, and their collective organization, even around themes of healing and meaning, can translate into latent political discontent.

Taken together, these factors explain why the state reached for familiar but elastic charges to bury “Create Abundance”: “feudal superstition,” “evil cult,” “violating Marxist materialism,” and ultimately “endangering national security.” The language is generally associated with the CCP’s tight control over religious, but in practice authorities suppress any form of independent association – religious or not – that might generate alternative sources of identity, loyalty, or truth.

This is the broader significance that risks being obscured by labeling “Create Abundance” as a religious group. Beijing is not only targeting religion. It is extending its coercive framework into philosophical, cultural, and even therapeutic spaces – any domain where individuals seek meaning outside the CCP’s narrative.

That trend should concern not only human rights organizations but also international actors operating in China. Foreign individuals and groups engaged in counseling, spiritual guidance, or community-building may find themselves crossing invisible red lines, as the definition of “superstition” or “ideological threat” continues to expand.

The USCIRF’s attention is both justified and necessary, but it should be the beginning, not the end, of policy engagement. The U.S. Congress and the State Department should explicitly recognize this case as part of a new pattern in China: the politicization of thought itself. They should press for transparency in legal proceedings, call for the release of those detained, and support asylum claims for individuals facing persecution. Targeted sanctions against officials involved in such cases could also raise the cost of ideological repression.

More broadly, Washington should integrate these developments into its understanding of China’s governance model. What is at stake is not only religious freedom but the boundary between state authority and the inner life of citizens.