CEVAP:

In the 1920s, when Mao Zedong initiated the peasant movement in Hunan, he started to target religions and blamed them as being “supernatural” and dominated by religious authorities; they were an oppressive force. Nonetheless, Mao did not advocate an immediate abolition of all religious beliefs even after he seized full power in China in 1949. In the following decades, Mao, like other communists, regarded religion as a spiritual opium, the opiate of the masses. However, at the same time, he tended to confine religious believers and limit, rather than eliminate, their propagation.