Regulating religious fraud: theory and practice around the globe

Chapter 2 situates the religious fraud regulations in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong with the existing literature that grapple with the issue of false religion. The literature can be broadly classified into four related categories. The first category is the largely U.S. centric debate about sincerity testing as the means to determine religious falsity. The second category is the comparative inquiry about the regulations of New Religious Movements, especially vis-à-vis the designation of cult. The third category concerns the prohibition of superstitious and/or deviant practices that are of more ancient heritage (e.g., witchcraft, crafty sciences and obeah). The fourth category is where the state is tasked with the policing or determination of religious truth, such as in the context of religious libel adjudication or laws relating to blasphemy and heresy. This chapter identifies the two peculiarities of religious fraud regulations in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong vis-à-vis this literature: the use of fraud-based criminal prosecutions and the occurrence of heavy-handed interventions in liberal democratic jurisdictions.