Profile

Ren Wuzhi is a retired senior Chinese civil servant who held leading positions in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front Work Department (UFWD) and the State Council Bureau of Religious Affairs. Described as a “noted specialist in nationality and religious affairs”, his work was foundational in the development China’s religious soft power.

Ren started his career as a Tobacco factory worker, and in the 1940s and ‘50s he held roles in finance and accounting in the trading and banking sectors. Having joined the of the CCP, he moved to Xinjiang and became a Vice President of the county branch of China’s Central Bank, eventually being appointed as Minister of Finance and Trade for Xinjiang County. He also served as an administrator for Jinnan Newspaper. In 1959, following China’s occupation of Tibet, he moved to Lhasa where he started work in the editorial team of the Tibet Daily newspaper, the CCP’s official mouthpiece in the region. Over the next 20 years he progressed through the ranks, eventually rising to the post of Secretary of the TAR Party Committee.

From 1982 to 1992, Ren held several key roles relating to China’s Tibet policies. He served as a Director in the UFWD, as well as Acting Director then Head of the State Council Bureau of Religious Affairs. He was Secretary of the Party’s Leading Group on Tibet, also known as the “Central Coordination Group on the Struggle against the Dalai Clique”, which has overall charge of Tibetan affairs.

Throughout the 1980s in his capacity as Religious Affairs Director, Ren was a close associate of Buddhist Association of China (BAC) President Zhao Puchu, accompanying him during prominent engagements such as the 30^th Anniversary of the BAC in 1983, Zhao’s historic first visit to Singapore in 1988 at the invitation of the Singapore Buddhist Federation, the BAC’s 1989 accreditation of the influential cleric Hsing Yun upon his return to the mainland from Taiwan, and the funeral of the 10^th Panchen Lama in Beijing in 1989.

Ren served as Secretary of the Party Committee of the China National Centre for Tibetan Studies (CNCTS), a Tibetan studies organ tasked among other projects to “prove” that since the Yuan Dynasty Tibet has been under a Chinese Central Government and an inseparable part of Chinese territory. The CNCTS contributed to a key project undertaken by the State Nationalities Affairs Commission from 1991-95 to develop “counter-measures for social stability”.

In 1992, following the re-entry of the Chinese Church into the World Council of Churches, Ren travelled to Europe to represent the Bureau of Religious Affairs at religious conferences in Germany, Switzerland and Finland.

In September of the same year, 1992, Ren’s key accomplishment came with the appointment and accreditation by the Chinese state of Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje, one of the most important Tibetan spiritual leaders. This was the culmination of a decade’s outreach by the Chinese authorities since Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power, to co-opt key “approved” Tibetan figureheads in a plan to take control over the future successor of the influential Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism. In a televised ceremony, the first of its kind, the young Karmapa was officially appointed as a religious civil servant. The event, which took place at the Karmapa’s ancestral Tsurphu Monastery near Lhasa, was presided over by the very Tibetans recruited by the UFWD a decade previously, with Ren personally issuing the certificate of accreditation, together with a copy of Chairman Mao’s Red Book. The investiture proved such a success that it provided a template for future appointments of senior Tibetan clergy by the Chinese authorities, including the 11^th Panchen Lama.

Ren was later appointed to the post of Secretary of the China Tibetology Research Center, an important source of academic propaganda on Tibet, where he served from 1993 to his retirement in 1999. In 2011 his outstanding contribution was recognised with an award delivered by State Administration for Religious Affairs Director Wang Zuo’an at an event celebrating the 60^th anniversary of SARA’s establishment.

Network Links

• United Front Work Department
  • Ye Xiaowen
• State Administration for Religious Affairs
  • Wang Zuo’an
• Buddhist Association of China
  • Zhao Puchu
  • Pagbalha Geleg Namgyai
• Case work
  • Hsing Yun
  • Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorje
  • Tai Situ
  • Goshir Gyaltsab