Even a Monopoly game is distributed to teach locals and tourists that “cults and illegal religion” threaten them.
by Qi Junzao
In Shenzhen, the city of tech dreams and blockchain ambitions, even your weekend stroll through a heritage village or your child’s VR headset session is now part of a grand ideological mission: the war on “xie jiao.” The term, often mistranslated as “evil cults,” is more accurately rendered as “organizations spreading heterodox teachings”—though what counts as “heterodox” is, of course, determined by the government. And in today’s China, that increasingly means any religious group not officially sanctioned and suspected of harboring independent thought.
The 2025 Shenzhen Anti-Xie Jiao Propaganda Week was a dazzling display of how far this campaign has evolved—and how deeply it has infiltrated the city’s cultural, technological, and recreational life. Forget leaflets and stern lectures. This year’s festivities included interactive Monopoly-style games (“Anti-Xie Jiao Monopoly,” naturally), VR simulations of falling into cultic despair, and dance performances with titles like “I’ll Meet You at the Crossroads”—a charming euphemism for ideological reeducation.
Children were invited to play touchscreen games identifying which cartoonish silhouettes—lonely seniors, anxious teens, frustrated workers—were most vulnerable to “xie jiao.” The implication is that anyone not smiling in a state-approved way might be a target.
Meanwhile, tourists in the historic Hakka village of Gankeng were handed anti-cult fans embroidered with slogans like “Expel Evil, Embrace Righteousness,” while stamping their way through a “propaganda treasure hunt” for commemorative anti-xie jiao souvenirs.
Even the city’s port authorities got in on the act. Customs checkpoints now feature bilingual anti-cult videos warning travelers not to accept pamphlets from strangers—lest they be lured into a “leadership training seminar” that turns out to be a gateway to spiritual subversion. One commuter recounted narrowly escaping such a fate thanks to a timely warning. Ideological vigilance is the new passport stamp.
But perhaps the most surreal twist is the transformation of delivery workers and rideshare drivers into “mobile sentinels” of anti-xie jiao awareness. These modern-day Red Guards on scooters are trained to spot suspicious flyers and report them via a centralized platform. This grassroots mobilization adds a new layer of peer-to-peer ideological enforcement in a city where surveillance is omnipresent.
The Shenzhen campaign is a textbook example of what officials call the shift from “flood irrigation” to “precision drip”—a metaphor borrowed from agriculture, now applied to propaganda. The goal is not mass messaging, but targeted psychological conditioning embedded in everyday life. Whether sipping tea in a heritage courtyard or watching your child play a VR game, the anti-xie jiao message is subtle but persistent.
This fusion of leisure and ideological indoctrination is not just surreal—it’s symptomatic of a broader trend. Increasingly, the label “xie jiao” is applied not only to groups like Falun Gong or The Church of Almighty God, but to any religious organization that operates outside the state-sanctioned framework, including Christian house churches with a perfectly orthodox theology. In China, however, what is “heterodox” is not a theological question—it’s a political one, determined by the government and enforced by courts that rarely bother with nuance.
And that’s precisely what makes it alarming. When propaganda becomes indistinguishable from leisure, when ideological conformity is gamified and aestheticized, dissent doesn’t just become dangerous—it becomes unthinkable.
Uses a pseudonym for security reasons.
