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Ye Xiaowen (; born August 1950) is a Chinese politician who held various top posts relating to state regulation of religion in China from 1995 to 2009. Born in 1950 in Ningxiang County in Hunan, Ye became one of the first students of sociology at the Guizhou Academy of Social Sciences after a ban before China's reform and opening up. Ye was selected for national politics when he wrote an article based on his time in the Communist Youth League, describing why many Chinese youth were choosing religion, and advocating for a more moderate religious policy. In 1995, he became the director of the Bureau of Religious Affairs under the State Council. There, he worked to prevent religious unrest, select the 11th Panchen Lama, and ban the controversial Falun Gong group. In 1998, the Bureau of Religious Affairs was renamed the State Administration for Religious Affairs, while Ye Xiaowen remained its director. He acknowledged presiding over religions in China, and changed policy to say that religion has a place in society, although he persecuted groups that he thought brought foreign control to Chinese churches, like the Roman Catholic Church. In 2007 he declared State Religious Affairs Bureau Order No. 5, which attempted to reduce the influence of the 14th Dalai Lama and other foreign groups on the reincarnations in Tibet. All the while, he traveled often to the United States to defend his religious policy against criticism. Ye was relieved of his religious post in September 2009 to direct the Central Institute of Socialism. ==Early life and career== Ye Xiaowen was born in 1950 to a poor teachers' family in Ningxiang County, Henan, although he grew up in Guizhou. He joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1975. Ye was one of the few Chinese students to study sociology after the discipline was suppressed for 20 years, becoming vice director of the Guizhou Academy of Social Sciences. In 1985, after Hu Jintao was promoted to party chief of Guizhou, he was made Secretary of the Guizhou Communist Youth League. As part of his mandate in 1992, he traveled to Northwest China to find out why some young people were religious, and to try to convert them to the Youth League instead. The reflective article he wrote earned him the attention of religious and Communist Party leaders in China.〔 The article criticized the Communist Party leadership as regarding religion as "backward and fatuous", and for simply hoping that young people would become atheists. It acknowledged that religion "has mass appeal and is going to be around for a long time", and that it is "compatible with a socialist society." He condemned the anti-religious excesses of the Cultural Revolution, and recommended that China loosen its grip on religion as part of the reform and opening up. On the other hand, Ye vindicates the CPC's suspicions about foreign missionaries in Europe's colonial past with China, and religion's role in overthrowing communist states in the Revolutions of 1989. Therefore, he argues, the state must stress "self-governance, self-support, and self-sufficiency" in Chinese religious organizations. This greatly influenced Chinese paramount leader Jiang Zemin's reformist attitudes on religion, which were attacked on both the CPC right and left for being too restrictive or not restrictive enough. Ye later reflected that he had to quote Karl Marx on religion in order for the CPC members to listen to his ideas.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Ye Xiaowen」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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