Surely it falls under "control first, then eradicate." Lots of examples like that, e.g. vermin eradication. Like slowly boiling the frog, the Chinese government will gradually try to remove the influence of the Vatican from Chinese lives, aware that to do so too quickly would inflame tensions with other countries where Catholic influence is strong.
From Asia News last week:
http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Chin...nes-in-Shanxi-and-Guizhou-(videos)-45306.html
The sinicisation campaign began last February, with new regulations on religious activities. The destruction of churches, crosses, paintings, etc. began in Henan, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia and spread to Zhejiang, Jiangxi and other provinces.
Since the Sino-Vatican agreement was signed, the pace of destruction has increased.
Look at a religion that has had little influence outside China: Falun Gong. From Wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong
Falun Gong practitioners in China are reportedly subject to a wide range of human rights abuses: hundreds of thousands are estimated to have been imprisoned extrajudicially,[3] and practitioners in detention are subject to forced labor, psychiatric abuse, torture, and other coercive methods of thought reform at the hands of Chinese authorities...
Xinhua News Agency, the official news organization of the Communist Party, declared that Falun Gong is "opposed to the Communist Party of China and the central government, preaches idealism, theism and feudal superstition."[165] Xinhua also asserted that "the so-called 'truth, kindness and forbearance' principle preached by [Falun Gong] has nothing in common with the socialist ethical and cultural progress we are striving to achieve", and argued that it was necessary to crush Falun Gong to preserve the "vanguard role and purity" of the Communist Party.[166] Other articles appearing in the state-run media in the first days and weeks of the ban posited that Falun Gong must be defeated because its "theistic" philosophy was at odds with the Marxist–Leninism paradigm and with the secular values of materialism...
State propaganda initially used the appeal of scientific rationalism to argue that Falun Gong's worldview was in "complete opposition to science" and communism.[210] For example, the People's Daily asserted on 27 July 1999, that the fight against Falun Gong "was a struggle between theism and atheism, superstition and science, idealism and materialism."
We already seen reports on how the Chinese government treat the Muslim Uygurs. What do you think China will eventually say about Catholicism? I hardly doubt that the "struggle between theism and atheism", "superstition and science" and "idealism and materialism" will continue and be broadened.
