China is exploiting the worship of Mazu, a sea goddess widely venerated in Taiwan, to push unification narratives, using religious pilgrimages, subsidized hospitality, and political messaging to turn a sacred tradition into a tool of influence.
Mazu is the island’s most popular deity. Well over a million people participate annually in the Dajia Pilgrimage, a nine-day, 320-kilometer (200-mile) walk across Taiwan’s western coast. Hundreds of thousands more visit temples across the island. The goddess is so deeply embedded in Taiwanese life that her image appears everywhere from home altars to taxi dashboards.
Beijing sees an opportunity. Chinese state media invokes phrases like “all Mazus under heaven return home” to imply a single, China-centered origin for the faith. The government on Meizhou Island in Fujian province, where Mazu was supposedly born in the 10th century, promotes itself as the “ancestral temple” from which all true Mazu worship flows.
The mechanism is rooted in a ritual called fenling, the “division of spirit,” through which a new statue’s spiritual energy is transferred from an older one, creating a mother-daughter lineage between temples. Visiting Meizhou requires recognizing it as the highest Mazu temple. Some Taiwanese temples refuse, believing Meizhou lost its authenticity during the Cultural Revolution, when the original buildings were destroyed.
For those who do make the trip, Beijing provides what Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council calls free or below-market hospitality. Pilgrims from Taiwan are treated to subsidized tours, meals, and accommodations. The experience is framed as religious fellowship. But tour groups returning from Fujian maintain chat groups, and near Taiwanese elections the messages shift to political content and misinformation, aimed at discouraging votes for the Democratic Progressive Party, which favors independence, and pushing voters toward the China-friendly Kuomintang.
The Taiwan Affairs Office under Song Tao has openly endorsed the effort. “Mazu culture is an important component of Chinese culture in Taiwan,” Song said in 2023. He called de-Sinicization “a betrayal of ancestors.”
Academics have found measurable effects. Economist Sher Chien-Yuan documented modest vote-shifting toward the KMT linked to Mazu exchange tours. He warned that “combined with the bigger picture, it could add up to something much bigger.”
The IORG, a Taiwanese think tank that tracks Chinese influence operations, identifies Mazu as “the number one god being instrumentalized by the CCP to try to exert influence against Taiwan,” according to co-director Yu Chihhao.
Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior says it is monitoring the escalating exchanges and investigating religious groups that sign documents with Chinese temples or establish offices without approval under the Cross-Strait Relations Act.
But stopping the trips is politically difficult. The pilgrimages are genuinely popular, and most participants are there to worship, not to be propagandized. Hong Buo-chen, a longtime senior volunteer, put it simply: “For me, it’s personal. I’m just there to worship Mazu.”
That is precisely the challenge. Yu Chihhao of IORG described the dilemma: “Freedoms like the freedom of speech and freedom of religion are values, but they are also vulnerabilities. All of these trust-based values and systems are now being exploited by bad actors.”