> ...Christianity, which by some estimates is China’s fastest-growing religion, promotes Western values and ideals like human rights that conflict with the aims of China’s authoritarian government

This is the part that confuses me.

I'm not sure what Christianity intrinsically promotes (ask 12 Christians and I suspect you'll receive 13 conflicting opinions). But practically speaking, governments and ruling classes have used it for nearly two-thousand years to promote social order and subservience.

It's been used to justify the Crusades, and slavery. Within living memory it's been used to justify Jim Crow laws, and the Salvation Army used as a tool against labor union organizing. It's been used to promote leftist regimes in Catholic South America, and the far-right "Protestant work ethic" class structure in the USA. It's been used everywhere to enforce a social order based on strict sexual norms and patriarchal gender roles.

Christianity became one of the Top Two religions on earth, precisely because of how malleable it is. In other words, in practice, it tends to promote whatever the ruling class in a given place and time WANT it to promote. It's been that way since Emperor Constantine.

So why try to violently suppress it? That's never been an effective strategy. Just co-opt it, and make it promote whatever Chinese/Confucian values you want like everyone else does.