Beijing, China - China hosts the World Buddhist Forum this week, its first international religious meeting since the Communists swept to power more than five decades ago.
Organisers timed the forum to coincide with the Christian festival of Easter, sources said, apparently to send a message of China's greater religious tolerance to church-going U.S. President George W. Bush ahead of his summit with Chinese President Hu Jintao later this month.
Some 1,000 monks and Buddhist experts from 30 countries will gather in the scenic eastern city of Hangzhou for the forum which starts on Thursday and winds up in nearby Zhoushan on Sunday.
"The Communist Party has come a long way from uncompromising Marxist-Leninist-inspired atheism to a far more lenient and tolerant attitude towards religion," a Western diplomat said.
The theme of the forum -- "a harmonious world begins in the mind" -- mirrors Hu's campaign to build a "harmonious society" in the face of rising unrest at home.
"This is an unprecedented grand gathering in Chinese Buddhism's 2,000-year history," Ye Xiaowen, director of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs, wrote on the forum's Web site.
Apart from this forum, there has been talk of China forging ties with the Vatican by 2008 and a possible warming towards Tibet's exiled god-king, the Dalai Lama. A Tibetan nun jailed for 15 years was allowed to seek medical treatment in the United States last month.
Such moves, however symbolic, may provide Hu with a list of concessions on religion with which to temper any U.S. criticism during his visit, analysts said. But critics dismissed the moves as a public relations exercise.
IDEOLOGICAL VACUUM
The Vatican estimates about 8 million Chinese Catholics worship in underground churches loyal to the Pope, compared with 5 million members of the state-controlled Catholic association.
China is generally less fearful of Buddhism, with its home-grown roots, than other religions, even though many Tibetan monks and nuns have been jailed for their loyalty to the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing accuses of pushing for independence.
Religious freedom is enshrined in China's constitution, though. The world's most populous nation has about 100 million Buddhists, some 20,000 temples and around 200,000 monks and nuns.
But during the chaotic 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, monasteries were closed, statues were smashed, religious texts were burnt, and monks and nuns were forced to return to secular life.
China has since sought to control but not stifle religion in a society where an ideological vacuum has spawned corruption and eroded ethics in the post-Mao era.
But in the face of rising unrest -- 87,000 public order disturbances last year -- China has no qualms about crushing any challenge to its rule, banning the Falun Gong spiritual movement as an evil cult in 1999 and jailing thousands of its adherents.
Two of the top lamas of Tibetan Buddhism will be absent from the forum. The Dalai Lama has lived in exile in India since 1959 when he fled his Himalayan homeland after an abortive uprising.
A youth backed by the Dalai Lama as the Karmapa Lama, the third-ranking monk in Tibetan Buddhism, arrived in India from Tibet in 2000.