In this article, we take the charitable activities of the Shaolin Temple as a case study for our analysis of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) management of religion under Xi Jinping. Our fieldwork and in-depth interviews reveal that the Shaolin Temple has, through its charitable work, assumed the attributes of a “cultural broker” for the CCP. And because the temple has an abundance of symbolic capital and is respected by the public, it presents the CCP with a “dictator’s dilemma.” On the one hand, the CCP allocated resources to the temple’s orphanage so that it could assist the regime with its poverty alleviation efforts; on the other hand, there is a danger that the temple may gain sufficient ideological and discursive power to threaten the CCP’s rule. So, for political security reasons, the Party bureaucracy endeavours to maintain tight control over the orphanage.
