On a rain-soaked April day on Taiwan’s western coast, tens of thousands of pilgrims walked alongside a palanquin bearing a wooden statue of the sea goddess Mazu, one of the most widely worshipped deities on the island. Borne by four devotees, Mazu’s image glided along the street, stopping every so often for the adoration of locals who turned out in the thousands to offer fried snacks, cookies, freshly brewed tea, and fruits to the pilgrims—all for free.

Mazu—also known as Matsu—is believed to have been once a human woman, like many Chinese deities. She lived, if the stories are true, in a coastal island of the southern Chinese province of Fujian in the 10th century, becoming famous for her miraculous gifts. A few centuries after her death, she became a patron of sailors and fishermen throughout southern China. It’s a heritage of worship shared by many Taiwanese—but one that Beijing is now trying to exploit for its own ends.

For nine days in late April, the Dajia Mazu pilgrims travel roughly 200 miles on foot across Taiwan’s western coast, from the second-largest city of Taichung through rice fields and villages, before looping back again to the Mazu statue’s home at the Dajia Jenn Lann temple in Taichung’s suburban district of Dajia. This year, local authorities estimated tens of thousands turned out for the first day alone, with hundreds of thousands joining at different stages along the route. In total, well over 1 million people participate in Mazu pilgrimages across Taiwan each year, peaking in the spring during a time that many call “Mazu madness.”

Xu Zi-xuan, a volunteer in his mid-30s who has joined the pilgrimage every year for more than a decade, traces his devotion to a miracle. Years ago, he said, his mother’s arm was badly injured in a car accident. Surgery and other attempts by doctors couldn’t help her lift the arm past her shoulder. Then one night, she dreamed of a strange woman who took her hand and told her not to worry. “When she woke up, her arm was better,” Xu told Foreign Policy. “We believe that woman was Mazu.”

Liu Jia-li has been bringing her 18-year-old son, Wang Ke-buo, to the pilgrimage ever since he was 2 years old. When Wang was born, she and his father chose Mazu to be his godmother—a common practice in Taiwan.

“We’re walking from Yunlin to Changhua today to thank Mazu for supporting him and keeping him safe,” Liu said.

Mazu is worshipped on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, although for decades in China, that worship—like other forms of religion—was repressed under Maoism. In the modern People’s Republic of China, the state has increasingly sought to harness her following for explicitly political ends, framing the religious practice as evidence that Taiwan and China are “one family,” bound by shared ancestors and a shared fate.

At the center of that effort is Meizhou Island in Fujian. It is home to the Meizhou Mazu Temple, which Chinese officials and state media promote as the original birthplace of Lin Mo-Niang, the woman who would later become Mazu, and the ancestral temple for Mazu worship throughout the region.

This framing leans heavily on a feature of Chinese folk religion: fenling, the ritual “division of spirit,” in which a new statue of a deity is consecrated by transferring spiritual energy from an older one, creating a lineage relationship between the two worship sites. Traditionally, these connections have to be periodically renewed by pilgrimage—often literally bringing the “daughter” statue back to the “mother.”

Anthropologist Jacob Tischer, a professor at Czechia’s Charles University who has studied Mazu worship in Fujian and Taiwan, said that when Han Chinese migrants from Fujian started settling Taiwan in the 17th century, they brought Mazu statues from Fujian for protection from the dangerous currents and waves of the Taiwan Strait (known by migrants as the Black Ditch) that claimed countless lives.

Upon their arrival in Taiwan, they placed those statues in temples, which were ritually connected to their home temples in Fujian. Han settlers pushing further into previously Indigenous-held territories in Taiwan would then bring along Mazu statues from these coastal temples, creating complex chains of association stretching from inland to coastal Taiwan, and back to Fujian, which needed to be renewed periodically through pilgrimages.

Fujian remained significant through the Qing dynasty, but the connection was cut when pilgrimages back to the province were severely restricted under Japanese colonial rule starting in the late 19th century, and then banned outright when the Kuomintang party (KMT) imposed martial law from 1949 until 1987 and travel between China and Taiwan was severely limited.

The Dajia Jenn Lann temple, which hosts the Dajia pilgrimage, was one of the first Taiwanese temples to resume exchanges with Fujian in 1987. Today, the temple sits at the head of the Taiwan Mazu Fellowship, a network spanning over 180 Mazu temples in Taiwan that often facilitates pilgrimage trips to Meizhou. Administrators of Mazu temples in Taiwan are not necessarily priests themselves. Many are wealthy businessmen with ties to China. In the case of the Dajia Jenn Lann temple, its chairman, Yen Ching-piao, is a prominent former KMT legislator with multiple gang-related criminal convictions for illegal weapons and corruption.

Going to Meizhou means following strict conditions, Tischer said. “So, when they go, they will have to recognize that the Meizhou Temple is the highest Mazu temple. But not everyone buys into that narrative.”

According to Tischer, some Taiwanese temple proprietors believe the Meizhou temple lost its previous status because the original buildings were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the height of anti-religious fervor in China: “So they believe it’s no longer the authentic seat of Mazu power. It’s just being propped up by the Chinese Communist Party and by Taiwanese temples that visit. But the real center of gravity, the real power of the Mazu cult, resides in Taiwan, which is also why there are a number of temples in Taiwan that refuse to go to Meizhou.”

Political scientist Chang Kuei-min at National Taiwan University told Foreign Policy that, “for some temples, Meizhou matters greatly; for others, older Taiwanese temples and local pilgrimage networks are just as meaningful, or even more so.”

What makes Mazu distinctive, and uniquely vulnerable, is that this lineage logic can be repurposed. In Chinese state narratives, fenling is no longer just a ritual relationship, but a political one, implying that all Mazu statues, and by extension their communities, ultimately belong to a single, China-centered origin point.

State media outlets repeatedly invoke phrases like “all Mazus under heaven return home” in coverage of cross-strait religious exchanges in Meizhou. Beijing often evokes shared religious figures to claim both sides of the strait as part of a shared Chinese nation, a discourse Cheng Li-wun, the leader of Taiwan’s opposition KMT party, repeated in her recent meeting with Xi Jinping.

“Across Taiwan, temples are dedicated to deities such as the Yellow Emperor … all of whom originated on the Mainland. Therefore, people on both sides of the strait are all descendants of Yan and Huang, all belong to the Chinese nation, all have been shaped by Chinese culture, and all are one family,” Cheng Li-wun said at the meeting, citing two emperors who, according to legend, founded Chinese civilization.

At a 2023 meeting in Beijing, Song Tao, head of China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, told a group of Taiwanese pilgrims that “Mazu culture is an important component of … the deep-rooted and flourishing Chinese culture in Taiwan.” He condemned “Taiwan independence forces’ attempts to ‘de-Sinicize’ Taiwan” as “a betrayal of their ancestors.”

Hong Buo-chen, a longtime senior volunteer with the Dajia pilgrimage, has been to Meizhou many times and heard Chinese officials deliver pro-unification speeches like these. “For me, it’s personal,” he told Foreign Policy. “I’m just there to worship Mazu.”

Taiwanese officials are increasingly worried about the scale of China’s efforts.

Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior, in a statement to Foreign Policy, noted that the Dajia temple’s exchanges with Meizhou have intensified over time, evolving from “simple ceremonies of fenling statues returning to the mother temple” into large-scale tours involving thousands of devotees. Its Mainland Affairs Council, which handles cross-strait affairs, told Foreign Policy that Beijing exploits Mazu pilgrimages to places like Meizhou by “deliberately providing free or below-market hospitality to Taiwanese participants, transforming simple religious exchange into a tool for spreading political ideology.”

In response to China’s increasing use of religious exchange to push political unification, Taiwan’s government has urged religious groups attending events in China to register them in advance. The interior ministry noted that when it receives reports of domestic religious groups signing documents with Chinese temples or establishing offices in Taiwan for them without permission from the proper authorities, it investigates the groups for potential violations of the Cross-Strait Relations Act, which governs Taiwan’s relations with China.

The think tank IORG, which researches Chinese information operations against Taiwan, has documented how religious exchanges can double as influence channels. “Mazu is the number one god being instrumentalized by the CCP to try to exert influence against Taiwan,” the organization’s co-director, Yu Chihhao, told Foreign Policy.

According to Sher Chien-Yuan, an economist at Taiwan’s National Sun Yat-sen University who has researched the impact of Mazu exchanges with China on election results in southern Taiwan, tour groups returning from Fujian often maintain chat groups that begin with banal messages, like “good morning” greetings and tips on staying healthy. But around election time, these messages shift towards political content and misinformation aimed at discouraging votes for Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which has taken a harder line against Beijing, and pushing voters towards more China-friendly opposition parties like the KMT.

The effect of swinging votes toward the KMT is modest but measurable, Sher’s co-authored paper shows. But combined with the bigger picture of China’s efforts to influence Taiwan, Sher said it could add up to something much bigger. Democracy is unique in that “voters can burn it at the ballot box itself. … China is counting on Taiwanese voters to do that,” he said.

“Freedoms like the freedom of speech and freedom of religion are values, but they are also vulnerabilities,” Yu, of the think tank IORG, said. “All of these trust-based values and systems are now being exploited by bad actors, which forces all of us to confront this dilemma. And it causes some of us nowadays, in Taiwan, to turn rightwards. It doesn’t mean that we stop believing in these things. We just need to calibrate them, to protect them.”