Apart from being highly amused? I don’t think it will fully work. And it’s not even just the forgiver part. It’s the eternal afterlife in heaven part. Because if the choice is “obey Xi on Earth by no longer venerating Christ” or “spend an eternity in heaven,” and I believed in all this stuff, I’d sure pick heaven and just worship in secret.

I will say that it does kind of stop people though… in the sense that eventually their beliefs get diluted into a sort of merging of belief systems. Judaism and Christianity themselves are examples of this, but more recent ones would be the various New World iindigenous groups that merge their Pre-Columbian religion with Christianity or Crypto-Jews in the Southwestern U.S., the result of Spanish Jews converting to Christianity to avoid expulsion from Spanish lands.

So maybe what will end up happening is a sort of new form of Chinese Christianity where Mao is venerated as a saint or a prophet, but Jesus will very unlikely be usurped from the top of the worship chain… but right now, they aren’t actually offering anything in return for that veneration even close to what Jesus offers believers.