Contentious debate has surrounded the question of religion and state in China, and in particular the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) harsh surveillance and control on a wide spectrum of Chinese religious practice and thought. The intensification of religious regulations under Xi Jinping's leadership suggests that authoritarian rule in China will endure and even be enhanced. Dividing the five legal religions in China's "red religious market" into three categories, i.e., antagonist or black-in-red (Catholicism and Protestant Christianity), accommodating or grey-in-red (Islam), and cooperating or red-in-red (Buddhism and Taoism), this article argues that there is a tripartite control of legal religions in China, operating according to the degree of political sensitivity, with different state responses ranging from cooperation to accommodation and suppression. This analytical framework of tripartite control of religion is constructed and developed to better analyze and understand the dynamics of state-religion relations and the Party-state's complex political and religious pressure in contemporary China. The framework improves upon the triple market model, which neglects certain factors affecting state responses to different legal religious groups.