Acknowledgments
Growing up in a place full of temples, churches, shrines, and rituals, I have always been curious about the past of Chinese religions. This long-standing curiosity, plus the realization that there were very few studies of religion under Mao, prompted me to write a history of local religious life during the Mao years. It has been more than four decades since the ending of the Cultural Revolution and almost a decade since I began research for this book. Understanding Maoism and its legacies on contemporary Chinese society and politics seems ever more important with passing time.
I have accumulated numerous intellectual and personal debt to many people while working on this book. I thank Michael Szonyi, my adviser at Harvard, for allowing me to choose religion under Mao as the theme of my dissertation even though neither of us were sure if this topic was doable given the difficulty of gaining access to materials. Michael’s critical insights have helped me shape my ideas into their current form in the book. From research to writing to other aspects of creating this book, Robert Weller has been a main source of help. I thank his straightforward and useful suggestions. His thoughtful comments and his broad perspective on Chinese religions constantly impress and never fail to inspire me.
I thank the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, where I finished this book, and I especially thank Director Peter van der Veer for his interest in and support of my project all along. MPI has the best work environment that I could ever imagine. Not every research institute has a proper kitchen and a garden! As one of the few historians in the institute, I learned a great deal from my anthropologist colleagues. I miss countless chats with colleagues and friends: Irfan Ahmad, Suddheesh Bhasi, Chen Yan, Chen Yining, Chiu Tzu-lung, Diao Ying, Fabian Graham, He Xiao, Jin-Heon Jung, Kang Jie, Maya Kaiser, Patrice Ladwig, Samuel Lengen, Liu Jifeng, Ma Zhen, Mai Thi Thanh Nga, Tam Ngo, Paul Sorrentino, Shaheed Tayob, Sajida Tursun, Leilah Vevaina, Ngoc Thi Vuong, Yu Jingyang, Zhu Jili, and others.
Special thanks to Maya for meticulous and superb editing and truly insightful comments. I feel really lucky to have had her help.
Some colleagues have read parts of the early versions of the manuscript and provided invaluable comments. They include Peter Bol, Jeremy Brown, Henrietta Harrison, Matthew Johnson, and Paul Katz. I am indebted to them all.
I feel lucky to be publishing with Oxford University Press. It has been a wonderful experience working with Cynthia Read, the editor of my book, and her assistant, Salma Ismaiel.
I am fortunate to have received the aid of numerous individuals who greatly facilitated the task of collecting data and field researches. Above all, I want to thank the staff at the local state archives in Longquan, Pingyang, Rui’an, Taishun, Wencheng, Wenling, Wenzhou, Xinchang and Yueqing, Rui’an City Library, Wenzhou Municipal Library, and Zhejiang Provincial Library for helping me find documents. Special thanks go to Wu Zhenqiang of Zhejiang University. Among my many interviewees and local guides, I especially thank Chen Meiling, Dai Xuefu, Ding Bingkuan, Ding Yuzhen, Pan Yiheng, Shi Liaozheng, Wu Zhenwei, Xia Mingxin, Ying Weixian, the late Zhang Junsun, Zhang Shisong, Zhou Zexian and Zhu Chenlan. My friends Zhou Gang and Qin Yong helped arrange my visits to local temples, archives, and the Rui’an Religious Affairs Bureau. Wu Tianyue and Zhang Jieke not only shared their own researches but also made copies of historical records of local churches in Rui’an and the Wenzhou region available to me. Pan Junliang of the University of Paris VII shared with me documents on southern Zhejiang that he had collected. My relatives provided invaluable support during my fieldwork in Rui’an and Hangzhou. I thank my brother Xuan, cousin Zhe, in-laws Haifeng and Dong, uncle Mingxiong, aunt Caicha, and aunt Chunhua.
My parents, Wang Jianyong and Lu Chuzhu, were always supportive of me pursuing my own interest, though they do not necessarily understand the nature of my researches. They were born around the founding of the PRC and have lived through many major political movements since 1949. Naturally, when I grew up, many dinner table talks were about PRC history, especially my parents’ and their peers’ experiences during the Mao years. They may not have realized it yet, but I increasingly see in them the “why” for becoming a historian. This book is for them.
Finally, my wife Xuan Gui has been by my side for every up and down of the entire journey. Xuan read early versions of the book, helped polish my writing, and shared her thoughts with me. Her love, patience, and unwavering faith in me kept me going. Without her, this book would not have been possible. This book is dedicated to her.
Translations, Characters, and Abbreviations
This book uses pinyin for transliterations unless the Chinese terms already have a commonly known spelling (e.g., Chiang Kai-shek, Y. T. Wu).
Names of authors are listed in either the Chinese (surname followed by given name) or Western order (surname followed by given name), mostly depending on the order of the names appearing in the publications.
Chinese characters are used in the term list and bibliography. This book only uses traditional characters.
Frequently used abbreviations:
CCP: Chinese Communist Party
CIM: China Inland Mission
CJIC: China Jesus Independent Church
EPA: Elderly People Association
KMT: Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party
PRC: People’s Republic of China
On April 28, 2014, before dawn, hundreds of armed police descended on the vicinity of Sanjiang Protestant Church in Yongjia, which sits across Ou River from downtown Wenzhou. The police cut off cell phone signals and dispersed a small number of Protestants who had stayed to defend the church, which the government had declared an “unlawful building.” By evening, heavy bulldozers had completely leveled the church, which had taken ten years to build. As global media watched the standoff unfold on site, the demolition put an end to a month-long vigil at Sanjiang Church, which at its height allegedly included as many as several thousand Protestant protesters from the Wenzhou region and beyond. The demolition was followed by a province-wide “Three Rectifications and One Demolition” (sangai yichai) campaign that partly targeted unlawful religious buildings and symbols in Zhejiang.1 By July 2015, the campaign is said to have removed crosses from more than 1,700 church roofs.
In late 2015, with cross removal winding down in Zhejiang, many Christians expressed fear and worry as well as anger, as they saw the shadow of the Cultural Revolution in the sweeping demolition of crosses. “They want to remove every trace,” said a woman living near Sanjiang Church. “During the Cultural Revolution, they burned Bibles, but they didn’t remove the crosses,” she added.2 A Ms. Huang in neighboring Taizhou region told reporters, when describing the demolition: “Some wore police uniforms, with helmets and shields, some were plainclothes police and some wore red armbands—just like the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.”3
In a widely circulated letter to clergy and members of the Wenzhou diocese, the bishop appointed by the Vatican, Zhu Weifang, said he was stunned and confused. “I thought that now that more than three decades have passed since our country’s reform and opening, such a Cultural-Revolution-style movement should not have happened, given that we have once more embraced the world. It seemed impossible. Yet this campaign, which is a deep wound to us Christians, did happen and is getting worse!”4 Curiously, some others saw hope. Wenzhou Christians had endured the government’s experiment “to eliminate religion” in the late 1950s and the ordeals of the Cultural Revolution (among other campaigns of the Mao years) and welcomed an unprecedented renewal in the church. The cross-removal campaign, they believed, would invite another Christian renaissance because “the more severe the persecution, the more the church thrives” (yue bipo yue fuxing).5
These pervasive references to the Cultural Revolution are symptomatic of the enduring legacy of Maoism in China’s religious consciousness, a legacy that has taken on a life of its own. People like Zhu, belonging to a cohort who weathered the political storms of the revolutionary years, are disappearing one by one, and with them the living memory of those years. Yet their narratives of religious persecution under Mao have been passed on to members of younger generations, who made up the bulk of protesters at Sanjiang Church. The trope of religious persecution under Mao has conjured up, and may continue to conjure up, emotional reactions and could at times become a rallying cry and a call to action for Christians.
The broad question addressed in this book is as follows: How has Maoism transformed religion in China? If, as the events in Sanjiang indicate, the shadow of revolution still looms large in Chinese religious life, how has Maoism affected the ways that Chinese religions organize, operate, and interact with the state?
To answer this question, the book begins by tracing the history of encounters between Communist forces and followers of various religious traditions in Rui’an County, Wenzhou, before 1949. It looks at how religious communities in Rui’an have engaged with the Communist revolution since 1949 and how the legacy of Maoism has continued to shape the religious landscape in the post-Mao era. In so doing, the case study sheds light on, more generally, the making of religious modernity and rural organizations in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Maoism and the Contemporary Landscape of Chinese Religion
In the decades following the Communist revolution, outside observers were often pessimistic about the future of Chinese religions, citing the Mao regime’s harsh rhetoric and anti-religion campaigns. A survey of Christianity and other religions in China, published in 1969, described it as “a nation state, with one fourth the earth’s population, in which religion as an effective force seems to be all but nullified.”6 Holmes Welch, who authored a number of seminal works on religion under Mao, saw what he believed to be unmistakable signs of the demise of Buddhism in China.7 For Welch, the rise of Maoism marked an unprecedented break with tradition that effectively eliminated Buddhism from everyday life. In a similar vein, C. K. Yang’s monumental study of Chinese religions projected that Communism as a secular ideology would replace the theistic faiths that were in decline, in keeping with the trend toward secularization that he observed in the Republican era.8
Given that the Mao years (1949–1978) saw what may have been the worst religious repression in Chinese history, and considering that foreign researchers lacked access to the country during the same period, the pessimistic tone of their writing is not that surprising. It is curious, however, that to this day the Mao years remain the least studied period in the history of religion in modern China. The study of modern Chinese religion has burgeoned in the period since the end of Mao’s rule, yet most studies focus on the pre-1949 and post-1978 eras. A landmark study of religious history in modern China, The Religious Question in Modern China, mentions the Cultural Revolution only in passing, leaving out almost any mention of popular religion under Mao.9 Very little has been written about certain facets of religious life from 1949 to 1978, such as any interactions concerning religion that occurred between local officials belonging to different levels of government, between officials and locals, or between religious and non-religious people.
Despite the lack of research in this field, we are now starting to develop a clearer picture of religious life under Maoism thanks to local experiences that are coming to light from different regions, religious traditions, and ethnicities. The narratives of those who lived through the period from 1949 to 1978 also show that the effects of Maoism on local traditions are often pervasive, complex, and multivalent. Stephen Jones’s research in Hebei Province, in northern China, illustrates the survival of village rituals and ritual music associations through an era of repeated political intrusions.10 In fact, some village ritual associations were able to carry on their practices unobtrusively to such an extent that Jones asserts that “the restoration of ritual associations around 1980 was no reinvention, no piecing together of cultural fragments” but an “authentic transition.”11 By contrast, other ritual traditions were much more affected by Maoist movements. As Henrietta Harrison found in Catholic communities in southern Taiyuan, Shanxi in northern China, the crackdown and propaganda since the Socialist Education Movement in the early 1960s sparked massive resistance among Catholic villagers, deploying miracles as a rallying point. In the end, local authorities effectively curbed the public practices of Catholicism, though this had the paradoxical effect of reinforcing Catholic identity, laying the foundations for a religious revival in the reform period.12
In a similar vein, Paul Mariani’s research on Catholic communities in cosmopolitan Shanghai shows that Catholic leaders in the early 1950s resisted the Communist Party’s assault on religion, refusing to renounce the Pope and the Church in Rome; yet the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) eventually succeeded in dividing the Catholic community.13 In south and southeast China, Protestants seemed to be more successful in resisting and surviving the penetration of the state using a wide range of tactics. In eastern and northern Fujian the revival of Protestantism might even have started toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, as research by both Chen-Yang Kao and Melissa Inouye suggests.14
In ethnic minority regions, where the politics of religion is closely associated with the politics of ethnicity, issues of religious repression and revival have often had a dramatic character. In Hui Muslim communities of Yunnan, in southwestern China, state violence against Islam led to a religious uprising at the height of the Cultural Revolution which contributed to a resurgence in local Islamic identity.15 In the 1969 “Nyemo incident” in Tibet, during the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, villagers angered by government policies in the frenzy of local factional fights were mobilized by religion.16 These case studies and numerous others show the powerful role of religion in local politics throughout China’s ethnic minority regions during the Mao years.
Departing from the pessimism of earlier accounts, recent studies of religion in China see the CCP’s efforts to remodel society as being far less successful than was once believed. New research argues that traditional cosmologies have, in many ways, continued to guide people’s thoughts and behaviors, in spite of the preponderance of Maoist ideology.17 The most violent attacks on religion were often short-lived and occurred within the context of local affairs, allowing for the survival of ritual traditions, in fragments or as a whole. These findings are underscored by a broad analytical shift in the study of religious life in China from religion and politics on a national scale to local, often unexpected, outcomes and to non-elite actors at the grassroots level. Improved access to state archives and a boom in the study of oral history have allowed researchers to go from studying the decline of Chinese religions to examining their survival,18 predicated on multiple tactics including resistance, negotiation, and compliance in a wide range of forms.
This shift in emphasis raises new questions. While earlier studies tended to assume that all religious activities had diminished, regardless of their nature, it is now clear from recent studies on the ground that efforts to suppress or advance religion did not simply result in a linear decline. Instead, the development of religious life within China varied at different times, places, and for different traditions. As is shown by Thomas DuBois,19 there was variation even among different groups from the same religious tradition, as in the Hebei villages where intra-village sects survived better than trans-local ones. The diverse outcomes of Maoist suppression demand further comparison and analysis. How is it possible that modes of action and organization, theological ideas, local history, and the politics of religion played out with so many variations, even within the same regions, in the fate of different religious groups during the Mao era?
During the campaigns against religion, the Communist government developed a distinct rhetoric with which to describe the major religious traditions, creating attributes for each based in Communist theory. The territorial temple activities, Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam were all tied to the theory of feudalism. Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, were associated with the concept of imperialism, an association that lent a powerful stigma to Christianity throughout China from 1949 onward. Salvationist traditions bore the harsh epithet of fandong huidaomen (meaning “reactionary societies, teachings, and sects”). These labels to a large extent guided government policy toward the different religious traditions. In other words, the Communist revolution presented different challenges to each, but to what extent did these account for the differences in how religious organizations and traditions navigated the tumultuous political history of the Mao era?
By exploring the multiplicity of experiences among different religious groups, this book addresses the overall evolution of the local religious landscape, as it was transformed by the changing balance of religious and political power. This study does not treat religion as a closed-off system that can be easily separated from local political and economic life; nor does it see the relations between religious traditions as a zero-sum game, as some scholars in mainland China have suggested.20 The present study begins from the perspective that changes in religious life are inextricably linked with the religious ecology of local society. Changes in one area may reshape the entire religious landscape.
The differences in local experiences open up the possibility of exploring religious reinvention during the revolutionary years, something which has rarely been associated with that period. Until now, most research on the revolutionary era has tended to view it as one of disruption and loss. Helen Siu, for instance, suggested the Mao era as a period which saw the fragmentation of a more coherent and authentic pre-1949 tradition, arguing that the resurgence of rituals in the reform era was less a revival of “tradition” than it was a case of “cultural fragments recycled under new circumstances.”21 The “recycling” metaphor reveals the mechanism of religious revival and is well received, yet few scholars have explicitly questioned the implications of this metaphor.
Tradition is, as Adam Chau argues, “a complex, dynamic, ever-changing cluster of institutions, practitioners and consumers, knowledge and practices fully amenable to innovations, inventions and reinventions.”22 Once we see tradition as a “process that involves continual re-creation,”23 it is entirely possible that Maoist rule could have simultaneously suppressed religion and sparked religious reinvention. In other words, fragmentation and reinvention could go hand in hand. State violence may be detrimental to orders and institutions, while efforts to avoid it often require inventive measures, and may lead to new orders and institutions being developed. In its efforts to repress religious life, the state unintentionally incited religious fervor, contributing to the diffusion of religious ideas throughout China. As religious practitioners found ways of coping with repressive policies, the state itself became a resource for cultural appropriation: its discourses, symbols, and institutions.
As this book demonstrates, the Mao era is extraordinary but not exceptional. Violent state campaigns against religions have led to religious reinvention and even expansion. The struggle to resist and survive fueled reinvention, sowing the seeds for further transformation and even growth. The Mao era is no less important than any other period of Chinese history in the making of modern religious traditions in China. Not only did the revolutionary years see many fundamental transformations in religious life, they also set the conditions for more critical religious innovations in the post-Mao era.24 In keeping with this, we must renew our understanding of the continuities and discontinuities in the years from 1949 to 1978.
Land Revolution, Religious Property, and the Reinvention of Rural Organizations
This book pays close attention to what I term “property issues” to highlight revolutionary experiences at the local level and their consequences for rural religious organizations. “Property issues” refer specifically to land and property owned by religious groups, including religious buildings, the land they occupy, and religious artifacts such as incense burners and statues of divinities.
Property issues, in particular issues surrounding land, are at the root of so many religious issues during and after Mao’s revolution and something that returns again and again. In the Sanjiang incident a more fundamental issue is in fact land. Since the Communist revolution took land away and established the state as the largest and sole landowner,25 insecure property rights have been a huge problem to local communities. When the government tightened regulation of land use amidst rapid commercialization and urbanization that made land an increasingly precious resource, local communities have to constantly engage and sometimes clash with the authorities on the land issue.
Researchers have tended to focus on the economic and political aspects of land reform in the PRC, looking at issues such as the process of implementing land reform at the local level, especially the confiscation and redistribution of land; the economic effects of land reform, especially on agricultural production; and the politics of mass mobilization and state building.26 Recently, interest has shifted to the cultural factors and consequences of land reform.27
The present study highlights the social aspects of land revolution in the PRC, extending an area of inquiry that has been well studied for the Republican era but not so far for the Mao and post-Mao eras. Land was crucial to the formation, continuation, and growth of religious activities and communities in traditional Chinese religions. It was vital to constructing a permanent ritual space, as well as to finance daily temple affairs and ritual processions. Land marked the territoriality of religious communities and the sovereignty of local deities, and in this close association with the locality, it became an anchor of society in villages and city neighborhoods. Religious organizations in imperial China were major land and real estate owners, and often had many villagers working for them or farming their landholdings. In the imperial era, religious property was sometimes a target of state attacks because of state fears that temples might become too powerful.
From the late nineteenth century onward, there were frequent confiscations of religious properties, showing the enactment of secularism in the creation of modern China. A significant number of studies have examined the encroachment on religious sites in the late Qing and Republican periods, as well as the local unrest which this generated. They have also considered the local politics of religious space, as well as the broad consequences of anti-superstition campaigns on local sociopolitical structure, revealing the crucial importance of property issues in the fate of religion in modern China.28
While there are some sharp discontinuities between the Nationalist and Communist governments’ policies on religious issues, as far as religious property was concerned, the Communist government was, in many ways, the “inheritor of the Nanjing Nationalist architecture of religious policies.”29 As one example, the confiscation of land and other religious property during land reform and other post-1949 political campaigns can be seen as a continuation of Republican policies on religion. Yet crucially, CCP policies toward religion were guided by international communism as well as by Chinese politics. China’s Communist revolution in 1949 inaugurated a comprehensive secularization project that operated on social, political, and economic structures to transform rather than directly target religious life. This holistic approach was far more devastating to religion than the secularizing engineering of the Republican regime. Despite religion not being a priority of land reform, religious properties were affected on an unprecedented scale. The subsequent nationalization of land ultimately made religion’s traditional dependence on land ownership unsustainable.
Given the challenge posed by the political and ideological environment under Mao, how much scope was left for local religious communities to manage property issues? To what extent were resistance, negotiation, and manipulation possible? When it came to the competition for religious space, local realities and politics were highly significant, as is clear from histories of the Republican era. With the extension of state power into local society and unprecedented levels of bureaucratization, what room for maneuver still existed for local actors in the Mao era?
One of the goals of land reform was to destroy the economic underpinnings of the old society, including religious property. By undermining the economic foundations of religious institutions, however, land revolution had another, more drastic effect: it deterritorialized religious groups on a scale never before seen in Chinese history. Most religious institutions were expelled from their traditional ritual sites, or saw their access restricted. How have religious communities coped with massive deterritorialization? As this book shows, the process of reterritorialization, which occurred in multiple forms and different paces across different traditions in both Mao and post-Mao years, not only allowed some religious practices and institutions to survive the day, but also essentially facilitated the reinvention of rural religious organizations. This book therefore argues that Maoist policies on religious property were a catalyst for the institutional reinvigoration of religious organizations, which was an important and unintended consequence of Maoism.
Understanding Religious Governance in the People’s Republic of China
In order to document the experiences of local religious communities under Mao, this book comprehensively revisits the Maoist governance of religion. The big question that this book sets out to answer is as follows: Why did Mao’s approach to religion have such catastrophic consequences for religion in China, while on the other hand failing to achieve its policy goals in the long run? The atheistic, nationalistic ideas of Chinese Communism certainly lent an iconoclastic tone to the CCP’s Mao-era policies toward religion. Yet since it was founded, the party’s approach to religion has been much more pragmatic than its overt ideology might suggest.
Before 1949, the party’s tough stance on religion often yielded to practical concerns. Its strategy toward local communal religious organizations focused on propaganda and education, especially on the occasion of temple fairs, which the party strove to transform into a site for Communist propaganda. During this period the CCP targeted so-called religious superstition professionals (zongjiao mixin zhiyezhe) such as mediums, and forced them to give up their practices. In its northern revolutionary bases, the Communist Party is known to have destroyed temples and imposed taxes on “superstition goods” (mixinpin) such as candles and paper money, which also occurred in Nationalist-controlled territories. Yet party officials had deliberately prevented such actions from turning to excess, fearing that attacks on temple activities might affect support for the party.30 Salvationist traditions were considered the biggest political threat. The party wanted to disband their organizations and terminate all salvationist activities. They were ruled illegal in revolutionary bases. But it was not unusual that the Communist forces found an ally in some salvationist groups.31
This pragmatism manifested even more prominently in the Communist Party’s pre-1949 stance on Christianity. Up until the late 1930s, as the party softened its tone on Western countries, authorities in Communist-controlled areas had allowed Western missions to operate, own land, and open schools and other enterprises. After the Civil War broke out, the Communist Party’s stance shifted drastically, a change which can be largely attributed to America’s support for the Nationalist government, such that Christianity (associated with American and other foreign presences) was perceived as a political threat. Christian missionaries, churches, and church land in Communist-run areas once again became subject to land reform and struggle meetings.32
The Communist Party’s relations with local religious groups changed profoundly when it achieved national rule in 1949. The party put forth pro-atheist, anti-religious propaganda via newspapers, exhibitions, drama performances, and other means. There were brief campaigns against some religious organizations, especially salvationist groups and the Catholic church. Yet a certain level of pragmatism continued to guide policy, as evidenced by its United Front strategy in religious work. Religious policies formulated in the spirit of the United Front would suppress “counterrevolutionary activities in the disguise of religion” (pizhe zongjiao waiyi de fangemin huodong) while protecting religious freedom as stipulated in the Common Programme (gongtong gangling), later enshrined in the 1954 Constitution of the People’s Republic.33 Even during the Cultural Revolution, the government never formally abolished the distinction between “counterrevolutionary” religion, and beliefs or activities protected by religious freedom. The central government had never launched a national campaign against “superstition”—a conceptualization of religious practices which is at the root of the Republican architecture of religious policy. In fact, throughout the Mao era, the Communist government never formulated a clear definition of what “superstition” (as opposed to “religion”) might mean.
The Communist government’s guidelines on religion seem to signal a more balanced, pragmatic approach than we might presume from the one-sided religious suppression that resulted. How can we make sense of the discrepancy between reality and political rhetoric? The answer, I believe, lies in the nature and rhythm of the Chinese Communist revolution and the local dynamics.
To understand the impact of Maoism on religious life, one must follow the “ecological approach” recently proposed by Vincent Gooassert and David Palmer, i.e., looking at the state’s political and economic agenda as well as its religious policies per se.34 The Communist Party’s ambition, led by Mao, was to enact total revolution in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, uprooting the structure of China’s economic institutions, its political system, and society as a whole, in order to replace them with new ones. The revolution prioritized those agendas that involved (re)distributing or amassing the material, human, or cultural resources which were required for revolution, destroying resources that it did not want, and channeling residents into social units created or sponsored by the government in order to make them comply with the everyday rhythm of socialism. Thus in many cases, instead of directly attacking religion, revolutionaries destroyed the very sociopolitical and economic order on which traditional religious life was based. In other words, the Communist Party’s policies and actions toward religion were highly contingent on its political and economic agenda. In order to implement this agenda, the Communist government employed a critical instrument: mass campaigns. These included the land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. What happened to religious communities under Maoism, I argue, has to be understood primarily through this revolutionary temporality.
Using Archival Sources of the PRC
One of the biggest challenges in doing research on religious life under Mao is the lack of data and the inaccessibility of the data that exist. Early observers could only rely on newspaper reports and journal articles published by the Chinese government, refugees’ accounts, and sometimes materials written by visitors to China. This has continued to be a challenge (though less so today), as religion remains a sensitive issue in government archives. In this regard I benefited from being a native of Rui’an and a speaker of the Wenzhou dialect, which people in China often joke is one of the most difficult dialects in the country, allowing me to gain better access to local state archives and to conduct oral history research with villagers in Rui’an.
The details described in this book concerning local religious life under Mao are mainly drawn from county-level archives in southern Zhejiang, in particular the archives of Rui’an City. The documents I collected from local state archives include statements and directives of religious policy at different levels, reports on the implementation of religious policies, registers of religious organizations, religious surveys, and investigative reports of religious and other social activities.
The use of government archives also poses a challenge to researchers in the study of religion under Mao. In its efforts to control every aspect of social life, the Communist government was obsessively concerned with collecting bits and pieces of information regarding the daily life and thoughts of ordinary people. This quest left behind a voluminous record of opinions and remarks related to religion, as well as records of religious behaviors. No government in Chinese history had ever before created such a detailed body of records on the social life of ordinary people.
Yet, while they provide a valuable resource for historians, state archives require extra caution and efforts to decode. They are steeped in the political discourse of the Communist Party, presenting information through the lens of Maoist ideology. Moreover, the information contained in religious surveys or the records of religious organizations was often collected in a coercive political environment. It is difficult to judge the accuracy and authenticity of information reported to the government, insofar as it was shaped by political conditions at the time. And state archives of the Mao years have other limitations as well: they rarely mention the conditions of domestic worship; nor do they describe the transmission of religious knowledge or its evolution, as official investigations rarely recorded this level of detail.
To overcome some of these issues, I employed cross-referencing to check the consistency of official archives, comparing the records of different government sources. More importantly, I gathered oral history accounts through interviews and conversations with local religious practitioners and institutions, allowing me to compare these accounts with official records. In order to draw comparisons and situate Wenzhou in broader contexts, I have also extensively referenced the religion section of new local gazetteers (xinfangzhi) in Zhejiang and in other provinces in both northern and southern China.35 The book as a whole aims to present a comprehensive picture of religious life under Maoism by bringing to light the ways in which officials perceived religious practices and beliefs, as well as how religious and non-religious villagers made sense of their own life experiences.
In the summers of 2006 and 2011–2013, I traveled to religious sites across all of Rui’an City to interview villagers and rural officials. My oral history interviews were mainly conducted in the towns of Xincheng and Dingtian, Xincheng District; Luofeng, Tangxia District; Mayu, Mayu District; and Anyang, the county seat.36 Fortunately, I was able to locate and meet some of the people who had directly participated in or witnessed the events that appeared in archival sources. Their accounts lend depth to some of the events that I have documented here. As one example, the demolition of Rock Head Palace (yantou gong) in Mayu after the central government’s call to eliminate superstition in 1983 was a high-profile case exalted by the county government as a model action, leading the countywide anti-superstition campaign. Yet my interviews show that the real events were much more ambiguous than the official story of the government’s iron fist smashing “feudal superstition.” Before the demolition, people were able to move statues of divinities and other facilities to another temple in the same village, and this other temple, it seems, was deliberately left intact. Rock Head Palace was eventually rebuilt and reopened in this new location.
State archival sources have other limitations. The tumultuous years of the Cultural Revolution between late 1966 and 1978 have left very few records in state archives, as the paralyzed local government was unable to collect or archive information for quite some time. This book’s case studies of religious life during the Cultural Revolution have had to rely on the historical accounts of local communities. Religious followers in Rui’an and Wenzhou have produced many personal witness accounts, memoirs, and histories of religious institutions. These accounts do pose some problems of interpretation, like oral history accounts: for instance, religious testimony may be shaped by Christian speech practices, sharing life experiences as a means of preaching the Gospel. Suffering, persecution, and solidarity among religious followers may be overemphasized. Nevertheless, these accounts provide valuable information that might otherwise disappear, and I rely on them to the greatest extent possible.
The case studies in the book focus on “communal religious traditions,” Protestant churches, salvationist groups, and, to a lesser extent, the Catholic church. Readers may notice that lineage organization per se is not a focus of this book. This is for two reasons: Since the land reform period, archives show that disputes over corporate lineage property have been less prominent than issues involving other religious traditions. Furthermore, lineage is a complex, multivalent phenomenon beyond its ritual dimensions.
Daoism is not treated as a separate category in the book. State archives lack records of Daoist activities. Rui’an City Archives, for instance, do not have a registry of Daoists or Daoist temples. The problem is not that Rui’an did not have Daoist activities. Many villages have a tradition of residential Daoism and families with generations of Daoists.37 The lack of records specifically identifying Daoism is most likely because Daoist activities were so closely intertwined with territorial cults and village life, such that local governments in the Mao era treated them indiscriminately as “superstition,” together with territorial cults. Readers should consider Daoism as part of what I broadly term “communal religious tradition.”
“Communal religion” or “communal religious traditions,” as described in this book, mainly refer to traditions of territorial temples, Buddhist monasteries, and Daoist temples. Territorial temples refer to village temples dedicated to the worship of local deities. The communist government adopted different policy schemes on territorial temples and Buddhist monasteries and Daoist temples, with the former as sites of “superstition” and the last two as legal religious venues. Most Buddhist monasteries and Daoist temples, however, traditionally were village temples. People built those monasteries in their villages, and funded and regulated them. In the Wenzhou region, for centuries, many Buddhist monasteries and Daoist temples stood side by side with territorial temples in what we may call a “village religious compound,” which remains true in many villages even today. Their proximity means an overlap in their leadership and especially their patronage. I therefore use “communal religion” as a common term for territorial temples, Buddhist monasteries, and Daoist temples because of their affinity as village religious institutions.
Why Wenzhou?
This book is mainly set in the region of Wenzhou, in Zhejiang Province. It is beyond the scope of the present inquiry to describe the experiences of an entire country. However, the Wenzhou case can serve as an entry point to understanding the broader transformations in China as a whole, for a number of reasons. Wenzhou is one of the regions where religious and lineage activities and organizations have seen the most active revival since the 1980s. The density of religious sites here, including territorial temples, Buddhist temples, Daoist temples, and Christian churches, may be among the highest in China. An official prefecture-wide survey in 2012, for instance, indicates 8,579 territorial temples with buildings larger than 20 square meters.38 On the eve of 1949, Wenzhou Protestants constituted 41.5 percent of the entire Protestant population of Zhejiang Province, which had the largest Protestant population in the country.39 Because of this, Wenzhou bore the brunt of Maoist campaigns on religion and their legacy.
After 1949, the region was one of the key areas for “religious work” (zongjiao gongzuo) in the province and in the country as a whole. In 1958, the first year of the Great Leap Forward, the State Administration for Religious Affairs held an on-the-spot religious work meeting in Pingyang County, Wenzhou, which Chinese Christians have since widely interpreted as an attempt to mount a national campaign to eliminate religion. Since the 1980s, following the footsteps of the well-known Wenzhou entrepreneurs, Wenzhou Protestant churches have put down roots in various areas from Northeast to Southwest China, as well as among Wenzhou migrant communities in Europe and the Americas, creating a global network of Wenzhou Protestant Christianity. When the cross-demolition movement hit Zhejiang in 2014, attracting global attention, Wenzhou was at the center of the storm. Although Wenzhou was once rather isolated, and in spite of it being located far from Beijing, it was never far removed from Maoist politics. Notably, it became a strategic locale in the frontier areas facing Taiwan. This region is therefore a hotbed of religious activities and an ideal site to observe local responses to Maoist secular governance.
It is important to note some differences in the consequences of national political campaigns, which were contingent on the dynamics of local history and politics—two parameters that this book stresses in order to illustrate the ways that Maoism reshaped the local religious landscape. The Socialist Education Movement in the early 1960s, for instance, did not generate such drastic massive resistance among religious followers in Wenzhou as it did among Catholics in Taiyuan, Shanxi, as described in Henrietta Harrison’s study. During the Cultural Revolution, militarized resistance against religious suppression and extreme state violence in Shadian, Yunnan, was also absent from Wenzhou. Nevertheless, similarities can be identified at similar times across different sites. The brief religious resurgence of the early 1960s, as I will discuss in the book, was seen and reported not only in Zhejiang, but in numerous areas across the North and South of the country. My own research in Wenzhou and other studies in northern Fujian all indicate the vitality of Protestant Christianity during the Cultural Revolution. Though this is unlikely to have been a nationwide phenomenon, it was likely true for other traditional strongholds of Protestantism across the country, as research data indicate.
Organization of the Book
This book is organized chronologically and thematically to compare the paths of different religious traditions after 1949. Chapter 1 examines the changes in religious life before 1949 and the intricate relationship between religious communities and the Communist revolution, situating the developments that were to follow in a broader historical context. Salvationist groups and Christian movements, both Catholic and Protestant, arose from the turmoil of the first half of the twentieth century, but they were not filling a vacuum. Communal religious traditions endured in spite of enormous challenges from anti-superstition campaigns. When the Communist guerrillas emerged at the fringes of local society, they competed, collaborated, and clashed with salvationist groups and Christian churches. The Communist Party’s relations with religious communities persisted after 1949, as Chapter 2 shows, but as their relative positions shifted, their engagement proceeded on very different terms.
Although the new regime did not wage an all-out war against religion, Chapter 2 demonstrates that land reform demolished religious life. Yet the effects varied for different religious traditions. Land reform dealt a huge blow to the established activities of territorial and Buddhist temples as they lost land, major patrons, and traditional leaders, whereas young Christian churches did not have much land to lose. The most dramatic twist was the ephemeral surge of salvationist groups during land reform, followed by their rapid downfall in the government’s massive crackdown, which marked a turning point in the twentieth-century history of local religious life.
Throughout the remainder of the 1950s and 1960s, various political campaigns and collectivization initiatives continued to encroach on the traditional ritual spaces of territorial and Buddhist temples in local communities. Yet villagers fought to preserve these ritual spaces and continued to pursue worship activities to a certain degree. At times, there was even a surge in communal religious practices. Chapter 3 explains why this occurred and points to the difficulties communal religious groups faced in restoring their activities during the Mao era.
From a comparative perspective, Chapters 4 to 6 zoom in on the experience of Christians, especially Protestants, after land reform. As Chapter 4 shows, though the Catholic Church stagnated in the wake of the Legion of Mary crackdown, carrying the stigma of a “counterrevolutionary” organization, most Protestant denominations made inroads after land reform. This chapter explains why this was the case. Yet a far-reaching “great leap in religious work” in 1958, the year of the Great Leap Forward, temporarily halted the rise of Protestantism, as all churches and temples were closed. This critical moment saw all worship activities restricted to house gatherings. The end of the Great Famine ushered in a new era for Protestant communities, in spite of the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.
Chapter 5 maps the territorial expansion and organizational reinvention of Protestant churches during the Cultural Revolution. As Chapter 6 demonstrates, though, Protestant churches had to contend with the legacy of the Mao years, which had mixed effects on the growth of Protestantism. Crucially, the social developments that occurred under Mao facilitated the explosive growth of Protestant churches after 1978. Yet churches had to grapple with the Three-Self movement and a growing schism within the religion, both of which stemmed from the Maoist past. Chapter 7 illustrates local attempts to circumvent the issue of legality stemming from Maoist policies in the temple reclamation movement that followed the collapse of collectivization. Such efforts revitalized traditional social institutions in rural life, in particular the Elderly People Association, which then moved toward the center of village politics.
Finally, in the Conclusion, I review overall the transformation of the religious landscape in Rui’an and call for a renewed understanding of the Mao era and its legacy for the religious and social life of rural China.
1“Three Rectifications” refers to the rectifications of old residential neighborhoods, old factories, and urban villages. “One Demolition” refers to the demolition of unlawful buildings.
2“China’s Christians Remain Strong Despite Worst Persecution since the Cultural Revolution,” The Guardian, July 15, 2014.
3“China Removes Crosses from Two More Churches in Crackdown,” New York Times, July 28, 2014.
4A copy of the letter can be found here: http://wzchurch.blogspot.de/2016/04/blog-post_6.html (accessed on May 4, 2018).
5“Shizijia zhi zhan: weishenme Wenzhou shengchan jiaotang ‘dingzihu’ ” (The fight for the cross: Why are Wenzhou churches fertile ground for “nail households?”), Duanchuanmei (The Initium), September 1, 2015. “Nail household” is a term that analogizes households refusing to be eminent domained to nails resisting being pulled out.
10Stephen Jones, Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New China (Leiden: CHIME Foundation, 2004) and “Revival in Crisis: Amateur Ritual Association in Hebei,” in Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation, ed. Adam Chau (New York: Routledge, 2011), 154–181.
11Ibid., 168.
12Henrietta Harrison, The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), Chapter 6.
13Paul P. Mariani, Church Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
14Chen-yang Kao, “The Cultural Revolution and the Emergence of Pentecostal-style Protestantism in China,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 24, no. 2 (2009): 171–188; Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, “Politics of Faith: Christian Activism and the Maoist State in Chaozhou, Guangdong Province,” The China Review 9, no. 2 (2009): 17–39; and Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, China and the True Jesus: Charisma and Organization in a Chinese Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), Chapter 7.
15Xian Wang, “Islamic Religiosity, Revolution, and State Violence in Southwest China: The 1975 Shadian Massacre” (MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 2013).
16Melvyn C. Goldstein, Ben Jiao, and Tanzen Lhundrup, On the Cultural Revolution in Tibet: The Nyemo Incident of 1969 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
17Steve A. Smith, “Local Cadres Confront the Supernatural: The Politics of Holy Water (Shenshui) in the PRC, 1949–1966,” The China Quarterly 188 (2006): 999–1022 and “Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of ‘Superstitious’ Rumors in the People’s Republic of China, 1961–1965,” American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (2006): 405–427.
18Also explaining the survival of religion under Mao, Fenggang Yang uses market analysis, though his interest is more theoretical than empirical. See Fenggang Yang, Religion in China—Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press), 2012.
19Thomas David Dubois, The Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005), 147–149, 166–173.
20For a survey of discussions of “religious ecology” in Chinese academia, see Philip Clart, “‘Religious Ecology’ as a New Model for the Study of Religious Diversity in China,” in Religious Diversity in Chinese Thought, eds. Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Joachim Gentz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 187–199.
21Helen F. Siu, “Recycling Rituals: Politics and Popular Culture in Contemporary Rural China,” in Unofficial China: Popular Culture and Thought in the People’s Republic, eds. Perry Link, Richard Madsen and Paul Pickowicz (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), 134; See also Helen F. Siu, “Recycling Tradition: Culture, History, and Political Economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 4 (1990): 765–794.
22Adam Yuet Chau, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 6.
23Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin, “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious,” The Journal of American Folklore 97, no. 385 (1984): 287.
24Qigong, for instance, is a good example. As David Palmer demonstrates, the state’s co-optation of Qigong in the 1950s socially and institutionally paved way for the emergence of Qigong fever in the 1980s when Chinese searched for individual empowerment and subjectivity. See David A. Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press), 2007, Chapter 1.
6Richard C. Bush, Religion in Communist China (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1970), 10.
7Holmes Welch, Buddhism under Mao (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972).
8See C. K. Yang, “Religion and the Traditional Moral Order,” in Religion in Chinese Society: A Study of Contemporary Functions of Religion and Some of Their Historical Factors (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 278–293.
9Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
25Though the nationalization of land was formally written into the Constitution only in 1982, land has been the de facto property of the state ever since private land ownership was effectively abolished by land reform and collectivization.
26Victor Lippit, Land Reform and Economic Development in China (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1974); Vivienne Shue, Peasant China in Transition: The Dynamics of Development Toward Socialism, 1949–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Julia C. Strauss, “Paternalist Terror: The Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries and Regime Consolidation in the People’s Republic of China, 1950–1953,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (2002): 80–105.
27Philip C. C. Huang, “Rural Class Struggle in the Chinese Revolution,” Modern China 21, no. 1 (January 1995): 105–143 and Brian James DeMare, Mao’s Cultural Army Drama Troupes in China’s Rural Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 2015.
28Prasenjit Duara, “Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaigns against Popular Religion in Early 20th Century China,” Journal of Asian Studies 50, no.1 (1991): 75; Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), Chapter 3; Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 2010); Shuk-wah Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900–1937 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2011); Paul R. Katz, Religion in China and Its Modern Fate (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014), Chapter 1, 17–68.
29Rebecca Nedostup, “Superstitious Regimes,” 286.
30Wang Meng, “20 shiji san sishi niandai Jizhong genjudi miaohui yanjiu” (A study of temple fairs in the central Hebei revolutionary base in the 1930s and 1940s) (Hebei Normal University, MA thesis, 2011).
31Zhu Xinming, “Kangri genjudi zhili huidaomen yanjiu” (A study of control of reactionary societies, teachings, and sects in revolutionary bases) (Shanghai Normal University, MA thesis, 2006), Chapters 2–3.
32Tao Feiya. “Christianity and the Communist Revolution,” in Handbook of Christianity in China, Volume 2: 1800–Present, ed. R. G. Tiedemann (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 708–716.
33“Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu Han minzu zhong Fojiao wenti de zhishi” (The Party Central Committee’s instruction on the issue of Buddhism among Han people) and “Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu chuli Tianzhujiao wenti de zhishi” (The Party Central Committee’s instruction on the issue of Catholic Church). See Zhonggong zhongyang tongyi zhanxian gongzuo zu, ed., Tongzhan zhengce wenjian huibian (disijuan) (Collections of the united front policies, Volume 4) (Zhonggong zhongyang tongyi zhanxian gongzuo zu, 1958), 140–149.
34Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, “The Religious Question in Modern China,” 6–13. Adam Chau has suggested the importance of looking beyond religious policies. My focus in this book is how priority agendas of Maoism have actually affected local religious life. See Adam Y. Chau, “Chinese Socialism and the Household Idiom of Religious Engagement,” in Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia, eds. Tam T. T. Ngo and Justine B. Quijada (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 225–243.
35Different from traditional gazetteers, new local gazetteers predominantly cover the history of the People’s Republic.
36Most names of interviewees in this book have been changed in order to protect their identity.
37Chen Wenzheng, a prominent leader of the southern Zhejiang communist guerrillas, was himself a residential Daoist and came from a Daoist family in the Lower Village of Xincheng District, Rui’an.
38http://www.zjsmzw.gov.cn/Public/NewsInfo.aspx?type=4&id=5d64d052-7013-4a8e-97be-1556b1464a37, these communal temples were distributed in 5,405 administrative villages and 380 urban neighborhoods around the same period. Given its number of communal temples, it is no wonder that the first national “folk belief work” roundtable organized by the State Administration for Religious Affairs took place in Wenzhou in 2012. See: http://www.wenzhou.gov.cn/art/2015/4/7/art_1214432_1731837.html (accessed on May 4, 2018).
39Fuk-tsang Ying, “The Regional Development of Protestant Christianity in China: 1918, 1949 and 2004,” The China Review 9, no. 2 (Fall 2009): 80.