2
On May 7, 1949, the Communist guerrilla force of southern Zhejiang, largely commanded by locals, entered the city of Wenzhou after peace negotiations with Nationalist forces, leaving behind the mountainous areas in the west where they had been entrenched for many years. Over the following days, Nationalist forces in the counties surrounding downtown Wenzhou followed suit, ceding ground to the Communist guerrillas. Rui’an was “liberated” on May 9. Soon after, someone informed the Communist forces against Jiang Songling, a former committee member of Lord Chen Temple (chenfu miao), a prominent religious site located outside the south gate of the county seat. Jiang had served on the temple management committee for many years, acting as its chairman from 1942 to 1948. He had also been the president of the county chamber of commerce and a member of the first county council elected in 1946.
The informer, perhaps another member of the temple management committee, accused Jiang of embezzlement and profiteering while serving on the committee. The accusation mainly involved contracts that Jiang signed with tenants of temple estates in 1942 and 1943, in the chaotic period when China was still fighting the war of resistance against Japan. Jiang was alleged to have taken money from negotiating and renewing contracts.1 A request was made to investigate the property issue concerning Lord Chen Temple.
The new county government, formed days after the Communist forces entered the county, responded swiftly. They detained Jiang and ordered the temporary seizure of all of the temple’s assets. In order to reorganize the temple’s properties, the temple management committee invited Xu, the principal of a local elementary school situated on temple land, to join the committee as its new chairman. In October, after a dozen or so meetings, the new committee management invalidated all prior contracts signed with Jiang and asked tenants to sign new contracts with the temple under different terms. Enforcing the new contracts, however, dragged on for a while and led to more board meetings. Some tenants refused to comply. In September 1950, almost a year after the establishment of the central Communist government in Beijing, the board was still meeting to discuss unresolved issues.
Those who informed on Jiang may have perceived the Communist takeover as an opportunity to settle old scores, to reshuffle temple leadership, or perhaps to revive temple activities. The war of resistance, followed by the civil war, had hit the temple hard. The tenants on the temple estates ran businesses in the south gate market, many of them dry goods shops or seafood stalls. Most members of the management committee, including Jiang, were also tenants of the temple estates. Yet few could have anticipated the fate that soon befell the temple, its properties, or the committee members themselves.
In April 1950, the new county government of Rui’an began experimenting with land reform in a few Rui’an townships. Then, in October of that year, about a month after the last recorded meeting of Lord Chen Temple board, the Rui’an County Government embarked on full-scale land reform. Within a few years, Lord Chen Temple fell into decay. Though what happened to its members is unclear, it appears that the board committee had ceased to function. The county’s water transportation office took over the dilapidated temple buildings and turned them into a warehouse sometime around 1955. Neighborhood residents failed to claim back the temple in the 1990s due to the lack of legal standing of their claim—similar situations occurred in many other local communities at that time. They could only house the statue of Lord Chen in a cramped building not far from the south gate market.2
The issue of religious property, especially land, is central to “the religious question” in modern China. Land was also at the heart of Mao’s revolution. This chapter explores the repercussions of the ferocious land reform campaign (1951–1952) for religious life in Rui’an. The intent of the campaign was to thoroughly restructure local society through the redistribution of land and wealth. As an economic revolution and political mobilization on a grand scale, land reform directly targeted the assets of religious organizations, jolting the foundations of communal religion in Wenzhou. The purge of traditional rural elites dealt a huge blow to the leadership and patronage of religious communities. Yet the effects of land reform on religious life were far from clear-cut and uniform. The uneven impact of the campaign pervaded various dimensions of religious life across the spectrum of religious affiliations and activities. This chapter follows the trajectories of the major religious traditions in Rui’an in the early and mid-1950s, exploring the different ways in which they were affected by land reform and highlighting the factors that contributed to these differences.
Decay and Contraction of Communal Religious Traditions
As discussed in Chapter 1, campaigns against religion dated back to the turn of the twentieth century, including the appropriation and conversion of religious buildings and land assets to benefit secular institutions.3 But the impact of land reform in the early 1950s was much more profound than that of any previous government encroachments on religion. The nascent Communist state saw communal religion and culture as “a principal obstacle to the establishment of a ‘disenchanted’ world of reason and plenty.”4 It also wanted to extract revenue from communal religion to finance its modernization programs.
However, there is another important difference. The Qing and Nationalist governments in the first half of the twentieth century never launched a concerted attack on all religions. They mainly targeted communal temple estates, and their appropriations of temple lands and buildings were carried out in the name of eliminating “superstition” and funding modern education. They were not overtly attempting to overturn the traditional structures of local society.
Under the late Qing and Nationalist governments, the conversion of communal temples and its properties was a much less violent process than it would be under the Communist government. It was spearheaded by local elites with government endorsement and encouragement. However, the Communist government, with the assistance of its extended bureaucratic system and peripheral organizations, targeted estates belonging to all religious organizations.
Countywide land reform in Rui’an began in October 1950 and continued until the end of 1951. The basic principle of the campaign was to classify households according to their class status and transfer wealth and land deemed to be “superfluous” from landlords and rich peasants to the poor peasant class. It is well known that land reform stripped individual families classified as landlords or rich peasants of land and properties. Yet what happened to land not owned by individual families is less studied. The Land Reform Act (tudi gaige fa) construed territorial temples, Buddhist monasteries, churches, ancestral halls, and other social organizations as corporate landowners. Chapter 3, section 2 of the Act specifically stipulates the expropriation of “common land” (gongdi) held by ancestral halls, territorial temples, Buddhist monasteries, and other social organizations.5
According to statistical charts on changes to landholding before and after land reform in three districts in Rui’an, 80.89 percent of “common land” in Tangxia District, 66.2 percent in Xincheng District, and 87.93 percent in Mayu District was immediately distributed to villagers during land reform.6 The rest was not untouched but instead was set aside for “the purposes of additional allocation” (tiaoji zhi yong). Common land saved for additional allocation made up 2.13 percent of total land in the district of Xincheng and 1.9 percent in Mayu.7
Monks and nuns (including some Daoist masters) who insisted on staying in their temples received on average 1.3 mu of paddy rice fields or other land per person.8 Ultimate Tranquility Temple (benji si), a locally famous monastery in the suburb, had more than forty mu of fields in 1933. The fields provided not just for the monastics living in the temple, but also for more than two hundred children in a makeshift shelter that had been established on temple grounds during the second Sino-Japanese War.9 After land reform, only two mu were left to two monks who resided in the temple and who were now expected to farm the land themselves.10
Before land reform, the ritual service economy had undergone a sort of recession. Members of the Municipal Wenzhou Buddhist Association, an independent organization of Buddhist monks with government approval,11 had to initiate joint ritual services (jingchan lianying) to collectively weather the poor circumstances, after initial efforts to delimit their respective areas of operation failed to prevent different ritual service providers from competing in each other’s territories. Ritual services were so essential to the livelihoods of monks and nuns that the association rejected the government’s request for “scriptural ritual reform” (jingchan gaige) among its members in early 1950, which aimed to reduce and restrict ritual services. The association itself needed income from ritual services to fund its operations.12 Following the decline in the ritual services market, the expropriation of corporate landholdings was another big blow to monasteries, monks, and nuns.
When land reform began, the government requested an end to activities in Buddhist temples and all other religious institutions, out of a concern that counterrevolutionary forces might use them as an opportunity for infiltration and manipulation. Few dared to openly challenge the government’s requests. Jiaoxuan, then the head of the Buddhist Association in Yueqing County, was sentenced to five years in prison for “undermining” land reform solely because he printed copies of the land reform law to help monks and nuns better protect Buddhist temples and estates. Baihe Temple, where the association was located, was sealed on government orders.
In the years following land reform, there were signs of a recovery in Buddhist activities when the political atmosphere became less tense. The authorities noticed an increase in Buddhist rites (fahui), unsanctioned Buddhist organizations, and requests to repair damaged Buddhist temples in some regions of eastern China.13 In the county seat of Rui’an, Buddhists organized a Rui’an Buddhism Study Group (Rui’an Fojiao xuexihui), which represented a large number of Buddhist temples in communications with the county authorities from its founding in 1953 until it disbanded in 1957.14 Some rituals and ceremonies also resumed, such as the traditional Guanyin Ceremony (guanyin hui), which the Lotus Society for Nuns (nu lian she) hosted in the county seat, as well as the public ordination ceremony in Jianshan Hall (jianshan tang) in the Daluo Mountains of Xianyan District, a traditional center of Wenzhou Buddhism. Each of these two meetings drew a crowd of several hundred participants every day, according to authorities.
The purpose of resuming these ritual meetings was not just to revive the traditional religious calendar. As the official report found, much of the income from public ceremonies was used to repair damaged Buddhist sites. Because land reform had removed a major source of income, unsurprisingly, Buddhists had to rely on donations and ritual performance fees. Using funds from ritual meetings, the Buddhism Study Group repaired the Buddhist Hall in West Gate Street and succeeded in raising enough money to repair the Temple of Awakening to the Truth (wuzhen si), a major temple in the county seat, before authorities intervened to call off the restoration.15
On the whole, it became very hard to maintain monastic life with the loss of income from land and the decline of the ritual service economy. Indeed, “the decimation of the sangha was the most important of many consequences of land reform for Buddhism in China.”16 Monks and nuns were called upon to support themselves through labor by participating in production,17 but this proved to be a difficult task. A 1955 government survey of 579 monks and nuns in Rui’an shows that 173 of them either claimed to have no capacity to farm their land or found it difficult to support themselves through agriculture.18 In January 1951, in the midst of land reform, the Wenzhou Buddhist Association sent the government a list of items belonging to its member temples, mostly ritual instruments including drums, chimes, tripods, and tin wares, and asked for permission to sell them.19 Due to restrictions on the performance of rituals, the 1951 survey likewise found that many temples “wanted to sell ‘waste’ (feiwu) like those ritual temple instruments to collect useful funds for members’ production.”20
The expropriation of land also removed a major source of income for territorial temples and ritual organizations. Membership in temple and ritual organizations in southern Zhejiang was traditionally based on certain inherited economic privileges, the most common of which was the right to farm and manage common fields. Wang Hengqing, a resident of Qiancang, Pingyang County (south of Rui’an), was a “head of affairs” (shoushi, a local name for temple and ritual managers) for both the Earth God Temple and the Five Manifestations Temple (wuxian miao) at Qiancang before the Communist takeover.21 Wang recalled that since the time of his grandfather, his family had farmed four mu of common lands belonging to the Earth God Temple (tudi miao).22 They lost the land in the land reform campaign. The expropriation of common land made it nearly impossible to maintain temples or continue ritual activities. Temples and ritual organizations lost their economic foundation.
Yet land reform not only targeted the economic structures of religious life; it also attacked the traditional leadership of communal religion. Patrons of territorial temples and Buddhist monasteries were among the local elites purged in the revolutionary campaign. One example of this was the family of Jie Jiongsui.23 For generations, the Jie family, who arose from organizing local militia against the Taiping Rebellion in the late nineteenth century, had been prominent patrons of Lord Jiang Palace (jiangfu dian), a temple in Dingtian, Xincheng District. Jiongsui’s father had been the head of a township in the Republican period. In land reform, the family’s land and properties were confiscated and redistributed to poor villagers. Then, shortly after the end of the campaign, Jiongsui’s father was executed, allegedly for concealing weapons.
In the township of Meitou in Tangxia, the family of Ying Qiancheng suffered a similar fate. Qiancheng was a Daoist master and a successful businessman. He had been a constable (baozhang) for twelve years during the Republican era and was also an important patron of the East Peak Pavilion (dongyue guan) in Meitou. Ying was classified as a “businessman landlord” (gongshangye dizhu) and a “superstition boss” (mixin touzi). He lost all the lands he owned and most of his houses.24
Many territorial temples reopened following the end of the land reform campaign, though “the incense fire [or the incense smoke] had cooled” (xiangyan/huo lengluo), to use a euphemism that often appears in historical accounts of local territorial temples.25 [Great Emperor] Huaguang Temple (huaguang miao) in Xianyan, Tangxia District, formerly held a temple fair once every year on the seventeenth day of the first lunar month, when disciples made a tour of the neighborhood carrying the palanquin seating the statue of Emperor Huaguang, the temple’s main deity. The temple survived the transition to a Communist government and the land reform campaign, but the annual temple fair ceased to take place. So did the temple’s ritual activities for the Dragon Boat Festival. Only a few elderly people still frequented the temple, which the village government also used for its meetings and gatherings.26
Christian Churches: Laying Low and Relatively Safe Passage
After Communist guerrilla forces entered the county seat of Rui’an in May 1949, many local churches took steps to make their public presence less conspicuous. In Taoshan District, western Rui’an, the local China Inland Mission (CIM) church was building a new chapel. They had completed the auxiliary buildings but had yet to start building the main hall. Concerned by the militant political atmosphere, the church suspended the project as well as its church meetings. In 1950, the new Communist government executed Pan Bofeng, the pastor of CIM’s main church in the eastern Rui’an plains, in Xincheng District, for being a landlord and having served as town head for the Nationalist government.27 Following his execution, the Xincheng Church also suspended gatherings for a year and half. But most churches did not immediately stop assembling. Some, such as the China Jesus Independent Church (CJIC) in the mountainous district of Gaolou in western Rui’an, reportedly even preached more actively.
Both during and after land reform, the buildings owned by churches were a frequent target of expropriation. During land reform, the Catholic Church in Baotian Township, Tangxia, was turned into housing for individuals. The Catholic Church in Zhangzhai Village was confiscated to house a kindergarten and a cultural center (wenhuaguan). The village clinic in Tangkou “borrowed” the village’s Protestant Church. In Xiasheng Village in neighboring Xianyan, the Catholic Church was “borrowed” to house the local militia’s offices as well as classrooms for the peasant night school.28
Nevertheless, in economic terms, the land reform campaign did not affect Christian groups as much as it did other religious institutions. Local churches, unlike Buddhist monasteries and territorial temples, did not rely heavily on rents as a source of income. Hence redistribution or confiscation of their land for government use had a much smaller impact on their economic structure.29 The United Methodist Church had 26.63 mu of land dispersed across four locations in the districts of Taoshan and Xianjiang. The income from these fields only made up 0.033 percent of its total income in 1948; that percentage went down to zero in 1950, when the lands must have been redistributed or repurposed.30 The CIM owned three mu of vegetable gardens in front of its head church in the county seat, but these were “borrowed” by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to build a training ground in 1949.31 Catholic churches bought three mu of land in the Xianjiang District in 1944; in 1948 and 1950, the income from that land made up only 0.056 percent and 0.089 percent of the churches’ total income, respectively.32 Other denominations did not own any land or assets to finance church activities.33
For the vast majority of village churches, neither the 1949 transition nor land reform had much of an economic impact on their operations, as their finances came predominantly from member donations. Under the influence of the independent church movement, some rural branches of the Methodist Church and the CIM, such as West Gate (Ximen) Church in the county seat of Rui’an and the Xintian Church in Tangxia, maintained only a nominal affiliation with their denominations. Their finances and day-to-day operations were entirely independent. Both of these churches erected chapels in 1923 without the financial support of the CIM.34 The Assembly and the CJIC had long cut off foreign connections and therefore had no foreign subsidies to speak of, nor did they own any land.
Most rural churches used a financing system very much like the Shayang Church, a branch of the Assembly in Rui’an. The church’s financial records show that it held frequent collections to finance church activities, including a regular Sunday collection, a self-supporting fee, and a Thanksgiving collection. More requests for donations could be made at any time if the church had additional needs.35
In 1949, many local churches did not yet have a permanent gathering place. While the Catholic Church in Rui’an had one parish church and nineteen branch churches, each with its own chapel (jiaotang, most of which were built before 1930), Protestant congregations were quite different. Only two of a total of nine branches of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church owned a formal church building. Among the twenty-one branches of the Assembly, only eleven owned a formal church building. Of the remaining ten branches, one held meetings in a cloth factory (which may have been run by Christians), while nine others met in members’ homes.36 Local Protestant churches’ own historical records show that, as of 1949, fifty-nine of Protestant communities had “chapels” (tang) while the other thirty-seven were called “gathering points” (dian), suggesting that they had no permanent meeting place.37
Because of the reliance of local Protestant communities on home gatherings, even when they did have church buildings, Protestants still carried on various meetings in members’ homes. Aside from attending Sunday worship at the church, members were also asked, for instance, to attend weekday Bible study or prayer meetings, which usually took place in members’ homes. These were sometimes held on specific holy days, such as Holy Friday (sheng wu) or Holy Wednesday (sheng san).38 Additionally, ad hoc prayer meetings were convened when a church member or one of their relatives became ill.39
The paucity of church estates and other church properties (and therefore limited economic effects of land reform on them) underlines the fact that Christianity in this region was a religion of the poor, which was not part of the social and political establishment that the land revolution targeted. The fact explains why, in spite of the changes brought about by the Communist takeover and the land reform campaign, the native leadership of Christian churches in Wenzhou was still largely in place by the early 1950s.
Most western missionaries had left within a few years of the establishment of a Communist government, and the land reform campaign thoroughly uprooted local elites. Yet church leaders in Wenzhou were for the most part indigenous church members and rarely members of the Nationalist Party or the landed elite. Very few officials or members of established local families were attracted to the church.
However, the government did order the arrest and execution of a few church leaders with ties to the Nationalist regime. In addition to the aforementioned Methodist preacher Pan Bofeng, Shen Liangshi, a preacher for the Catholic Church in Meitou Township, Tangxia, was also arrested and executed for being the alleged ringleader of a Nationalist resistance force. In neighboring Pingyang County, Fang Jiesheng, a long-term leader of the CJIC, had to flee from his native Aojiang Town to avoid arrest. He came from a prominent local business family and acted as a standing commissary for the Nationalist government when it set up a local party committee in Pingyang in 1926.
The church leaders who remained felt a growing political pressure from none other than the government-backed Three-Self patriotic movement. In July 1950, the publication of the Three-Self Christian manifesto by Wu Yaozong (known in English-language sources as Y. T. Wu) and several other national church leaders set the tone for Communist government policies regarding Christianity. Thereafter, the government mobilized local churches to denounce imperialism and promote patriotism in a series of events such as the Resist America and Aid Korea movement, the land reform movement, and the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries. In this climate, the Wenzhou Protestant Reform Committee was formed in January 1951. In November of that year, the Methodist Church in Rui’an rallied other Protestant denominations to found the Rui’an Protestant Three-Self Reform Preparation Committee. All six Protestant denominations had representatives on the committee.
In Pingyang County over a year earlier, in the summer of 1950, Pastor Chen Huimin of the CJIC returned to his native home of Lingxi Town and formed a Nangang District Three-Self Reform Committee, a move that church leaders in Pingyang, especially those from the CJIC, might consider an attempt to establish a power base on their home turf. Chen had spent almost his entire career outside of Pingyang. Months before coming home, he organized a Three-Self Preparation Committee in Anxi County, Fujian, where he served in the local CJIC. Chen repeatedly sent letters to the Pingyang County Government in June and July 1953 urging the government to take action against Ye Tingchao, a leader of the local CJIC, alleging that Ye had been implicated in criminal activity.40 However, Chen’s attempt to establish his own power sphere in Pingyang was unsuccessful. Ye was elected president of the Pingyang Protestant Reform Committee in 1954, while Chen did not obtain a formal position on the committee.
In spite of Chen’s failure, incidents like this in the Three-Self movement sowed the seeds of discord within the church. These would ultimately bring about a much more harmful and far-reaching schism during the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957 and the Great Leap Forward in 1958. Church leaders who had supported the Three-Self movement, as well as those who opposed it, would suffer bitter disillusionment when these political storms swept the church in the late 1950s, as I discuss in later chapters.
It is important to note that the Three-Self movement in the 1950s is significantly different from the Three-Self movement re-initiated in the 1980s. In Rui’an and Wenzhou, Three-Self committees were first organized at the prefecture and county levels, and were followed by Three-Self reform teams at the district level. But neither state archives nor church records indicate that the government at that time intended, as they did in the 1980s, to extend Three-Self organizations to the grassroots level, namely village churches. In other words, the government did not attempt to organizationally implement the Three-Self patriotic movement at the grassroots level. County governments indeed asked for the registration of churches, but they did not require village churches to register individually. Rather, each denomination registered collectively. A village church included in its denomination’s collective registration was not pledging allegiance to the county Three-Self committee. Nor did it need county authority approval for its leadership choice.41
Salvationist Groups: An Ephemeral Surge
As the Communist government established strict measures to control religious groups after 1949, the militarized Big Sword Association was the first in Wenzhou to suffer a crackdown. In the early 1940s, the Big Sword Association’s political activities had begun to alarm Communist forces even more than its religious pursuits, at a time when the Communists were often aligned with the Nationalist government. The Dong Renzhang faction of the Big Sword Association in Pingyang was labeled a counterrevolutionary organization in June 1949 and suffered swift crackdown. The largest Big Sword Association group in Rui’an, the Ye Jilang faction in Gaolou District, refused to disband and was crushed in a battle against government forces in September of that same year.
For the time being, the government did not make it a priority to dismantle the non-militarized religious societies, though they were on the radar. With their eschatological messages, these societies seemed to view the 1949 transition as another opportunity for expansion. Of all the salvationist groups, the Yellow Yang Teaching had the most rapid expansion after 1949. Shortly after the Communist takeover in May of that year, Xie Qingxian established a new altar for preaching in Pingyangkeng Village, Mayu. Four of his disciples opened new altars in Jianglong Township in October 1949 and in Fengxiang Township, Gaolou, in March 1950. The expansion of Xie’s group, however, soon ended after concerned local authorities raided one of their meetings in the spring of 1950 and arrested Xie. By then, Xie’s organization was estimated to have over seven thousand followers in Tangxia District alone.42 If true, this would have meant that more than 10 percent of the population of Tangxia belonged to Xie’s group.
The Seven Stars Teaching and the May 9 incident
In neighboring Wencheng (formerly the Western Region [xiqu] of Rui’an County until the 1940s), another of the traditional salvationist groups, the Seven Stars Teaching, oddly kept growing even during and after the ferocious land reform campaign, albeit only for a short time.
When Communist guerrilla forces moved from the western mountains into the newly liberated areas in the plains, various groups belonging to the Seven Stars Teaching made a resurgence to occupy the mountains once again. A sectarian leader named Zhou Shouzhen re-established a central altar with several other members of the Seven Stars Teaching in Kutou Village, Huangtan District, in Wencheng. There they created a new technique called kexianjin, “inscribing divine turbans” (with talismans), and had soon established six sub-altars in Huangtan District.
Li Rongyin’s faction, based in Huangliao Township, Nantian District, expanded even more quickly. By April 1950, the success of the faction was such that Li had to upgrade the original central altar to a master altar (zhutan) plus four central altars, which oversaw twenty-six sub-altars and two minor altars (xiaotan). Li was even enthroned by his assistants and disciples. When land reform was at its height in late 1951, the government accused Zhou and several other leaders of attempting to incite an uprising. They were arrested and executed for their alleged crime. Yet Li was able to continue his operations, and his faction, as well as other Seven Stars groups, continued to expand,43 like the group affiliated with Hu Zhilong and Hu Zhiping of Jinyan Township, Nantian, whose network of altars—established in Puzhou Township, in the Beishan District of Qingtian County, in November 1951—soon extended to thirty-two townships.44
Local authorities did not see the expansion of the Seven Stars Teaching as a cause for any serious concern. Cadres knew very little about it and considered it at most a “superstition” group, less harmful than others.45 However, the dramatic events of May 9, 1952, only a few months after land reform, changed the game.
On that day, hundreds of followers of the Seven Stars Teaching marched from the border regions of Wencheng, Qingtian, and Jingning from all directions toward the Liu Ji Temple in Nantian. They wore white vests and white turbans inscribed with talismans, carrying Seven Stars flags and shouting slogans referring to Liu Bowen, also known as Liu Ji, a Ming minister and native of the region, whom they believed had descended to save people and the world. “We will offer sacrifices to the great master Liu who will bestow upon us precious swords and open the jinnang [the embroidered pouch which was supposed to contain Liu’s revelations].”46 While they were carrying out rituals within the temple, it was besieged by soldiers and public security officers.
The incident had a rather peaceful end. The Seven Stars followers were hardly armed and unprepared to resist. Most of those who marched to Liu Ji’s temple were arrested. A few were injured; only one was killed, when he attempted to flee.
It is unclear who actually coordinated the May 9 action. In official propaganda, the May 9 incident was classified as a landlord-manipulated counterrevolutionary riot for the political purpose of stigmatizing the Seven Stars Teaching, although the government never found any direct evidence to implicate those former landlords.47 Yet internal investigation reports acknowledged that it was other factors, including discontent with the Communist Party among local residents, which were mainly responsible for driving people to join the Seven Stars Teaching, eventually leading to the May 9 incident.
Villagers in the mountains had a very strong sense of being left behind when the Communist guerrillas moved to the cities in the plains. People in the border regions of Wencheng, Qingtian, and Jingning supported the guerrillas and participated in militias and peasant associations, hoping that the revolution would improve their impoverished lives. But their lives did not get better after 1949. During village visits, officials learned of ballads such as: “Thunder hit the mountains, but the rain fell on the plain areas [instead].” “The Nationalist Party could not provide for us, the Communist Party could not support us, to survive we can only depend on Buddha and submit ourselves to the will of Heaven.”48
The investigators found that mountain villagers were even more distressed at the disparities of land reform. In many cases, cadres dominated the distribution of land to favor their own families while not giving a fair share to other villagers. Other cadres used land reform to launch personal attacks against other villagers.49 A growing sense of disillusionment pushed local residents to embrace salvationist religion.
The messages of the Seven Stars Teaching appealed to many inhabitants of the mountain areas. Some of their slogans spoke directly to the disadvantaged: “Believing in [the power] of Heaven would win you [women] the status of eighteen celestial beings,” “bring you [the sick] peace” and “help you [poor peasants] cross over to Jingzhou [a mythical land in ancient Chinese myth) to have a life of great peace.”50 They assured the relatives of PLA soldiers that joining the Seven Stars Teaching would bless their sons and prevent them from being killed in battle. Some Seven Stars propaganda directly commented on the campaigns and policies of the Communist government. On land reform: “Landlords’ land resulted from the good deeds of their ancestors. Thus we should not take away [their land] . . . you would not be able to eat grains grown in the distributed land.” On the counterrevolutionary campaign: “We should behave with a good heart. Do not hurt others.” And on taxation: “the Communist Party imposes ten thousand [types of] taxes. In the past, we farmed for landlords, but now we farm for the Communist Party.”51
The brutality against followers of the Seven Stars Teaching during land reform might even have catalyzed the movement’s proliferation, officials implied. A report pointed out that land reform work teams “seriously violated policy, [and mistakenly] expanded the scope of the attacks.”52 In the “encirclement and elimination” (weijiao) campaign that was concurrent with land reform, they arrested and executed some sectarian leaders as “bandits.” Followers were coerced to confess and condemn sectarian leaders in struggle meetings. There were “excessive arrests and excessive strikes.”53 Even some villagers who seemed to have no history with the Seven Stars Teaching were under attack. Many of those affected, whether or not they were members of a Seven Stars group, were frightened and fled to hide together in the mountains.
The Massive Crackdown on Salvationist Groups and Its Aftermath
After the May 9 incident, the Wenzhou Prefectural Commission, which by then had become aware of how serious the situation was, immediately sent its cadres out to the region. There they joined top county officials to form a fandao (“anti-religious society”) command center. More fandao groups were established at various administrative levels, from district to village, to ask followers to register with the government and mobilize villagers to inform on members of religious societies. Supervision and training camps (guanxunban) were organized to brainwash sect leaders. The most creative and interesting propaganda measure was a propaganda play with a script based on the May 9 incident. This theatrical performance toured the affected villages, with some former top leaders of the Seven Stars Teaching appearing as themselves. 54
By the end of September, the government had made massive arrests and had organized public struggle meetings. Official records state that 1,433 people were either arrested or killed.55 By the spring of 1953, all salvationist groups were outlawed in southern Zhejiang. At the end of that year, a total of 3,163 society leaders and approximately 61,500 followers were registered with the government in twelve counties under the jurisdiction of the Wenzhou Prefectural Commission.56
Conclusion
In the years immediately following 1949, the Communist government did not have a systematic program to crack down on religion. Yet land reform—Mao’s core revolutionary agenda—dealt a huge blow to religious communities. The permanent, full-scale expropriation of religious land under Mao followed a logic similar to prior modernization efforts from 1898 onward, in which religious properties were commandeered to serve as public buildings. Yet the sweeping breadth of land reform, driven by the Communist government’s capacity to reach to the heart of rural society, went far beyond the “temple to school” movement or previous anti-superstition campaigns. It marked the peak of state efforts to take over the operation of religious sites, effectively restructuring the economic basis of communal temples and constraining their day-to-day operations.
Yet land reform did not have the same effects on all religious traditions. During and immediately after the land reform campaign, land seizures removed one of the main sources of livelihood for Buddhist and territorial temples, while “ways of organizing actions” less bound by locality—the salvationist groups and Christian churches—were less hard hit economically. More to the point, Christian churches were largely not part of the social and political establishment in local society, which explains why they were less economically and politically affected for the time being. Yet Christian groups were also under pressure to submit to the new regime because of the political campaigns concurrent with land reform, sowing the seeds of discord among church leaders.
The most significant consequence of land reform’s uneven effects on religious life may have been the dramatic expansion of indigenous salvationist groups during land reform, followed shortly thereafter by their swift downfall. This marked a critical shift in the local religious landscape. In a broader context, the downfall of salvationist groups was tied to the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries to consolidate the Communist Party’s power. Yet the downfall of salvationist groups should also be understood in relation to local history before 1949. For decades, salvationist groups and Communist forces had been powerful players who both competed and collaborated with each other in the local politics of Rui’an. The crackdown marked a brutal end to this relationship, as well as the fifty-year rise of salvationist groups in the local religious landscape.
After the massive clampdown of the early 1950s, traditional salvationist groups did not disappear, and still exist today.57 Yet the political stigma of “reactionary societies, teachings and sects” made it difficult for them to gain traction in the local ideological landscape (though we do not know if this may happen in the future). Local gazetteers show pockets of Yellow Yang Teaching activities still taking place during the rest of the Mao era. In the autumn of 1953, less than a year after the crackdown, nine central altars resumed activities involving 1,081 followers. A year later, in the autumn of 1954, Li Xiuzhuo, a former teacher of the Seven Stars Teaching, launched sixteen “central altars of the world” (shijie zongtan) that amassed hundreds or possibly thousands of followers.58
Zhang Dechang, one of the most important early leaders of the Seven Stars Teaching, was released from prison and returned to his hometown in Zhangdan Brigade in Qingtian in February 1961, coinciding with the Great Famine. He soon reconnected with old teachers and followers. They absorbed more than 180 new followers in seven brigades and one town across three districts before they were suppressed. In early 1967, Wu Qingyan, a self-styled “emperor” of the Seven Stars Teaching and the leader of a central altar, interpreted the outburst of the Cultural Revolution as a message from Heaven (tianji) that he should secretly resume activities. His organization spread to fourteen brigades across four districts until it was exterminated by the government in October 1977. In the final years of the Cultural Revolution, followers in Qingtian, after undergoing meditation training in neighboring Ouhai County, returned to revive the Twelve Steps Teaching, a faction of the Seven Stars Teaching. They created new altars and attracted disciples in the name of “religious freedom.” Their activities involved five districts and towns in Qingtian until early 1987, when the county government again ordered a clampdown.59
In the early 1980s, there was a brief surge in the Yellow Yang Teaching in parts of Yueqing. Revelation teacher Chen Libin of Haiyu Township mobilized three hundred followers in seven towns and townships to rebuild a series of local temples: the “Jade Emperor Palace” (yuhuang dian), the “Saint Mother of Black Dragon Palace” (wulong shengmu gong), and the “Evergreen Pavilion” (changqing guan).60 They took advantage of these temples to open altars for preaching and practicing exorcism to cure illnesses for village residents. Although the attempt to use communal temples for salvationist religion in Yueqing did not last long, it indicates a tendency to integrate two traditions that is worth further study.
Unlike salvationist religion, communal religion never had to face a massive militarized crackdown. As Chapter 3 shows, communal religion was the largest religious tradition and was much less politically sensitive, giving followers much more room to maneuver—though having suffered a huge loss of properties and leadership, they continued to be bound by political constraints throughout the rest of the Mao years.
1“Rui’an Xian Chenfu miao miaochan zhengli weiyuanhui guanyu shenhe miaochan chubu juedingshu yu zuza hetong” (Rui’an County Lord Chen Temple property management committee’s preliminary decision on temple property audit and rental agreement), October 1949, Rui’an City Archives 173-1-1.
2“Jiang Xinmin weiyuan: Guanyu Damadao Xinfandianqian jumin laoxiehui huodong changsuo bixu geiyu jiejue” (Council member Jiang Xinmin: [The government] must settle activity space for elderly people associations in Damadao and Xinfandianqian), March 25, 1995, Rui’an City Archives 109-14-23: 78–80.
3Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 44–50.
4Prasenjit 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.
5Due to lack of records, it is unclear on what basis the common land was redistributed. As a general principle, the common land should be redistributed to residents of the villages where they were located regardless of the origins of former owners.
6“Tangxia Qu qige xiang tugai tongji zonghe cailiao” (Comprehensive statistical materials on land reform in seven town[ship]s in Tangxia District), August 1951, Rui’an City Archives 1-3-51: 12; Xincheng Qu ge xiang tugai zonghe tongji cailiao (Comprehensive statistical materials on land reform in town[ship]s in Xincheng District), September 30, 1951, Rui’an City Archives 1-3-52: 13; “Mayu Qu ba ge tugai xiang tongji cailiao” (Statistical materials on land reform in eight town[ship]s in Mayu District), December 31, 1951, Rui’an City Archives 1-3-55: 6. Some common land was likely not reflected in the statistics, given the complexity of land property rights before 1949.
7For the redistribution of monastery land in other regions, see Holmes Welch, Buddhism under Mao (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 46–47.
8The average land that each monk and nun acquired is based on data from “the register of Buddhist [monks and nuns] in districts in Rui’an County” in 1952 (“Rui’an Xian ge qu Fojiao jie fojiaotu mingce” (The register of Buddhist [monks and nuns] in districts in Rui’an County), 1952, Rui’an City Archives 4-4-74: 12–25.
9Li Bingjun et al., eds., Qiannian gucha: Benji si (A historical temple of a thousand years: Ultimate Tranquility Temple) (Rui’an Shi yuhai wenhua yanjiuhui Benjisizhi bianxiezu, 2009), 47.
10Ibid., 24.
11This was only an organization of Buddhist monks in the Wenzhou municipality. There was no Buddhist association at the regional level at that time.
12“Gaige Wenzhou Shi Fojiao jingchan de jihuashu” (The proposal on scriptural ritual reform in Wenzhou municipality), March 1950, Wenzhou Prefectural Archives 51-1-33: 28–31.
13It was not just in Rui’an. In some other regions of eastern China, the central government too noticed that Buddhists sought to reorganize and repair monasteries without government approval. See “Huadongju guanyu chuli zuijin Fojiao huodong hunluan qingkuang de zhishi” (Directives of East China Party Committee on the handling of recent chaos in Buddhist activities), May 9, 1953, Longquan City Archives, 1-5-11: 61–67.
14“Guanyu xian fojiaotu huodong de han” (Report on Buddhist activities in our county), April 15, 1957, Rui’an City Archives, 4-9-121: 34–37.
15Ibid., 36.
16Holmes Welch, Buddhism under Mao, 80.
17Holmes Welch, “Buddhism under the Communists,” The China Quarterly 6 (1961): 1–3.
18Rui’an Xian Fojiao jiben qingkuang diaocha mingce (A preliminary investigational list of Buddhism in Rui’an County), July 1955, Rui’an City Archives 4-7-20: 105–149. This seemed to be a common phenomenon, also reported elsewhere. See Holmes Welch, Buddhism under Mao, 47–48, 54–55.
19For the letters of Wenzhou Buddhist Association to Wenzhou municipal government and the latter’s reply, see Wenzhou Prefectural Archives 51-2-30: 2–21. The difficulties with maintaining monastic life partly explain the massive departure of monks and nuns from Buddhist temples. Holmes Welch estimated that the number of monks and nuns in Jiangsu and Zhejiang dropped by about 90 percent in the first eight years after liberation. See Holmes Welch, Buddhism under Mao, 80–81, 502–503n126.
20January 10, 1951, Wenzhou Prefectural Archives 51-2-30: 1.
21Zhang Fen, “Pingyang Qiancang chenghuang miaohui” (City god temple fair in Qiancang, Pingyang) in Pingyang Xiang, Cangnan Xiang chuantong minsu wenhua yanjiu (Studies of traditional folk culture in Pingyang and Cangnan Counties), eds. Xu Hongtu and Kang Bao (Paul Katz) (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2005), 108.
22Ibid.
23Interview with Jie Jiongsui, on August 18, 2012.
24Shi Shihu, Ying Weixian zhuan [Biography of Ying Weixian] (Xianggang chubanshe, 2009), 8–9; interview with Ying’s grandson, Ying Weixian, on August 17, 2012. Ying Weixian has been the head of the Rui’an Daoist Association since 1992.
25Zhou Konghua and Ruan Zhensheng, eds., Wenzhou Daojiao tonglan (A general survey of Daoism in Wenzhou) (Hong Kong: Tianma Books, 1999).
26“Xianyan Qu Xianyan Cun Huaguang miao shijian diaocha” (Investigation of the Huaguang Temple incident in Xianyan Village, Xianyan District), July 1953, Rui’an City Archives 1-5-113: 17. The forced conversion of temples of such size and regional influence as Huaguang Temple could be much more damaging to Party-people relationship than the destruction of those small village temples. This may partly explain village cadres’ attitude toward Huaguang Temple.
27Rui’an jiaohui, Rui’an jiaohui shi (A history of Rui’an church), internal document, 1998, 12.
28“Zhixing zongjiao zhengce diaocha baogao” (Investigational report on the implementation of religious policies), April 9, 1953, Rui’an City Archives 1-5-62: 13.
29The land data are from churches’ registration forms with the government. It is not entirely impossible that some churches might have hidden some land possessions. The chance that they intentionally did not report large chunks of land possessions, however, is slim given the intensity of the political atmosphere.
30“Jidujiao xundao gonghui Wenzhou jiaoqu Rui’an lianqu dengji zongbiao” (The register of the Rui’an affiliated district of the Wenzhou ecclesiastical district of the Methodist Church), July 1951, Rui’an City Archives 4-3-12: 53–61.
31“Rui’an Xian Zhonghua Jidujiao zizhi Neidihui zonghui dengji zongbiao” (The register of the Autonomous Chinese Christian Inland Mission in Rui’an), July 11, 1951, Rui’an City Archives 4-3-12: 82–105.
32“Rui’an Xian Tianzhujiao dengji zongbiao” (The register of the Catholic Church in Rui’an), May 19, 1951, Rui’an City Archives 4-3-12: 123–131.
33“Yesujiao Zilihui Rui’an fenhui dengji zongbiao” (The register of the Rui’an division of the China Jesus Independent Church), July 1951, Rui’an City Archives 4-3-12: 45–52; “Jidu fulin Anxirihui Rui’an jiaohui dengji zongbiao” (The register of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church for the Return of Jesus in Rui’an), July 1951, Rui’an City Archives 4-3-12: 64–73.
34“Rui’an Ximen jiaohui 1950 nian jingji shouzhi qingkuang” (Financial statement of West Gate Church in Rui’an in 1950) and “Rui’an Ximen jiaohui dengji zongjiao” (The register of West Gate Church in Rui’an), July 14, 1951, Rui’an City Archives 4-3-12: 74–81, 134–135.
35“Pingyang Xian Shayang jiaohui shehui tuanti chengli dengji shenqing shu” (Social organization registration form of the Shayang Church of Pingyang County), August 10, 1954, Pingyang County Archives 10-60-90:58. Shayang Church was located in Rui’an but for a short while had been under the administration of Pingyang ecclesiastical district of the CJIC because of its proximity to Pingyang.
36“Rui’an quan xian Anxirihui mingce” (The register of the Seventh-Day Adventist church in Rui’an), 1953, Rui’an City Archives 1-5-113: 29, 32.
37Rui’an jiaohui, Rui’an jiaohui shi, 11.
38Holy Friday and Holy Wednesday perhaps refer to Good Friday and Ash Wednesday.
39“Guanyu Mocheng xiang Yesujiao de huodong wenti qingkuang zonghe baogao” (Comprehensive report on Christian activities in Mocheng Township), November 4, 1955, Pingyang County Archives 1-7-164: 173–174.
40In the letters, Chen accused Ye of ten crimes, including embezzling donations in the Resist America and Aid Korea movement, convening church meetings privately without official permission, and funding the flight of Pastor Fan Jiesheng, who had a Nationalist background. See “Guanyu zuizheng quezao qing yi fa ban yili aiguo aijiao er yi sanzi gexin de cheng” (The evidence of [Ye’s] crime is beyond doubt, please act in accordance with the law in order to promote patriotism and love for church and therefore facilitate the Three-Self reform), June 16, 1953, Pingyang County Archives 10-5-20: 25–26. See also a historical account on the formation of Three-Self Church in Pingyang by Ling Konghua. Ling Konghua, “Heyi zhilu” (The path to unification), published online at https://www.meipian.cn/ojmgm5h (accessed on May 4, 2018).
41These suggest that in Wenzhou the Three-Self movement might not have created as much division in grassroots church organizations as it did among church leaders at and above the county level—something that partly explains the continued growth of some village churches in the early 1950s. That the government did not extend Three-Self organizations to the grassroots level implies that they were taking a top-down approach to the Three-Self movement, prioritizing the mobilization of church elites to support the Communist regime.
42“Rui’an Xian renmin zhengfu bannian minzheng gongzuo zongjie” (Semiannual summary of civil affairs by the Rui’an County Government), 1950, Rui’an City Archives 4-2-6: 7.
43“Fandong Qixing hui cankao ziliao” (Reference materials on the counterrevolutionary Seven Stars Teaching), 1952, Wencheng County Archives 1-4-8: 51–52.
44Zhan, Qingtian Xian gong’an zhi, 173.
45During the crackdown after the incident, superior officials had to explain to village and town cadres why the teaching was counterrevolutionary. See “Guanyu Wencheng, Qingtian, Jingning san xian fandao diqu xiang ganbu kuoda huiyi zongjie” (Summary of the expanded meeting of district and town[ship] cadres on anti-religious society work at three counties of Wencheng, Qingtian, and Jingning), August 6, 1952, Wencheng County Archives 1-4-9: 16–19.
46Zhan, Qingtian Xian gong’an zhi, 174.
47Wencheng County gazetteer says that Li Rongyin and an ex-KMT military Fu Shaodai at Nantian, Wencheng, masterminded the entire incident. Qingtian County public security gazetteer, however, shows that the incident was “manipulated” (caozong) by Hu Zhilong and Hu Zhiping, two “counterrevolutionaries” in Beishan District of Qingtian. The discrepancies between these versions suggest that the May 9 incident was perhaps deliberately used to frame the Seven Stars Teaching as a political group with the intention of subverting the communist regime. See Zhu Li et al., eds., Wencheng Xian zhi (Wencheng County gazetteer) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996), 723; Zhan, Qingtian Xian gong’an zhi, 173–174; and Chen, Qingtian Xian zhi, 540.
48“Liuyue ershi zhi liuyue ershiwu ri qingkuang baogao” (Report on the circumstances between June 20 and June 25), June 25, 1952, Wencheng County Archives 1-4-9: 85.
49Wencheng County Archives 1-4-9: 61.
50Wencheng County Archives 1-4-8: 56–57.
51Ibid.
52Ibid.: 53; Wencheng County Archives 1-4-9: 61.
53Wencheng County Archives 1-4-8: 56.
54Zhao Shaozhong, “Yi zhi tebie ‘xuanchuandui’” (A special propaganda team), in Wencheng wenshi ziliao di san ji (Wencheng historical materials volume 3), ed. Wencheng Xian zhengxie wenshi weiyuanhui (Wencheng Xian zhengxie wenshi weiyuanhui, 1987), 54–60.
55Wencheng County Archives 1-4-9: 30.
56Zhao Jiazhu, ed., Zhongguo huidaomen shiliao jicheng (A comprehensive compilation of historical materials on reactionary societies, teachings and sects in China) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004), 465.
57For the survival of salvationist religion in the Mao years in China, see Steve A. Smith, “Redemptive Religious Societies and the Communist State, 1949 to the 1980s,” in Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism, eds. Jeremy Brown and Matthew Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 340–364.
58Zhu, Wencheng xianzhi, 724.
59Zhan, Qingtian Xian gong’anzhi, 179–180.
60Yang Dianzhong et al., eds., Yueqing Xian gong’anzhi (A history of public security in Yueqing) (Beijing: Haiyan chubanshe, 1993), 36.