3
With land reform completed, in 1952 the Rui’an County Government started promoting mutual-aid teams (huzhuzu) in rural areas. From then on, most of the temples that survived land reform had to face increasingly frequent encroachments on ritual space. The land reform statute did not stipulate the expropriation of religious property other than land, but unsurprisingly, the other assets of religious organizations were often a target of plunder and violence provoked by the mass mobilization of land reform. As collectivization unfolded, trespasses on temple and temple property became routine. More buildings belonging to territorial temples and Buddhist monasteries were expropriated under the pretext of various state and local initiatives. The government seized temples in the name of setting up state granaries (linked to grain requisitions), government offices, and supply-and-sell co-ops (gongxiaoshe). Local communities themselves also converted temples for various non-religious purposes such as hosting schools of various types, offices for the village government, and warehouses for collectives or communes.
This chapter explores the struggle to preserve communal temples and carry on traditional religious practices in the years following the end of land reform. Expressions of religiosity continued to find an outlet even during the Cultural Revolution. Even as most temples were eventually shut down, attempts to revive them came to be at the center of religious politics in the ensuing decades. Here I delve into the reasons for this, exploring the challenges facing communal religion in spite of the continuation of public religious practices.
The Collectivization of Communal Temples
Temple of Pacified Nation: Occupation and Loss
In the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, Temple of Pacified Nation (anguo si) (Photo 3.1), a Buddhist convent in Upper Village (shang cun), Xincheng District, often served as the command center for underground Communist forces in eastern Rui’an. Liaoxing (Photo 3.2) was the temple abbess throughout the Communists’ stay. In addition to providing a cover for Communist activities, members of her family and many other families in the village signed up to join the party before 1949, including a few women. In the years immediately following land reform, the convent continued to hold ceremonies on the first, eighth, fifteenth, and twenty-third day of each lunar month to recite Pure Land scriptures. In October 1955, the convent even started hosting a Lotus Pool Buddhism study group meeting with around 140 participants.
Photo 3.1. Temple of Pacified Nation (2012).
Source: Author.
Photo 3.2. Photo of Abbess Liaoxing on display at Upper Village revolutionary memorial hall, along with a photo of Anguo Temple (2012).
Source: Author.
When Upper Village formed cooperatives, the village government began requesting the use of Temple of Pacified Nation housing. Liaoxing seemed to have reached an informal verbal agreement with the village head to allow the front row of the temple complex to store farm tools for the village’s Lianguang cooperative and three rooms in the middle row to house a village night school. But the cooperative did not want to wait and did not consider Liaoxing’s informal offer to be generous enough.
On October 8, 1956, dozens of villagers belonging to the Lianguang cooperative broke into the west wing of the rear row, the main section of the temple complex. Tossing away all the items in the west wing rooms, they claimed to have a government order to turn the temple into a night school to develop cultural industry and improve the peasants’ level of education. The village head did not appear.1
Furious, Liaoxing sent a letter to the county government that very day. Accusing the cooperative members of manipulating state policy for their own purposes, she asked, “Didn’t they hear what Chairman Mao said, ‘the Chinese Communist Party’s policy is to protect religion?’ People have religious freedom, which the constitution clearly stipulates. . . . They should not have used such a repressive means to offend Buddhist properties, because today, under the sagacious leadership of Chairman Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, there should no phenomenon of people oppressing people.”2
The letter did not seem to have an immediate effect, as on October 12 the cooperative further occupied and remodeled the main hall of the temple set in the rear section of the complex, turning it into their accounts office. After Liaoxing again sent letters via the Rui’an Buddhism Study Group, the county government did send a reply, but without offering any substantial measures in response. They only asked village and town cadres to educate those young cooperative members responsible for any excesses, to negotiate first and to refrain from causing damage in the future if they needed to use temple buildings, to avoid complaints from Buddhist communities.3
Liaoxing eventually gave in to the cooperative’s encroachment on convent property. As I learned on my visit to Upper Village, she had to vacate the temple which had been her home for sixty-some years, along with the temple’s remaining nuns, and for the remainder of her life she lived with a relative in the village.
With collectivization progressing rapidly in the mid-1950s, many other religious institutions faced the same fate as Temple of Pacified Nation. In 1956, the same year that Liaoxing wrote letters to protest the invasion of the temple, the Rui’an Buddhism Study Group made a formal complaint to the county government that twenty-eight other temples had been partly or wholly taken over by cooperatives. Most of them were converted to livestock pens and storage in response to the government’s call for cooperatives to develop animal husbandry. Monks and nuns were also asked to participate in cooperative agriculture.4 The twenty-eight temples that sought help from Buddhism Study Group were very likely not the only temples taken over by cooperatives. A 1955 government survey indicates that the number of temples with housing for monks and nuns had shrunk from 383 in 1949 to only 256 in 1955.5
Even Sagacious Longevity Temple (shengshou si) in Xianyan Town, Tangxia—one of the most famous Buddhist temples in the Wenzhou region, which supposedly enjoyed protected status as a legal religious site—was helpless to prevent encroachments on its property. Since land reform, lower level cadres and some residents had willfully taken things from the temple. Then in 1952, a village school was set up inside the temple. Villagers turned wooden engravings into chairs and blackboards and sold iron cauldrons (valuable ritual objects) to fund the school.6 In the following years, more educational institutions took over parts of the temple: first Xianyan High School, then Xinyan Elementary School, some cadre schools, and a night school successively set up classrooms in the temple complex. Eventually, by the early 1970s, the temple became barely recognizable (see Photos 3.3 and 3.4).
Photo 3.3. Sagacious Longevity Temple (ca. 1975).
Source: Courtesy of Mr. Liu Xianyou.
Photo 3.4. Sagacious Longevity Temple (2012).
Source: Author.
Resistance: The Unsettled Summer of 1953
In contrast with land reform, when the extraordinarily tense political atmosphere silenced almost all dissent, in the mid-1950s some communities openly resisted the appropriation of temples. This was especially the case in 1953, when several factors converged to bring about a string of collective actions to take back temples.
This is the year that county authorities began to implement the unified purchase-and-sale policy (tonggou tongxiao), a key economic program aiming at nationalizing the grain market. Food shortages appeared in some areas when people did not have enough grain left over for their own consumption. Rumors criticizing the unified purchase-and-sale policy abounded. Villagers attacked cadres and demanded grain in several towns in the western mountains and along the southern bank of the Feiyun River.
Efforts to promote collectivization were not going well. Some rural households quit the cooperatives. By the summer of 1953, only 20 percent of rural households were participating in mutual aid teams. Then, between June and mid-August, a prolonged drought ravaged all of Zhejiang Province. It was the first major natural disaster since liberation.
The drought finally pushed tensions to boiling point: many villagers believed that it was caused by deities upset by the reckless destruction and closure of temples. This set off what local authorities named the “superstition riots”: a series of attempts to retake local temples, beginning with the attempted restoration of dragon boat racing in the eastern plains, in the basin of the Tang canal.
The yearly Dragon Boat Festival (duanwu) still took place, but the dragon boat races, a central part of the festival, had been disrupted since 1949. In May 1953, as villagers were preparing for the ritual procession, they recalled how dragon boats stored in temples and ancestral halls had been dismantled for the construction of schools and government offices. A rage held back for years suddenly erupted to the surface.7 Many villagers asked village governments to compensate them for the dragon boats that were destroyed. Some went to beat up village and town cadres in retaliation for demolishing the dragon boats. In Xiasheng, Li’ao Township, Tangxia, some villagers even threatened to drown local school principal Lin Fuzhen (drowning was a traditional local method of punishing criminals), because Lin was accused of ordering the dragon boats sawn into pieces to make stools for the township school.8
In the night of June 13, two days before the date of the Dragon Boat Festival, villagers in Xianyan Village, Tangxia, assembled to ask for the restoration of Huaguang Temple (see Chapter 2) (Photo 3.5). Two months earlier, Wang Muyong, the principal of Xianyan Elementary School, began work to convert the temple into a school in collusion with cadres from the southern part of the village. Cadres from the northern part of the village, who had long been at odds with their southern counterparts, did not agree. Nevertheless, in April 1953, Wang covertly brought in students and local militias to demolish almost all of the statues in Huaguang Temple in April and turn the temple into an elementary school.
Photo 3.5. Huaguang Temple (2012).
Source: Author.
Most villagers believed the government had ordered the takeover, so they did not dare protest. The atmosphere changed in early June, after a worker from a rock-mining company based in nearby Qingtian County had a vision while staying in Huaguang Temple overnight. The next day, he told the residential temple manager that he had a dream in which he saw a man wearing a white robe and heard the sound of horses. The story spread panic through the community, as villagers feared that Lord Huaguang (Huaguangye) had abandoned the temple and the community.
In the night of June 13, over 140 people flocked to Wang’s school, most of them elderly residents of the village. When he heard the news, Wang fled. According to official reports, most village cadres did not intervene; they simply stood by and looked on. A few of them even joined the crowds.
Over the next two days, villagers flocked to the Xianyan town government to demand a solution. They searched for Wang but could not find him. On the third day of their search, villagers destroyed all the elementary school facilities that Wang had set up within the temple. The incident startled county officials. The county culture and education chief and several town cadres who had gone to investigate the incident could not appease the villagers until 3 a.m. on the fourth day, when Wang reappeared and performed a self-criticism in the temple in front of the assembled villagers. He agreed to take responsibility for all damages and guaranteed that the school was not going to move in.9
In July and August, as drought set in, people made ritual processions to ask for rain, carrying statues of their gods on village tours. Many residents of Rui’an ascribed the drought to the destruction of temples and statues of divinities. An official report quotes one villager as saying: “Pusa [deities] do exist. The government is wrong not to believe in pusa . . . the lack of rain in the past [months] is due to the fact that the government did not believe in pusa and destroyed too many pusa [statues].”10 Similar words were heard throughout the county.
As people were preparing for the rainmaking ceremony, they demanded that the temples be restored. In Lower Village (xia cun), Xincheng, near Upper Village where Temple of Pacified Nation was located, the government set up a granary in the former village temple of East Hall Palace (dongtang dian) (Photo 3.6). Rumors spread that “the milled wheat has choked the gods and sent them away” (longkang ba fo mengzoule).11 On July 26, villagers meeting in East Hall Palace for a ceremony to call out the moon (a local custom to make the moon reappear after a lunar eclipse) tore down the clapboards on the granary walls. They subsequently asked to remove the stored grain from the temple in order to stage a rainmaking ceremony. When vice district head Xie Duyin arrived to inspect the temple and discuss solutions, the situation almost escalated into violence. Xie had to fire a gun in the air to stop an excited villager who wanted to grab his gun.12
Photo 3.6. East Hall Palace (2012). Rebuilt multiple times since 1980s, the temple today, which includes a park, is several times bigger than it was before 1949.
Source: Author.
In response, the county government was curiously accommodating. They did not issue a prohibition order to stop the dragon boat races. With tensions running high due to the unpopular policies of collectivization, officials may have wished to avoid further resentment. The county government ordered that when villagers went to pray for rain, they should first be “educated” (jiaoyu), and if persuasion was futile, they should be allowed to perform the ritual.13 They even stressed that cadres should not impose uncompromising prohibitions, but should instead make it clear that “there is no prohibition on the belief in deities and there is also freedom not to believe in religion.”14 Xie Duyin was later asked to write a self-criticism for firing his gun in the air to “dispel the masses” and “attacking” a ritual organizer in Lower Village.15 Finally, the county government decided to restore both East Hall Palace in Xincheng District and Brook-side Palace (xiwei gong) in Mayu District, removing granaries and returning the temples to their respective communities—though, as it turns out, this would prove to be only a temporary measure.16
These accommodations were certainly not typical of the way local governments handled “superstition riots,” but they reflect the difficulties that local officials were only beginning to face in their relations with villagers. As land reform left a vacuum in the leadership of communal religious practices, grassroots cadres had to confront religious activities mainly led by the “revolutionary masses” (geming qunzhong), the landless peasants, poor peasants, and middle peasants whom the Communist Party relied upon for the revolution and the construction of a socialist state.
For many cadres, dealing with the revolutionary masses was more difficult than ousting traditional elites. Unlike the activities of salvationist groups, the government typically avoided labeling the religious activities of the “revolutionary masses” as counterrevolutionary. Moreover, it was not a secret that in some villages, a number of local cadres themselves, including village heads and Youth League secretaries, organized rainmaking ceremonies.17 Where grassroots cadres were involved in “superstitious” activities, county officials had a difficult time obtaining effective support for the ban on illegal religious practices. Indeed, when political campaigns did not demand a drastic approach, county officials preferred to maintain a certain flexibility.
Adapting to the Constriction of Ritual Spaces
In spite of these concessions, the closure and expropriation of village temples continued over the following months and years. Unlike the sudden, drastic confiscation of religious estates during land reform, these encroachments were often a gradual process. In many temples, ritual and secular activities occurred side by side, sometimes maintaining a fragile peace. The most typical case was the coexistence of ritual and educational sites. Schools might occupy the majority of a temple building, while the worship of deities was allowed to continue, confined to a smaller part of the temple.
The coexistence of religious and secular activities very much depended on whether religious practitioners and occupying institutions were able to avoid conflict. Tensions sometimes mounted to the point where the county government was required to intervene. Hongyan Palace (hongyan dian) in Middle Village (zhong cun), Xincheng, was turned into a township school after 1949. Nevertheless, villagers continued to use the school’s auditorium as ritual space, sweeping up the cabinet previously built for divine statues and setting up incense tables. The auditorium had been the temple’s main hall before the conversion. The school principal made multiple requests for various levels of local government to intervene, but the problem was only solved with the involvement of the county government in 1954. Though it still took four months of negotiations with the villagers, the school and the township government were finally able to remove the incense tables.18
The outcome of the dispute over the incense tables was not ideal for religious practitioners, because it meant that even limited religious practices were no longer possible on temple sites. This transformation of ritual spaces to public spaces precluding any kind of religious activity was a widespread occurrence, with government orders to confiscate or expropriate temple buildings and construct granaries, county-level schools or factories in their stead. In such cases, the occupying institutions tended to restructure and demolish the temple itself or to construct entirely new buildings. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the county Buddhism Study Group, on behalf of the Sagacious Longevity Temple in Xianyan (see earlier discussion), filed multiple reports requesting that the schools move out, but local authorities ultimately rebuffed all their requests in the name of developing education. There was not much local communities could do to salvage traditional ritual sites.
Nevertheless, some religious and secular sites coexisted for many years, in some instances even for the entire duration of the Mao era. The Great Yin Palace (taiyin gong) in the northeastern district of Huling, dedicated to the worship of the deity Princess Chen Shisi (known as Lady Linshui in her home region of Fujian), continued to hold religious activities even after liberation when a school was set up on the premises. According to the Great Yin Palace’s own historical account, “for forty years, the palace’s religious activities and the school’s educational activities were constantly in tension.” Nevertheless, school and temple coexisted until 1979 when a new Great Yin Palace was built at the entrance of the village to resolve the problem.19
When the conditions were such that religious practitioners could not carry on even minimal worship in a repurposed temple, a common solution was to make a substitute space. Local residents worshipped statues of gods and other religious objects, secretly or semi-publicly, often in remote locations. Such arrangements sometimes persisted until the end of the Cultural Revolution or even later. When Liujia Palace (liujia gong) in Liujia, Taoshan District, was closed down in 1952, people took the statue of the main deity Lord Yang to another location, where people continued to worship him discreetly until the reconstruction of Liujia Palace in 1979.20
The Great Leap Forward and the Massive Destruction and Closure of Temples
The Great Leap Forward, beginning in 1958, was the biggest blow to communal temples in Rui’an after land reform. The Great Leap, like the land reform campaign, did not directly target religious issues. But the frenzy of agricultural and industrial production led to the wholesale closure and massive destruction of temples, a “great leap in religious work,” as local cadres called it, the details of which will be discussed in the following chapter. The harsh political climate made it impossible to engage in open resistance or even negotiation over religious space.
Following a socialist education class in April 1958 attended by religious leaders and activists in the county seat, with similar “struggle meetings” held in other districts, many monks and nuns in Rui’an came out to condemn the old society and renounce their Buddhist faith.21 Those who had asked for the return of monasteries admitted their “mistakes.” An official report described the party position: “The government borrowed monasteries for socialist construction, which is beneficial to all people. We should never consider monasteries as the private property of the religious sector.”22 Subsequently, “ninety percent of temples and churches were voluntarily donated to brigades,” with monks and nuns choosing to return to secular life and participate in agricultural production.23 A government survey boasted that zero Buddhist monasteries were active in 1960,24 in sharp contrast with the 400 or so Buddhist monasteries that had been active in Rui’an in 1949, and the 256 monasteries still housing monks and nuns in 1955, according to a government survey.25
It is impossible to state the exact number of territorial temples shut down or destroyed during the Great Leap Forward due to the lack of statistical data. Most of the temples which were already closed likely suffered further damage, while yet more temples were shut down.26 In the movement to collect iron for smelting, a program that was occurring throughout China as part of the Great Leap Forward, temples and monasteries became a source of raw materials: metal, timber, and bricks.27
Temples were also torn down to make way for the construction of reservoirs and dams, another important local program of the Great Leap Forward. Reservoirs were typically built in mountainous areas, leading to the destruction of a number of mountain temples. Temples near dam sites were sometimes entirely torn down to supply raw materials for construction.28
A small number of territorial temples apparently survived the storms of the Great Leap Forward. In Zi’ao Commune in 1963, not far from the district center of Tangxia, the work team sent down by the Wenzhou regional government for the Socialist Education Movement discovered that all of the territorial temples and Buddhist monasteries remained “fully preserved” (baocun wanzhengde) in the commune’s Shen’ao Brigade. The brigade had also kept seven roadside shrines (xiaoshenmiao). In a neighboring brigade, the temple of Shan’gen Palace (shan’gen dian), dedicated to the worship of the Monkey King (qitian dasheng, a famous figure in Chinese mythology), welcomed crowds to light candles and recite scriptures for blessings (dian fodeng) every first and fifteenth day of the lunar month.29
A Religious Resurgence in the Early 1960s
The policies of the Great Leap Forward led to severe famine throughout China lasting two to three years. During this period, religious activities in Rui’an fell into a near-total silence, at least according to government records. Yet as early as 1960, “superstitious activities” such as reciting scriptures, worshipping deities, and building temples and divine statues reportedly re-emerged in eleven communes of Xincheng, Tangxia, Gaolou, Xikeng and Nantian,30 along with many rumors about catastrophes and the end of time.31 After 1961, local authorities estimated that most “superstition professionals” (mixin zhiye fenzi) in Zhejiang had resumed their activities, including sorcerers, diviners, and occultists (male or female). In Pingyang, a county adjoining Rui’an, as well as several other counties in southeastern Zhejiang, nearly all “superstition professionals” were reported to have resumed their former roles after the end of the Great Leap Forward.32
As county officials in Rui’an noted, an important step in the restoration of communal religious practices was the re-creation of traditional spaces required for large-scale communal rituals. Surveys in Tangxia District in 1963 indicated that more than a thousand villagers were involved in renovating temples, rebuilding statues of divinities, and gathering for purification rites (jingdu) on the first and fifteenth day of the lunar month. Twenty-two territorial temples and Buddhist monasteries were renovated.33 Thirty-two lineages in twenty-seven brigades, covering a total of more than 20,000 people, were engaged in compiling genealogies.34 In Hongqiao District of Yueqing County, ten of the district’s 161 brigades renovated their ancestral halls, twenty-nine of them restored territorial temples, and fourteen compiled new genealogies.35
The resurgence of religious life was such that in June 1961, villagers held dragon boat races once more. The revival was initially led by none other than the party secretary of Lingxia Brigade and vice head of the County Seat Commune, Wu Zhenqian. It quickly spread to other districts. Concerned with the increase in “superstition activities,” the Rui’an County Government reiterated the ban on dragon boat racing in May 1963.36
Then, in 1964, in the midst of the Socialist Education Movement, the Zhejiang provincial government issued a special anti-feudal-superstition notice, worrying that “superstition activities” would affect social stability and might become a vehicle for counterrevolutionary activity.37 It may have been the first wide-scale ban on “superstition” in Zhejiang. The county government prohibited dragon boat races again in spring 1966, referring to “rampant feudal superstitious activities in the guise of dragon boat races, which have caused multiple disputes and even fights between villages.”38
Grassroots cadres were, perhaps not surprisingly, implicated in most cases of temple restoration. During the Socialist Education Movement (also known as the Four Clears Movement), work teams found that in Rui’an County and the periphery of Wenzhou, many grassroots cadres either directly organized or tacitly agreed to religious activities like temple reconstruction and genealogy compilation, the latter being a critical aspect of local lineages.
Zhang Buwang, the party secretary of the embroidery (handicraft) brigade in Tangxia Commune, arranged a large-scale funeral for his mother, who passed away on December 28, 1965. He invited a group of liturgists and Daoists to host a complete set of elaborate rituals, some of which, it was said, had only been seen before 1949. Hundreds of relatives and neighbors, including “landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries and bad elements” (di fu fan huai), attended the funeral and the immense banquet that followed.39
In another case, Shao Yongsheng, the vice head of Zi’ao Brigade in Tangxia, was invited to lead members of the Shao lineage in Shaozhai Brigade of Tangxia Commune in compiling a new genealogy for the entire Shao lineage in Tangxia District (Photo 3.7).40 In the new genealogy, which I saw in 2012, Shao Yongsheng’s name was listed alongside that of chief editor Shao Yanliu, a former landlord, who was also the chief editor of the previous genealogy. Cadres in Donglian Brigade, Hongqiao District, Yueqing, even used the brigade’s money to fund temple reconstruction and genealogy compilation.41
Photo 3.7 A page from the 1961 genealogy of the Shao lineage, which listed Yongsheng as a member of the editorial board. Yongsheng also appears in the editorial broad of the 1976 genealogy of the Shao family.
Source: Author.
More surprising yet is the case of the Mountain God Temple (shangong miao) in Meishukeng Brigade, Yaozhuang Commune, Huling, which borders Qingtian County and Wenzhou municipality. When the Mountain God Temple was rebuilt in 1961, county officials learned that brigade party secretary Chen Zhaorao not only initiated the restoration of the temple, but also was a spirit medium. In the opening ceremony of the restored Mountain God Temple, Chen allegedly entered a trance state and gave a speech condemning the government. In reference to the destruction of the temple, he said, “the Communist Party (previously) forced me to have no place to live.”42
Both Zhang and Shao became the targets of criticism in cadre meetings ostensibly held to educate other cadres, teaching “correct” attitudes and understandings of issues like lineage and feudal superstition. During the meetings, however, many cadres expressed overt sympathy toward Shao and Zhang. Regarding Shao, some cadres believed it was necessary to compile a genealogy because without it “the five relations (wulun) would get messy. We would not be able to recognize our ancestors, or a great aunt would not realize that she married her grandnephew . . . all things have a system. A nation is constituted of the center, province, county and commune level by level. So human relations should also be ordered generation by generation.”43
In Zhang’s case, one person said: “Funeral rituals have been our customs for thousands of years. Zhang’s mother was long-lived and a senior in the genealogical ranking (beifen). [She also had] the good fortune of having four generations [in her family] living together in one house (sishitongtang). [Zhang’s] son is party secretary and his grandson is the head of a cooperative. They have money and there is nothing wrong with making the funeral boisterous (‘re’nao’).” The observer continued, “If a funeral is class struggle, then everything in village life is class struggle! It is an old custom handed down from the older generation. If somebody’s funeral is cold and cheerless (lenglengqingqing), what flavor does it have?”44
As brigade and commune cadres continued to engage in traditional religious practices and other local customs, their ambivalence suggests that the difficulties in suppressing “superstition” did not disappear with collectivization. Collectivization may even have made it more difficult for the state to tackle communal religious activities. As the new commune leaders, grassroots cadres were now largely responsible for community affairs, becoming an obstacle to the state’s efforts to clamp down on superstition.
Indeed, after collectivization, local cadres became both the targets and the enforcers of anti-superstition policies. Superior officials were at pains to inculcate brigade and commune cadres with politically correct notions of religious and lineage activities. However, these cadres shared ideas of religion and lineage similar to those of ordinary villagers. They certainly behaved differently during political campaigns or when an important directive was sent down from above (even if they privately considered communal religious and lineage activities as harmless customs). However, as the county government discovered in its investigations, they could secretly permit, support, or even directly participate in religious and lineage activities.
The Cultural Revolution and the Conundrum of Temple Restoration
In the summer of 1966, when calls for the great proletarian Cultural Revolution reached Rui’an, work teams were sent to the countryside. They were tasked with mobilizing commune youths to “Clear the Four Olds” (old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas) and sweep away the “ox demons and snake deities” (niu gui she shen, a derogatory term loosely referring to class enemies). Religious sites and religious followers were faced with further attacks. But the Red Guards might not find many things to destroy in communal temples, as most of them had already been emptied during previous political campaigns. Thus religious objects belonging to households and families bore the brunt of the onslaught.
A report from a work team stationed in Caocun Township, Mayu, summarized a scene of the destruction of the Four Olds:
Within only a few days, ancestral altars, stovetop shrines, old tablets, clay statues of divinities, old doorplates have all been destroyed spontaneously. . . . Nu’ao Brigade, for instance, has spontaneously destroyed a thousand and more old incense holders and amassed more than seven hundred old books and “dirty novels”. . . now all 150 households in the Brigade have put up Chairman Mao’s poster in each of their homes. They [also] turned the tablets that used to hold ancestral altars into Chairman [Mao] quotation boards. Every house has hung one up. Members of Xu’nan and Xubei Brigade voluntarily demolished thirty-five clay and wooden statues of divinities in Mani Temple (mingjiao si) and Xu’ao Palace (xu’ao gong). The Great Yin Palace of Shangdu Brigade has been turned into a club.45
Incense holders and tablets were common household objects for the worship of deities and ancestors in traditional Chinese families. In October 1966 in Mayu alone, Red Guards confiscated 7,484.5 taels of tin and 57,698 incense holders. They destroyed 180 statues of divinities and burned 1,060 volumes of genealogy.46
In the wake of these ferocious attacks by Red Guards, the vast majority of temples, if not all of them, must have ceased to operate. Po Yiha, a former head of the Rui’an Buddhist Association which was established in the early 1980s, witnessed all of the Mao-era attacks on Buddhism in the region and confirmed that throughout Rui’an, very few Buddhist temples were still active or had any monks present during the Cultural Revolution.47
But in these fraught early years of the Cultural Revolution, villagers still found ways to save their deities and, where possible, carry on public worship. Sacred objects were sometimes salvaged and hidden elsewhere to allow villagers to covertly pursue religious activities elsewhere, as in the case of the Temple of the True Body (zhenshen si) in Baotian Commune, Tangxia District. The temple is dedicated to a local woman from the Dai lineage who was deified after death. Her statue, the Princess of the True Body (zhenshen taigu), is famously the temple’s main deity and once contained her mummified remains. In 1968, the Red Guards stormed the temple and removed the statue. They paraded it through the streets of Baotian before setting it on fire in front of the Dai lineage’s ancestral hall next to the temple. While those Red Guards most likely came from one of the local communes and may even have been members the Dai lineage, some members of the Dai lineage managed to collect the statue’s damaged remains, including the deity’s bones. They reburied the damaged relics behind a small shrine in nearby Fenghuang Mountain until the end of the Cultural Revolution.48
As the political atmosphere made it nearly impossible to publicly worship statues of divinities, resourceful villagers turned to more discreet means. In traditional Chinese religion, burning incense is a means of communicating with deities, offering them deference and inviting their presence. Furthermore, incense fire (xianghuo) is understood as a symbol of a territorial unit, family, or village. Thus burning incense is not just a religious act but also a way to reaffirm the bond between the community, the family, and their deities.49 Burning incense became especially important when it was not possible to engage in public worship in front of statues of gods.
Burning incense could be a means of engaging with religious sites, even after temples and buildings had been destroyed. The Temple of the Eastern Marchmount (dongyue miao), located at the center of the town of Tangxia, was first occupied by a supply-and-sale co-op and then was used as a timber shop. The worship of deities probably continued despite the occupation of the temple. Therefore, when the temple building was torn down to build a food market in 1970, a corner was left to erect an incense burner for worship. Incense fire, it was said, was still needed on the first and fifteenth day of every lunar month for prosperity. When even an incense burner was not allowed, people simply inserted incense sticks into the ground outside the temple.50 Villagers in the Lower Brigade of Xincheng did the same during the early years of the Cultural Revolution when the East Hall Palace was completely locked up.51
Whether public worship continued had a lot to do with varied local political environments and the inconsistency of social control across different levels of the state. The “Clear the Four Olds” campaign in 1966 and the armed fighting that occurred over the next few years were the most severe disruptions to religious life. The county seat remained at the center of political campaigns when armed fights began, whereas the vast rural areas, especially those away from town centers or the county seat, were relatively quiet in the remaining years of the Cultural Revolution.
In the summer of 1967, the Red Guard movement erupted in countywide armed fights of rival factions. General Headquarters (lianzong), a rebel group who held the county seat, began fighting another faction mainly made up of peasants, the loyalist United Headquarters (lianzhan), who besieged the county seat for three months.
In a pamphlet published in August 1967, General Headquarters accused United Headquarters of encouraging “superstitious activities” throughout Rui’an:
The burning of incense and worshipping of deities have resurfaced in Xincheng, Tangxia, and Mayu. People once again set up candles and incense holders in temples. “Superstitious” goods such as paper money and candles were available on the market for sale in large quantities. Those who were in power (dangquanpai, incumbent cadres) in Shangwang Commune openly told relatives of [their] soldiers [referring to those commune members mobilized to rescue incumbent cadres in the county seat]: “you can recite scriptures and worship deities as much as you wish.” The mother of Pan Shixing, team head of Shangwang, the mother of militia commander Yu Naibao, and the wife of party secretary Zhang Busong (who was fighting the war in Long Mountain [in the urban areas surrounding Rui’an]) all went to worship deities and light candles.52
This General Headquarters pamphlet may have been propaganda to defame United Headquarters. It was possible, however, that factional leaders who were not Maoist ideologues did give some leeway to public religious practices.
In the summer of 1967, at the height of the violent conflict, the county suffered its most severe drought since 1953.53 Senior residents of nearby villages flocked into the East Hall Palace in Xincheng (described earlier) and prepared to pray for rain. United Headquarters apparently allowed the rainmaking ceremony, but it was soon halted by General Headquarters. Fights broke out between the two factions, claiming two lives: a General Headquarters soldier and an elderly villager who was shot one night by the temple guard.54
As the Cultural Revolution crippled the regular functions of government, the control of religious activities fell to grassroots cadres, and their attitude toward religion gained a greater importance. In spite of the extreme political atmosphere, grassroots cadres behaved much as they had done in the 1950s and early 1960s. Not surprisingly, there were numerous accounts of brigade and commune cadres dispersing religious gatherings, reporting them to the county government, and making arrests. But there were also many instances where cadres tacitly allowed religious activities or directly participated in them.
In the early and mid-1970s, there were clear signs of attempts to bring back communal religious activities. A collection of brief histories of 170 village temples in Rui’an states that eleven of these were renovated or rebuilt between 1970 and 1978.55 This gives us a sense of the extent of the restoration of temple activities in the later stage of the Cultural Revolution. The records of the Rui’an County Revolutionary Committee at the time also noted instances of what they termed the “restoration of feudal superstition” (fengjian mixin fubi).
In Chengshanping Brigade, Lumu Commune, Huling, in February 1973, a medium called Chen Shicong and his son Chen Wenzhu claimed to be possessed by Lord Yang and helped the brigade identify the thief who had stolen fertilizer from its forest group. The Chens subsequently asked for the reconstruction of Lord Yang’s Palace, the temple that had been turned into an elementary school. In the name of the deity, the Chens even appointed Feng Zongde, the brigade secretary, as the manager of the project and asked him to collect donations to fund the reconstruction. However, less than a month later, both father and son were arrested, ending efforts to rebuild the temple.56
In another attempted revival of communal religion in the Huling District, which occurred in the Datong Brigade of Huling Commune in the winter of 1974, the Zheng family—under the leadership of a certain Zheng Qingzan—successfully forced the brigade’s agricultural machinery workshop to move out from the Zheng ancestral hall and got the brigade to agree to repair it. The county government only discovered the restoration of their ancestral hall when they were alerted by an informant, perhaps someone who did not belong to the Zheng family and resented Zheng Qingzan’s frequent interference with brigade issues using “lineage force” (zongzu shili). Zheng was subsequently convicted of being a “counterrevolutionary.”57
Much as in other stages of the Mao era, attempts to restore communal temples during the Cultural Revolution could not overcome a fundamental problem: Even when a temple was successfully rebuilt and rituals were restored, how could religious practitioners ensure its continued stable existence?
This conundrum stemmed from three difficulties. First, communal religious activities lacked a stable leadership to shield them from political retaliation and relentless political onslaughts. The examples of Shao and Zhang in the mid-1960s and Chen and Zheng in the late 1970s all suggest that regardless of one’s position, whether as a spirit medium, family elder, or cadre, one could not openly lead temple activities without incurring the wrath of higher authorities. Cadres sometimes shut their eyes to communal religion, and sometimes even secretly supported it, but when they took the lead in regular temple activities, they risked their political careers and the swift retaliation of higher officials.
A further leadership problem affected Buddhism in particular. In Rui’an, the vast majority of monks and nuns had returned to secular life after 1958 and ordination had been prohibited since then. Most ordained monks and nuns who were still alive in the early 1970s were already in their seventies.58 Though Buddhist gatherings did resurface around that time, these monks and nuns were simply too old to take an active leadership role, resulting in many Buddhist gatherings being organized and led by young lay followers. Due to the lack of clergy, collective ritual services became rare, and Buddhist gatherings were limited mainly to scripture chanting in the mountainous areas near villages, such as in the Daluo Mountains, Tangxia, a traditional center of Buddhism in southern Zhejiang, and in Jin’ao Mountain, Xincheng.59
The second major difficulty facing communal religion in the Mao era was financing. Performing rituals and maintaining territorial temples and Buddhist monasteries consumed a great deal of money and labor, which is why local cadres constantly criticized communal religious activities for being extravagant. The commune system removed money and production materials from individuals and concentrated them in the hands of the collective. As observed in the religious resurgence of the mid-1960s in Rui’an and Yueqing, people had to ask for commune leaders’ permission to use money and other materials belonging to the collective if they wished to stage a communal ritual or repair a temple or ancestral hall.
To overcome this problem, people sometimes went door to door asking for donations (aihu tankuan) from individual families, a traditional way of collecting funds for communal affairs, such as when Shengjing Temple (shengjing dian) was repaired in 1955. The problem, however, was how to secure reliable funding from members of communes and collectives. Using collective money would risk attracting the attention of local authorities, which would have a political cost for commune leaders.
Finally, even when communal rituals resumed or temples were successfully repaired, their existence was constantly interrupted by local and national political campaigns. Villagers in some cases did take back or rebuild temples and ancestral halls or resume the annual ritual of dragon boat racing. However, communal religion could rarely survive the onslaught of political attacks. With new campaigns, statues of divinities were smashed and temples were once again shut down. Their destruction could not prevent people from trying again, which is why there were always attempts to rebuild temples following waves of destruction. But followers of communal religion were never able to break the cycle of destruction during the Mao years.
Conclusion
From collectivization to the Cultural Revolution, communal temples deprived of land routinely came under attack by political campaigns and encroachments on their property and religious sites. Unlike the expropriation of temple estates during land reform, the loss of traditional communal religious space did not happen all at once. It occurred at a varied pace, with many temples going through periodic revivals before being shut down. By the early 1970s, the vast majority of communal temples belonging to territorial cults, Buddhism, and Daoism in Rui’an were either shut down, occupied, or destroyed, a massive deterritorialization on a truly unprecedented scale in local history.
The temples that disappeared under Mao and have not already been rebuilt are unlikely to be restored. Conversely, the temples that were rebuilt after the end of the Mao era were often rebuilt in new locations and in different forms. Whether temples were lost or rebuilt in new forms, their disappearance and transformation marked a permanent change in the local religious landscape. For the time being, though, as this chapter demonstrates, followers quickly learned to face up to the expropriation of traditional communal religious space through resistance, negotiation, and compromise, sometimes finding alternative spaces where they could continue to worship.
The prolonged struggle for communal religious space indicates that entrenched beliefs in local society continued to guide everyday life even as Maoist ideology took root in the minds of local residents. The political environment, which became more and more hostile in the decades following land reform, in fact pushed some people to cling to traditional practices. When facing intrusive sociopolitical and economic policies and their consequences, some people increasingly turned to religious explanations of natural and man-made disasters, sometimes culminating in public expressions of discontent, like the “superstition riots” of 1953. This type of collective action is essentially the same as other social protests, such as the widespread resistance against agricultural cooperativization in the mid-1950s, rejecting the Maoist imposition of social units and space.
Mao once famously wrote, “Peasants themselves erected gods [pusa, literally “Bodhisattvas”] and eventually they will use their own hands to cast aside [these] gods.”60 Yet the reverse is also true: the hands that cast aside their gods could erect them again. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the same rural residents of Rui’an who closed temples or even smashed statues of divinities would sometimes rebuild statues or temples and resume worship when they felt the time was right. The restoration of temples did not lack the support of party cadres, the new village leadership, in spite of the purge of traditional local elites who were leaders and major patrons of temples before 1949.
Brigade and commune cadres were far from being Maoist ideologues. On religious issues they often thought like other commune members, though their actions very much depended on their own interests. Village cadres’ backing of communal religion took a much less visible form than the support of traditional rural elites, but it was pervasive, as we see in the superstition riots or the “feudal restoration” occurring in the early 1960s and 1970s.
Communal movements to retain or restore traditional religious spaces ebbed and flowed following the currents of Maoist policies, with the intervals between major political campaigns at times allowing attempts at temple restoration to resume—at the beginning of collectivization, after the Great Famine, and in the later stage of the Cultural Revolution, as we see in Rui’an. This is because the political climate to a great extent determined the behaviors of ordinary community members and community leaders as well as the resources that people could mobilize. The wave of restoration of temples and ancestral halls in the early 1960s, for instance, was facilitated by the increased autonomy of local brigades, which the central government had allowed in the aftermath of the Great Famine. During this era, most cases of temple restoration occurred with the leadership and material support of the collective. It is difficult to imagine a similar scenario at the height of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution.
Therefore, during the Mao era, as the political climate affected the stability of religious spaces as well as the material foundations and leadership of communal religious activities, attempts to restore temples and temple practices could only persist at a minimal level. But this persistence, as subdued as it was, had a crucial role in laying the groundwork for the post-Mao revival of communal temples. The cycle of frustration, when attempts at communal religious revival were rebuffed and worship was once again halted or pushed underground, only came to an end in the post-Mao era, when the collective dissolved and the political environment became more permissive toward religion (explored in Chapter 7).
Traditional communal religious space is fundamentally territorial in nature: bound to land and to temples serving local communities. Thus it can only be reterritorialized within the communities that it serves. Its importance in the life of local communities lent it some resilience amid the political storms of the Mao era. How, therefore, did the political climate affect Christian churches, which had a distinct way of operating, much less bound to local religious sites? The trans-communal connections and organizational networks of the church made for a very different set of challenges during collectivization, as I discuss in the next chapter.
1October 9, 1956, Rui’an City Archives 4-8-111: 35.
2Ibid.
3“Rui’an Xian Fojiao Xuexihui baogao” (A report from Rui’an Buddhism Study Group), October 12, 1956, Rui’an City Archives 4-8-111: 28, 79.
4“Wei ju gedi siyuan deng baogao ge qu xiangcun nongyeshe wei xiangying zhengfu fazhan xumu haozhao, fenfen jiang gedi siyuan fangshe renyi shunhuai qingxing yanzhong, kaiju xiangqing qing xunsu zhizhi yimian kuoda jiufen you” (On rural agricultural cooperatives that, according to monks and nuns living in the temples in the respective districts covered thereby, recklessly damaged temples one after another in response to the governmental call to develop animal husbandry. [We] list details [below], please promptly stop [them] in order to prevent further disputes), August 11, 1956, Rui’an City Archives 4-8-109: 81–92.
5“Guanyu Fojiao qingkuang diaocha baogao” (Investigational report on Buddhism), July 14, 1955, Rui’an City Archives 1-7-137: 38.
6“Guanyu Xianyan si dahuo sunshi qingkuang baogao” (Report on fire in Xianyan Temple and losses), 1953, Rui’an City Archives 1-5-113: 4–7.
7“Wei xi chaming Yueqing Xian suo fasheng zongjiao wenti chuli bao shu you” (On elucidating the handling of the religious incidents in Yueqing County and reporting to the [Wenzhou regional] Commission), September 12, 1951, Yueqing City Archives, 26-3-2: 15–17.
8“Tangxia Qu hualongzhou qingkuang jianbao” (Briefing on the situation of dragon boat racing in Tangxia), June 1, Rui’an City Archives 49-5-1: 97–100.
9Rui’an City Archives 1-5-113: 17–23. Government documents did not indicate later developments around Huaguang Temple. Yet what I learned during my visit to the temple in 2012 was that the triumph of the villagers did not last long. After a while the school still moved into the temple.
10“Guanyu benxian gedi fasheng qunzhongxing zhaofo qiuyu ji saodong shijian de baogao” (Report on (the incidents of) conjuring up deities to make rain and disturbances throughout the county), August 5, 1953, Rui’an City Archives 1-5-3: 77. Throughout the province, people similarly held the party responsible for the drought. In Yongkang County of Jinhua, for instance, people held rainmaking ceremonies, also blaming the Communist Party for causing the severe drought. See Lü Shanxin, “Taiping Xiang qiuyu mixin shijian huigui” (Memoir of the incident of rainmaking superstition at Taiping Town), in Wushi niandai de Yongkang (Yongkang wenshi ziliao di shisan ji) (Yongkang Shi zhengxie wenshi weiyuanhui, 2001), 357.
11“Xincheng Qu guanyu Dongtang miao bei pohuai de baogao” (Report on the damage to East Hall Palace), July 30, 1953, Rui’an City Archives 32-4-7: 5.
12Rui’an City Archives 1-5-113: 17–23; Rui’an City Archives 32-4-7: 4–6. For superstition riots in Rui’an, see also “Mayu Qu Caocun xiang mixin saodong shijian de baogao” (Report on the superstition riot in Caocun Township, Mayu District), August 27, 1953, Rui’an City Archives, 4-5-63: 78–81.
13The county government in Yongkang, Zhejiang, even allowed all the county officials except for administrative heads (i.e., county head, district head, etc.) to participate in rainmaking ceremonies in order to better “educate” people. See Lü Shanxin, “Taiping xiang qiuyu mixin shijian huigui,” 360.
14Rui’an City Archives 1-5-3: 81.
15See “Guanyu Xincheng Qu Xinzhou Xiang saodong shijian geren jiantao” (Self-criticism on the riot of Xinzhou Town, Xincheng District), August 31, 1953, Rui’an City Archives, 1-5-90: 23–29.
16“Wei baogao benxian Xincheng Qu liangku feng zhun chexiao bao qing bei cha you.” (On the request for permission to revoke the Xincheng granary), August 25, 1953, Rui’an City Archives 32-4-3: 2; Rui’an City Archives, 4-5-63: 78–81. East Hall Palace, villagers told me, was later used for various non-religious purposes. At least one of the leaders who the government believed instigated the riots in East Hall Palace was sentenced to jail.
17Rui’an City Archives 1-5-3: 72–81.
18“Wei benxiang xiangxiao litang shang baiman fogui yuanbaozhuo fang’ai xuesheng jihui bufen mixin nongmin zhishi xuesheng kangyi yidong qing zhengfu xiezhu jiejue you” (On shrines and sacrifice tables occupying the auditorium of a town elementary school in Xinzhou Town, Xincheng, that obstructed school meetings; some superstitious peasants instigated students to protest against the action to remove shrines and sacrifice tables, we ask for the assistance of the government in settling [the problem]), 1954, Rui’an City Archives 4-6-69: 135–136.
19Zhou Konghua and Ruan Zhensheng, eds., Wenzhou Daojiao tonglan (A general survey of Daoism in Wenzhou) (Hong Kong: Tianma Books, 1999), 219–220.
20Ibid., 213.
21For how the 1958 campaign affected Buddhist monks and nuns elsewhere in China, see Holmes Welch, Buddhism under Mao (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), 91–92, 235–237.
22“Guanyu zongjiaojie shehuizhuyi jiaoyu yundong zongjie baogao” (Concluding report on socialist education movement in the religious sector), April 1958, Rui’an City Archives, 1-10-161: 51.
23“Guanyu 1958 nian zongjiao gongzuo zongjie baogao” (Conclusion report on religious work in 1958), April 24, 1959, Rui’an City Archives 1-11-183: 108.
24“Zongjiaotu bianhua qingkuang” (Changes in the number of religious believers), June 5, 1961, Rui’an City Archives, 4-13-42: 25–26.
25We should not take these numbers literally, especially the 1960 number, as I learned in my fieldwork. In Jianshan Hall (jianshan tang) of Jian Mountain near Luonan Township, Tangxia, for instance, throughout much of the 1960s, a small number of monks remained and worked together with a work team sent to open up a tea plantation and living in the temple. The 1960 number, however, does suggest the heavy blow to Buddhist monasteries from the Great Leap Forward.
26Most senior residents confirmed further destruction of temples and statues of divinities during the Great Leap Forward, though they could rarely give details.
27Zhou and Ruan, Wenzhou Daojiao tonglan, 53, 150, 226, 254.
28Ibid., 56, 12, 400.
29“Guanyu Tangxia Shen’ao dadui liangda shili zhengduo qingshaonian de qingkuang diaocha” (Investigation of two major forces competing for youth in Shen’ao Brigade, Tangxia), July 7, 1963, Rui’an City Archives, 1-15-143: [1–3].
30Xikeng and Nantian are districts of Wencheng County which fell under the same administrative division as Rui’an from 1958 to 1961.
31“Guanyu liji caiqu cuoshi jiaqiang fanghuo he zhizhi mixin huodong de yijian” (Opinions on immediately taking measures to reinforce the work of fire prevention and to stop superstitious activities), July 6, 1960, Rui’an City Archives, 4-13-12: 17.
32To name only a few numbers in Zhejiang: the percentage of superstition professionals who resumed the old profession is 69 percent in Xinchang (northern Zhejiang), 98 percent in Ninghai (eastern Zhejiang), and 98 percent in Pingyang (southern Zhejiang). See Cheng Shicen, ed., Pingyang Xian gong’an zhi (Pingyang county public security gazetteer) (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 1997), 98; Gao Shuibiao, ed., Xinchang Xian gong’an zhi (Xinchang county public security gazetteer) (Beijing: Dangdai Zhongguo chubanshe, 1994), 139; Zhang Zhebin, ed., Ninghai Xian gong’an zhi (Ninghai county public security gazetteer) (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2001), 256. Those “superstition professionals” in the statistics should have been under the radar previously. But other than that, we have no way to know exactly how local authorities generated the numbers. So we should not read these data too literally and they can only give some basic sense of the renewal of religious activities.
33“Tangxia Qu dangqian jieji douzheng qingkuang” (Current situation of class struggle in Tangxia District), December 15, 1962, Rui’an City Archives, 49-14-16: 64.
34“Pizhuan zhengfa dangzu guanyu zhizhi fengjian canyu de gezhong fubi huodong de yijian” (Approving and circulating Party committee of [county] political and legal office’s notification on stopping restoration activities of various residual feudal forces), May 5, 1963, Rui’an City Archives, 1-15-69: 18.
35“Hongqiao Qu guanyu dang de gugan zhengfeng xuexihui qingkuang de jianbao” (Brief report on rectification study cession of backbone Party members in Hongqiao District), February 18, 1963, Yueqing City Archives: 1-15-27: 42.
36“Guanyu Duanwujie hualongzhou huodong de tongzhi” (Notice on dragon boat race during Dragon Boat Festival), June 14, 1961, Rui’an City Archives, 1-13-108: 28–30; “Rui’an Xian Lingxia shengchan dadui nao longzhou” (Lingxia Production Brigade of Rui’an County to hold dragon boat [race]), June 13, 1961, Wenling City Archives, J79-1-48: 77–78.
37“Zhejiang Sheng renmin weiyuanhui guanyu fandui fengjian mixin huodong de tongzhi” (The Zhejiang People’s Committee’s notice on opposing feudal superstitious activities), December 26, 1964, Rui’an City Archives, 49-16-41: 19–20.
38Zhang Chaoyin, ed., Rui’an Shi longzhou huodong jianshi (A concise history of dragon boat racing in Rui’an) (Rui’an Shi shiwei dangshi yanjiushi, Difangzhi bangongshi, internal document, 2002), 8.
39“Pizhuan xianwei jianwei guanyu Tangxia Zhang Buwang tongzhi jinxing fengjian mixin huodong dasi huihuo langfei de diaocha baogao” (Issuing the investigational report by the county Party supervision committee on comrade Zhang Buwang of Tangxia’s engagement in feudal superstitious activities and extravagant expenditures), January 14, 1966, Rui’an City Archives, 1-18-8: 35.
40“Guanyu Tangxia Shao Yongsheng tongzhi canyu lingdao ‘xiu jiapu’ wenti de taolun” (Discussion on comrade Shao Yongsheng of Tangxia District’s involvement in organizing “genealogy compilation” activities), June 15, 1963, Rui’an City Archives, 1-15-143: [1–6].
41“Guanyu Donglian Gongshe fengjian mixin huodong qingkuang de diaocha baogao” (Investigational report on the situation of feudal superstitious activities in Donglian Commune), May 6, 1963, Yueqing City Archives, 1-15-27: 162–182.
42“Guanyu Yaozhuang Gongshe dubo he mixin huodong qingkuang de diaocha baogao” (Investigational report on gambling and superstitious activities in Yaozhuang Commune), December 26, 1961, Rui’an City Archives 82-11-8: 31–32. Similar waves of religious restoration were seen in Shannxi, Fujian, and Hebei in the early 1960s. See Elizabeth J. Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in China (London: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 289; Adam Yuet Chau, “Popular Religion in Shannbei, North-Central China,” Journal of Chinese Religions 31 (2003): 41–42; Stephen Jones, Plucking the Winds: Lives of Village Musicians in Old and New China (Leiden: CHIME Foundation, 2004), 135–138.
43Rui’an City Archives, 1-15-143: [1].
44“Guanyu dui Tangxia Zhang Buwang tongzhi jinxing fengjian fubi huodong de diaocha qingkuang he bianlun qingkuang” (Investigation and discussion of comrade Zhang Buwang’s engagement in restoration of feudal order) January 17, 1966, Rui’an City Archives, 49-18-1: 82.
45“Rui’an xianwei Caocun gongzuodui gongzuo qingkuang jianbao” (Bulletin of work of Rui’an County Party Committee Caocun work team, volume one), September 10, Rui’an City Archives 1-18-37: 2–3.
46“Xincheng Qu zongjiao qingkuang diaocha tongjibiao” (Statistical tables from investigations into the religious situation in Xincheng District), 1991, Rui’an City Archives 72-24-10: 56–57. Tin was commonly used to make religious artifacts in traditional Chinese society.
47Po Yiha, interview by author. Rui’an, May 15, 2013.
48Ying Weixian and Shi Shihu, eds., Liangchu guan yu Zhaoming taizi (Pavilion of Liang [dynasty] crown prince and crown prince Zhaoming) (Shenzhen: Haitian chubanshe, 2008), 74–75.
49Stephan Feuchtwang, Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001), 133–136.
50Zhou and Ruan, Wenzhou Daojiao tonglan, 158.
51Zhan Songlen, interview by author. Xincheng, May 1, 2013.
52“Xuezhai leilei zuixing taotian” ([United Headquarters’] mountains of blood debts and towering crimes), November 1967, Rui’an City Archives 42-1-15: 39.
53There was almost no rain for eighty-three days starting from mid-July. Even Tang River, the longest river in the Wenrui plains, dried up.
54Interview with Jie Zisong at Lower Village on July 26, 2012. Tang Yijun, ed., Xincheng Zhen zhi (Xincheng town gazetteer) (Huangshan shushe, 1998), 280.
55Ying Weixian, ed., Rui’an Shi Daojiao zhi (History of Daoism in Rui’an) (Rui’an Daojiao xiehui, 2011).
56“Guanyu Huling Qu Zheng Qingzan jinxing fengjian fubi de chuli jueding” (Decision on the handling of the case of feudal restoration of Zheng Qingzan in Huling District), July 8, 1977, Rui’an City Archives 82-27-1: 260–261.
57“Guanyu dui Huling Qu Chen Wencong, Chen Wenzhu fengjian fubi an de chuli yijian baogao” (Opinions on handling the feudal restoration case of Chen Shicong and Chen Wenzhu of Huling District), March 30, 1973, Rui’an City Archives 1-21-9: 30–31.
58The average age of monks and nuns in the entire county was fifty-two, based on a 1955 survey of residential Buddhist monks and nuns. See “Guanyu Fojiao qingkuang diaocha baogao” (Investigational report on Buddhism), July 14, 1955, Rui’an City Archives 1-7-137: 38.
59Po Yiha, interview by author. Rui’an, May 15, 2013.
60Mao Zedong, “Hunan nongmin yundong de kaocha baogao” (Report on the peasant movement in Hunan), in Mao Zedong xuanji di yi juan (Anthology of Mao Zedong, volume one) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1991), 33. Officials often quoted this sentence in dealing with the issue of “superstition” during the Maoist period.