When travelers today go from downtown Wenzhou to Rui’an, the first things they see along the newly built Yong-Tai-Wen highway are stretches of paddy fields; small, winding rivers, and lush, low hills in the distance. Next to appear are traditional Chinese buildings dotting hillsides and fields, too bright to miss. Some of them have yellow-painted walls and grey tile roofs. Others are adorned with colorful motifs, statuettes of various kinds displayed in cornices, and occasionally flags of various colors on the rooftops. The yellow buildings are easily recognizable as Buddhist temples, while the colorful buildings are temples for territorial religion. Most of them look fairly new. Careful observers will also notice many newly built Christian churches in a variety of styles, some recognizable, others harder to identify, dispersed in the plains along the highway. These are views the northern soldiers would not have seen on their way to Rui’an in the summer of 1949, when the Communist Party’s Eastern China Field Army came south to Wenzhou to take over the region from local Communist guerrillas.
Revolution and Religious Life
Much of the local religious landscape in Rui’an today, from newly erected Christian churches to rebuilt territorial and Buddhist temples, has been profoundly shaped by China’s Maoist past. Looking back at the region’s history since 1949, there is a strong continuity in religious life, echoing recent studies that demonstrate the resilience of religious traditions under Mao; yet the landscape of religion in Rui’an today has been forged through a series of attacks and radical policy shifts that have left rifts as well as revivals in their wake.1
The Mao era engendered a double crisis for followers and communities of every religion in Rui’an. The first was the removal of traditional leadership. Land reform toppled the local elites who had been the patrons and leaders of communal religion. Many of the leaders of salvationist religions were executed in the “Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries”; others were sent to prison. Foreign clergy in the Catholic and Protestant churches were sent home, while Chinese clergy were ousted, imprisoned, or even killed. The second crisis was the massive suppression of established ritual space and the obliteration of the economic foundations of religious communities, two issues that followers of communal religion in particular had to wrestle with from the very beginning of the Mao era.
Despite these adversities, local residents carried on with religious life, on and off, overtly or covertly, throughout the Mao era. The Dragon Boat Festival persisted until the eve of the Cultural Revolution and was revived again immediately after the Cultural Revolution. Public rainmaking ceremonies took place at the height of Red Guard conflicts, the most chaotic time during the Cultural Revolution. Even the most violently repressed local salvationist groups had their voices heard during the Cultural Revolution. The large scale of disruption in public religious life as a whole lasted for a much shorter time than previously assumed. The most severe attacks on religion during the Cultural Revolution were concentrated in cities during the first few years of the movement. In its later stages, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution even created opportunities for the expansion of religious groups.
The continuation of religious life benefited from the porous nature of state control. From the very beginning, the evolution of the local religious landscape in Rui’an after 1949 unfolded in the context of the government’s revolutionary agendas to restructure Chinese society. By extending state bureaucracy into rural and remote areas, the Communist government created a new political system with unprecedented possibilities of social control.
But this extensive system came with built-in weaknesses. There were broad inconsistencies between different arms of government and policies in different political periods. As religious policy constantly fluctuated with the ebb and flow of political campaigns, grassroots cadres appointed as agents of the state were faced with the conflicting demands of locals and superior officials, making it impossible for them to provide the unwavering support that the government needed to implement its sweeping agenda. Local cadres sometimes even resisted religious directives from their superiors, and some even actively participated in or sheltered religious activities. Thus, in spite of state attacks on religion, there was always a space for religious activities at the margins of political campaigns.
Moreover, the agenda to control social life while suppressing religious life generated widespread uncertainty, which in turn created a fertile environment for the continuation of religious practices. Under Mao, religious explanations remained a crucial way for local residents to come to terms with social changes and natural and manmade disasters, as well as the recurrent uncertainty and violence of the times.
The strategies that local residents adopted to cope with capricious political environments played a crucial role in the survival of religion. To cope with financial scarcity, people would knock door to door to ask for donations or stage ritual performances to collect funds. Age-old tools such as divine revelation (in the dreams of spirit mediums) or eschatological messages foreshadowing end times were used to mobilize religious followers and sometimes led to successful movements to defend traditional ritual space.
Difficult political situations demanded new strategies alongside the old. Christians used the discourse of religious freedom in the Chinese constitution to defend churches from occupation and expropriation. Even adherents of territorial cults, which the government did not recognize as a religion, cited religious freedom as a defense. Villagers even used Maoist struggle meetings to attack the cadres and school principals who destroyed temple facilities.
When it was impossible to preserve temples or churches, religious followers found numerous ways to recreate religious space. In many villages, people were able to retain a small space within their temples for religious practices. Lighting incense on former temple sites was the most common way to pursue worship when the environment was at its most hostile. Some religious followers created new spaces of worship, as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution prompted Christians to shift entirely to home gatherings, divide big meetings into many smaller ones, and spread them out over a wide range of locations to avoid attracting the attention of the state. Non-Christian villagers moved statues of deities to small shrines in remote locations or in their homes to continue worship.
Religious life could only persist at a minimal level for most of the Mao years. The political pressure on religious groups and their leaders made it nearly impossible to restore and stably operate temples and churches, especially during major nationwide campaigns. The suppression of religious activities, however, did not mean villages were isolated from each other in religious life. Far from being “highly self-contained units”2 or “cellularized communities,”3 different locales frequently communicated with one another. Protestant communities spread outward from their original gathering places to weather the political storms. Preachers often traveled far and wide to lead house gatherings in other villages, counties, or regions. These visits occurred not just in Rui’an or Wenzhou but all over southern Zhejiang.
To some extent, the hostile political environment actually reinforced communications and connections between Protestants in different places, pushing them to cooperate in order to ensure the survival of their communities. Followers of communal religion also sometimes acted together. The “superstition riots” in the summer of 1953 and the massive “feudal superstition restoration” of the early 1960s appeared almost spontaneously in numerous villages across Rui’an. People continued to visit certain important religious sites like East Hall Palace in Xincheng for worship and communal rituals. Some remote sacred sites, such as the Daluo Mountains of Tangxia and the Baiyan Mountain of Taoshan, likely never stopped receiving pilgrims throughout the Mao era.
Yet the survival of religious life in Rui’an under Mao is full of remarkable variance and unevenness across many dimensions, which we may characterize as uneven continuities. These variances existed in both time and space, within and across religious traditions. During land reform, the Great Leap Forward, and the early Cultural Revolution, public religious life in Wenzhou seems to have completely ceased. However, after each of these nationwide political campaigns lost momentum or drew to a close, religious practices surged again, regardless of the type of worship, from local deities, Buddhism, and Christianity to other religious traditions.
The religious resurgence of the early 1960s was in fact observed in many other provinces besides Zhejiang, indicating a widespread phenomenon. In Gaoyao County of Guangdong Province during that time, local residents collectively donated money and devoted labor to help rebuild temples.4 In Changshu of Jiangsu Province, “many production teams set up altars to chant ritual scrolls (xianjuan) in the name of bringing great peace and harvests, [while] others chanted scriptures and performed rituals in the name of making sacrifices to ancestors.”5 Similar revivals were also seen in Hebei and Anhui.6
The fluctuation in religious activities often related to variations in social control. During nationwide campaigns, social life was highly politicized. Public religious meetings and rituals entailed enormous political risk. In the intervals between major political campaigns, however, the risks were relatively low. The looser political environment during these calmer times shaped the behavior of both cadres and religious followers. When local cadres had more space to maneuver on religious issues, they generally did not make it a priority to interfere in religious activities. Religious followers felt the change in atmosphere as well and became more actively engaged in the restoration of temples and churches. During land reform, for instance, local residents did not voice their resentment over the destruction of temples, but instead expressed their grievances in the 1953 rainmaking “riots.” Similarly, the religious resurgence of the early 1960s was tied to the relaxation of the commune’s direct control over brigades. In a broader perspective, the temporality of religious life can be understood alongside Gail Hershatter’s study of “campaign time” and women’s memories of collective years as examples of how Maoist campaigns punctuated and constructed everyday life.7
The variance in religious life after 1949 is also evident in the divergent paths of different religious traditions. The “counterrevolutionary” label imposed on salvationist groups and the Catholic Church forced these religions to fall into a long silence after the massive crackdown of the early 1950s. Salvationists remained silent in Rui’an even in the post-Mao era. Territorial and Buddhist temples were devastated when land reform took away the landed estates most of them relied on as a primary source of income. Both territorial and Buddhist temples continued to lose ground as political campaigns further squeezed traditional ritual space. Collectivization impeded any lasting efforts to preserve and restore temple activities.
In this context, the successful survival of Protestant Christianity is a striking exception. Despite serious setbacks suffered during the Great Leap and the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, from the early 1970s onward, Protestant communities swelled in numbers and expanded into vast new territories, multiplying and scattering across Rui’an. When the Mao era ended, Protestant communities leveraged this period of growth to rapidly build new churches and restore old ones, turning many house gatherings into churches recognized by the state.
Looking at the broader context of social and political changes since the turn of the twentieth century sheds new light on the historical continuities and discontinuities in local religious life. When viewed against the overall continuity of religious life, the violent attacks on religion during the Mao era can be understood as short-term crises—drastic and sometimes brutal, but ultimately short-lived. In the year 1949, the disruption of religious life was much less severe than has been previously assumed, especially in the case of Protestant churches. By the late stages of the Cultural Revolution, both Christianity and communal religion were already recovering, and the expansion of Protestant churches was well underway. The post-1978 religious revival was a continuation of such developments. In other words, the religious revival in the post-Mao era did not happen overnight and did not begin with reform, but rather got its start during the Cultural Revolution, and appears to have been stimulated in part by the chaos and instability of the Cultural Revolution itself.
Nevertheless, the reinvigoration of religious life in the post-Mao era is far from a return to what it was before 1949. In many ways, the landscape of religion changed irrevocably under Mao. The large-scale religious revival was built on what religious life has become following three decades of Maoist rule.
The experiences of Rui’an religious communities as a whole suggest that a fuller understanding of the vicissitudes of the Mao era must first begin with the dynamics of revolutionary political campaigns. Attempts to control religion through policy and the apparatus of state cannot fully explain the evolution of religious life under Mao.8 The Communist government, like the Republican government that preceded it, embraced “secular nationalism.”9 Yet unlike the Nationalists, the Communist state aimed beyond religion, at the total transformation of the “old society.” Throughout the Mao era, religious policies were highly dependent on the central political and economic agenda enacted through state campaigns. Though they rarely directly targeted religion, major campaigns such as land reform had a profound impact on religious life.
It was the interaction between central directives and grassroots politics, as well as the local landscape of religion, that ultimately determined the effects of the revolution on local religious life and the trajectories of the different religious traditions. This is crucial to understanding what happened to Protestant churches in Rui’an after 1949, and why Protestantism in the Wenzhou region fared so differently than other religions under Mao. Contrary to what religious ecology theorists have suggested, Christianity did in fact suffer harsh repression during various stages of the Mao era.10 Yet the impact of Maoist campaigns (not just religious policies), Christian evangelism to a populace living in social chaos and uncertainty, and above all the local history of the church (its focus on house gatherings and its prior indigenization during the Republican era) all meant that Protestant communities had a vastly different experience of Maoism than communal religion or Catholic churches.
In this sense, the dynamics of religion under Mao cannot be boiled down to a dichotomy of state repression and local responses. In spite of the state’s profound penetration of local society, local actors—state and non-state—sometimes succeeded in manipulating central campaigns to their own ends. Maoist campaigns diverted the course of local religious history, notably by ending the ascension of salvationist religions. Yet in other ways Maoism reinforced other trends, like the indigenization of Christianity and the reinvention of communal religion.
The history of Wenzhou invites us to revisit the effects of state violence on the history of religion under Mao. At the peak of national campaigns, religious followers and organizations suffered extreme and brutal attacks. At these times, heightened political passions, combined with preexisting tensions, served to push attacks on religion far beyond what central policymakers expected or demanded. The “great leap in religious work” in 1958 is a powerful example of this, when local cadres took advantage of the Great Leap Forward to rapidly subdue religious communities.
The impact of national political campaigns often lasted far beyond these initial, brutal attacks. In the intervals and lulls between the most fervent periods of political activism, cadres and ordinary villagers alike exploited the stigmatization of religion to their own ends in daily life, as in the routine encroachments on temple property after land reform. Local actors navigated the rhythms of political campaigns both to attack and protect religious activities, followers, and organizations. The brutality of Maoism toward religious life is better understood through the local dynamics of social and political life, rather than solely as an expression of central political agendas. In other words, extreme violence against religion is better construed as an unintended consequence of Maoism, rather than its intended aim.
Looking at the transformation of religious life from a perspective encompassing local dynamics invites us to reconsider the Maoist governance of religion. Communist and socialist states, in China and elsewhere, are not “secular” in the classical sense, as they actively promote atheism as an anti-religious doctrine. But the Communist Party in fact did not have immediate plans to eliminate religion, and sometimes even co-opted religion to its own ends. Until the mid-1960s, officials at every level of government, from central and provincial authorities down to the lower levels of the state, made efforts to curb the enthusiastic anti-religious sentiments of local cadres, periodically reiterating the importance of religious freedom.11 The Cultural Revolution virtually criminalized all religious practices, but this was never a centrally formulated policy. Recent studies have proposed to include communism in some other socialist countries as a type of “atheist secularism” in order to understand how secularism came to be universalized.12 We should add Maoism to this list.
In this light, the Maoist governance of religion was inherently self-defeating due to the unstable political environment created by mass campaigns. As the temporality of the revolution became intertwined with local politics, it generated numerous unintended consequences, taking over the CCP’s project of secularization. The Chinese government has had to continually adapt to these unintended consequences of Maoist politics, as well as the unintended consequences of reform-era campaigns, including the “Three Rectifications and One Demolition” campaign in Zhejiang.
The Legacy of Maoism and the Transformation of the Religious Landscape
Destruction and disruption have tended to be the focus of discussion when it comes to the impact of Maoism on Chinese religion. Yet a closer look reveals that Maoism is both destructive and constructive, or destructively constructive, to Chinese religion, as is evident in three aspects of religious history in Rui’an.13
The first of these is the wholesale revitalization of sacred spaces, alongside a profound transformation in the geography of religion. Maoism led to the deterritorialization of religious space across all religious traditions on a scale never seen before, but this was accompanied by its reterritorialization as local communities strove to continue religious practices throughout the Mao era. Since the late 1970s in Wenzhou and elsewhere in China, a great number of temples and churches have been rebuilt and built. Never before in Chinese history were so many religious sites built or rebuilt in such a short period. Numerous temples and churches were rebuilt in new locations because their original sites could not be reclaimed. For the same reason, many of the local deities of communal religion are now housed in temples originally dedicated to other deities. To this day, numerous religious sites, rituals, and organizations still have not been restored and are most likely gone forever. Salvationist religion, which swept through China in the first half of the twentieth century, has been effectively silenced in mainland China since 1949, though it experienced a revival of sorts during the Qigong craze of the 1980s and 1990s. These developments have shifted the relative importance of various religious groups, as well as the sites and buildings used for worship, fundamentally altering the religious landscape.
Maoism and its legacies inadvertently facilitated a rearticulation of communal religion with elites and politics as local communities sought to reinvent communal religion. This is the second transformative effect of Maoism on Chinese religion that the Rui’an case suggests.
Beginning with the anti-superstition campaigns at the turn of the twentieth century, village elites departed from traditional cultural networks, at different times distancing themselves from, or being forced to leave, the religious field, a process Prasenjit Duara has described as a “disarticulat[ion]” of social relations.14 After 1949, this disarticulation culminated in the purge of traditional elites, who were removed from their role as the patrons of communal religion. This, alongside the loss of landed estates and temple buildings, pushed followers of communal religion to find new ways of embedding traditional religious practices in an altered social landscape.
During the Mao era, communal religion retreated from everyday social life, yet it continued to coexist and compete with the state apparatus and party organizations in rural areas. Thus, as Edward Friedman notes, tradition “has continued even as the traditional elite has not, because newly risen groups from the poor have bound culture to politics.”15 The dissolution of the collective planned economy and the start of reform pushed forward the reinvention of communal religion. The institutionalization and legitimization of temple organizations (relying heavily on the EPAs) allowed followers of communal religion to reverse the process of “disarticulation.” In this light, religious transformations in Rui’an after 1949 appear as part of a longer process of renewal and rearticulation in traditional rural organizations that began at the turn of the twentieth century, allowing communal religion to re-engage with the state.16
Finally, the “destructively constructive” effects of Maoism on religious life in Wenzhou are most evident in the ascension of localized Christianity, in particular Protestant Christianity, a trend that continues today and that has greatly transformed the dynamics of Christianity and local religion throughout the region.
Protestant Christianity as it emerged from the Mao era was different from Christianity before 1949 in several important respects. After the Mao era, Christianity was much further integrated into local society. Christianity in Wenzhou today, in its religious practices, its structure, and its self-representation, is deeply permeated with the values, symbols, and ways of thinking of local society. The denominations brought by Western missionaries have largely disappeared, replaced by local articulations of religious practice and belief. From the late 1970s onward, Christian businessmen from Wenzhou started to disseminate “Wenzhou Christianity”—a type of Christianity heavily invested with localized practices and modes of operation unique to this region. Throughout China and even overseas, Wenzhou Christian entrepreneurs spread the gospel among locals and migrant workers through their nationwide network of businesses and factories.17 Moreover, they have established a large number of what they refer to as “brother churches” across vast parts of China, stretching all the way from the Northeast to the Southwest, and in Wenzhounese communities across the world.18
This type of localized Christianity is also characterized by rampant schisms and new denominationalism, which manifest most visibly in the standoff between house meetings and Three-Self churches emerging from the Mao years. Schisms and new denominationalism are partly driven by the legacy of the Mao era: not only deep distrust and antagonism toward the state, but also distrust and division within Christian communities. Throughout China, during the Mao era, Protestant churches became more divided than ever. Paradoxically, the development of schisms and new denominationalism has also contributed to the dissemination and expansion of Protestantism.
A similar and important trend of survival and expansion, as Chapter 5 shows, is also visible in Protestant communities elsewhere in China, such as Wenling County of Zhejiang, Nanyang and Xinyang regions of Henan, Fuyang region of Anhui, and Ningde and Quanzhou regions of Fujian. Furthermore, as in Wenzhou, this increase in church membership often occurred alongside the dissemination of Protestantism to new areas, laying the foundation for a much bigger revival in the post-Mao era.
The Aura of Revolution and Religion in Urbanizing China
One of the most fundamental aspects of religious change under Mao is the issue of religious property, particularly land. Because the Mao era left behind it numerous disputes over religious property and estates, communities throughout China are still seeking the restitution of religious sites. These efforts are likely to continue in the foreseeable future.
Although the temple and church restitution movement in the 1980s and 1990s reversed the long trend of encroachment on traditional religious space, the nationalization of land after 1949 permanently changed the outlook for religious properties, creating a new long-term threat to the existence of religious sites and organizations. As long as the current land regime remains in place, religious communities will not be entirely secure in their rights to their land and buildings.
The restoration of temples and churches during and after decollectivization generally lacked formal legal status, even though it often took place with the tacit or overt acceptance of local authorities. In cases where restitution efforts failed, some communities and religious organizations built new temples or churches in new locations, also lacking official recognition. Paradoxically, the lack of legal recognition gave village temples, monasteries, and house churches a certain freedom to build, rebuild, or expand their buildings as they wished. This gave rise to a creeping gray zone in property issues, which the government came to see as an obstacle to its grand urbanization of rural areas.
Urbanization has been rapidly changing Chinese society. From 2000 to 2017, the urban population jumped from 35.39 percent to 58.5 percent. The government plans to increase the urban population to around 0.9 billion, or 70 percent of the total population, by 2025. The massive urbanization that the Chinese government is forcefully promoting today is conducted through programs like “Three Rectifications and One Demolition” in Zhejiang, seemingly with much less brutality than the transformations in rural and semi-urban society under Mao. It even enjoys popular support to a great extent, as to many people it represents development and progress. Yet the ambition of urbanizing China to such a degree in such a short period equates to another total reordering of social life. Massive urbanization can thus be construed as the manifestation and continuation of “authoritarian high modernism,”19 as James Scott has described it, which was a prominent aspect of the 1949 revolution.
The vast expansion of urban areas and the reorganization of social space have inevitably made religious sites face another major challenge, if not crisis. The insecure property rights and vulnerable legal status of religious organizations make them particularly susceptible to state crackdowns. In Zhejiang since 2015, the local government has ordered village EPAs to transfer the management of their assets to village governments, creating a further challenge for religious life.
In recent years, alongside urbanization plans, the Chinese government has been promoting the legalization of territorial temples—a radical shift compared with the loss of status these temples have experienced since the early twentieth century. At the same time, the government is also pushing Buddhist temples and Christian churches to register their properties with the government and open their own bank accounts (in the church or temple’s name). The state is expanding its bureaucratic machinery, using big data technology in the surveillance of religious sites. These developments foreshadow an increasing legibility of religious communities that would allow the state to exert greater control. Yet, as this book suggests, the state’s heavy hand when it comes to religious life has so far left room for maneuver, manipulation, and change. It is likely that as some gray areas disappear, new ones will emerge. And as was the case throughout the radical political movements of the twentieth century, forthcoming changes may not signal the end of religious life, but instead bring about renewal and other unexpected transformations.
1Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, Mark Selden, and Kay Ann Johnson, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); Gregory A. Ruf, Cadres and Kin: Making a Socialist Village in West China, 1921–1991 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jeremy Brown and Matthew Johnson, eds., Maoism at the Grassroots: Everyday Life in China’s Era of High Socialism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).
2Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 134.
3Helen Siu, Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
4“Nongcun mixin huodong de fazhan yingxiang shengchan he shehui zhi’an” (The development of superstitious activities in rural areas affected production and public security), Neibu cankao, December 25, 1962, 6–7.
5“Youxie Gongshe chuxian mixin huodong” (Superstitious activities appeared in some communes), Neibu cankao, January 24, 1962, 13–14.
6Stephen Jones, “Chinese Ritual Music under Mao and Deng,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 8 (1999): 27–66; Dong Chuanling, “Jianguo liushinian huabei nongcun shehui shenghuo bianqian—yi Shandong Sheng Liangshan Xian wei ge’an” (The evolution of rural social life in the six decades after 1949—the case of Liangshan County, Shangdong Province) (PhD dissertation, Nankai University, 2010), 225–227.
7Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
8Fenggang Yang, for instance, has used changes in religious demand and supply that government regulations caused to explain religious changes in the PRC. See Fenggang Yang, Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
9Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, 2010).
10Religious ecology theorists argued that the attacks on village temples and lineage organizations in the name of anti-superstition since 1949 have severely damaged the balance of religious ecology and led to the sharp decline in influence of traditional religious activities, making rural society vulnerable to the penetration of Protestantism. For a survey of discussions of “religious ecology” in Chinese academia, see Philip Clart, “‘Religious Ecology’ as a New Model for the Study of Religious Diversity in China,” in Religious Diversity in Chinese Thought, eds. Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Joachim Gentz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 187–199. For a study that systemically applies the theory of “religious ecology,” see Xiaoyi Chen, Zhongguoshi zongjiao shengtai: Qingyan zongjiao duoyangxing ge’an yanjiu (Chinese religious ecology: a case study on religious diversity at Qingyan) (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2008).
11For an example in other provinces, see Qin Heping, “Ershi shiji wuliushi niandai Wazu diqu Jidujiao de tiaoshi ji fazhan zhi renshi” (A discussion on adjustment and development of Protestant Christianity in Wa regions in 1950s and 1960s), in Zhongguo Bianjiang Minzu Yanjiu (Studies of China’s Frontier Regions and Nationalities) 3: 219–222.
12Tam T. T. Ngo and Justine B. Quijada, eds., Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
13Dan Smyer Yu has suggested that communism has been destructively creative to religion in the history of the PRC. His statement focuses on how Chinese Communism has cleared social spaces for the return of Christianity and how it has lent Buddhism the rhetoric of scientism for the latter’s reconstruction of legitimacy in the post-Mao era. His take on Christianity is very similar to those religious ecology theorists in mainland China. See Dan Smyer Yu, “Apologetics of Religion and Science: Conversion Projects in Contemporary China,” in Atheist Secularism and Its Discontents: A Comparative Study of Religion and Communism in Eurasia, eds. Tam T. T. Ngo and Justine B. Quijada (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 155–172.
14Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power and the State: Rural Society in North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 215.
15See Edward Friedman’s review of Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Duara, Culture, Power, and the State) in The American Historical Review 95, no. 3 (1995): 885.
16Duara, Culture, Power, and the State. In particular, see Chapters 4 and 5 on the decline of lineage and religion.
17Nanlai Cao, Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), Chapters 4 and 6.
18For an example in Henan Province, see David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 2006), 74–89. For the global expansion of Wenzhou Christianity, see Nanlai Cao, Wenzhou Jidutu yu Zhongguo caogen quanqiuhua (Wenzhou Christians and grassroots globalization) (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2017).
19James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), Chapter 3.