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FIVE Gender, Modernity, and Pentecostal Christianity in China NANLAI CAO China has experienced a strong revival of Christianity in the last few decades of economic reform. Recent estimates of the Chinese Christian population range from 23 million to 60 million.1 Although the “Christianity fever” has swept across the country, there are clear regional variations in the pattern of church growth. These variations are further compounded by the differentiation between the official TSPM (Three-Self Patriotic Movement) churches and the so-called house church movement.2 Generally, the many rural-based house churches feature a charismatic structure dominated by illiterate or semi-literate experientially inclined lay women, while the TSPM movement in urban areas has an institutionalized structure in which theologically trained male clergy assume leadership positions.3 This experiential/­ theological or charismatic/bureaucratic split continues to be played out in the process of intensified urbanization and modernization. The Christian scene at the grassroots level is far more complex and varied. Since the expulsion of foreign missionaries by the new Communist regime in the early 1950s, Christianity has been thoroughly indigenized through close contact with immediate local Chinese realities.The absence of an overarching central interpretative authority has contributed to the hybrid and fragmented nature of Chinese Christianity.4 Pentecostalism appears to be the dominant form of Christian expression among organizationally independent church groups outside the officially controlled TSPM church system, mainly due to its ability to adapt to changing local circumstances and to address daily practical concerns.5 This subject of this chapter is the Pentecostal/charismatic form of Christianity as it relates to the rise of a rationalized market modernity in the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing postMao period.Gendered charismatic authority and expression among prosperous Pentecostal-influenced communities in the coastal Wenzhou city serve as the focus of this discussion. The Pentecostal sector of Christianity mainly appeals to socially marginalized groups in rural and newly urbanized areas.Faith healing,a ­technically 150 Nanlai Cao illegal practice in the view of the authorities,has been cited as a major reason for the growth of the rural Chinese church by both researchers and converts .6 Even though religious persecution is often harshest in the impoverished inland, the rural inland provinces such as Henan and Anhui have the fastest growth rates of Pentecostal-like house churches. The spectacular growth has to a large extent depended on a multitude of traveling revival preachers and fluid, horizontal Pentecostal church networks that the state cannot effectively control and monitor.Pentecostal leaders of the rural house church often draw on their experiences of suffering under oppression and hardship and embrace an identity of martyrdom.These church communities take a spiritual approach to social and political issues and are exclusivist in orientation.Low level of education,minimally trained clergy,lack of medical provision,and rural poverty all appear to have contributed to the Pentecostal tendency in the countryside. This rural, anti-institutional, charismatic sentiment is not shared by the newly emerged house churches in major Chinese cities such as Beijing,where there are a great portion of university-educated intellectuals,academics,and other members of the urban middle class involved in church activities.These often Western-oriented or, more specifically, Anglo-American-oriented house churches focus on the study of Christian doctrines and actively engage in public discourse on human rights, with a focus on the religious rights of house Christians.7 Led by some prominent liberal intellectuals and rights lawyers, with the ultimate vision of a Christian China, high-profile Beijing house churches represent the most organized and politically active sector of the Chinese house church community. It is not an exaggeration to say that a much politicized intellectual house church movement has taken shape in the capital city, under close monitoring and scrutiny by the central party-state. The prosperous coastal city ofWenzhou in southeast China has produced another distinctive regional model of church development in the reform era in which the new rich businessmen, locally called “boss Christians,” spearhead local church development.8 Wenzhou’s recent Christian revival has benefited from the city’s political marginality and a mission-derived local faith tradition as well as a vibrant private household-based economy.It is now the most Christianized Chinese city,with a Christian population estimated to be as many as one million (15 percent of the local population). This upwardly mobile class of Christians, usually with rural origins, has a separate identity from either the official TSPM church, on the one hand, or...

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