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113 Since the repression of Falungong (法輪功, Practice of the Wheel of the Law) in 1999, the question of “cults” has become a critical issue in the Chinese religious field, leading Chinese scholars and ideologues to elaborate a new discourse on the category of “evil cults” (邪教, xiejiao). This was a term from imperial times that had fallen into disuse but was now reactivated to replace the concept of “reactionary secret societies” (反動會 道門, fandong huidaomen), which had been used in the 1950s in the campaigns to exterminate unorthodox religious groups such as the Yiguandao (一貫道, Way of Pervading Unity).1 This discourse draws equally on references to a genealogy of sectarian rebellions going back to the second century c.e. and on Western sources on “cults” associated with Christian apologetics and the academic discipline of the sociology of religions. This chapter attempts to trace the contours of the evolution of discourse on stigmatized religious groups in twentieth-century China—a discourse that has reinvented itself twice, defining itself first within the context of revolutionary struggle, and then as part of the contemporary worldwide anti-cult movement. Although it was the Falungong case that stimulated the production of the contemporary general anti-xiejiao discourse discussed in this chapter, this discourse is distinct from the specifically antiFalungong propaganda deployed during the repression campaign, which is not considered here.2 Unlike the introduction of other modern paradigms such as the sciencereligion -superstition dialectic, which led to the tearing apart of China’s traditional cultural fabric and to the reshaping of its politico-religious landscape, the use of modern categories to label “cults” appears to have only served to mask the redeployment of the classical Chinese paradigm of the conflict between the State and the Sect. But the current recourse 4 Heretical Doctrines, Reactionary Secret Societies, Evil Cults Labeling Heterodoxy in Twentieth-Century China David A. Palmer 宗樹人 UC-Yang-rev.indd 113 UC-Yang-rev.indd 113 8/27/2008 1:01:47 PM 8/27/2008 1:01:47 PM 114 / David A. Palmer to universalist discourses of the social sciences could, in the long term, have unpredictable consequences for the Chinese state’s legitimizing of its anti-cult campaigns. The field of Chinese “cults,” or “sects,” is a mined one, in which it is difficult to draw a clear line between a category deployed by the Chinese state’s ideology and propaganda, be it imperial or communist (which has always had little relationship with the reality on the ground) and what appears to be a specific and widespread form of Chinese religion (which, lacking a name of its own, has always been situated outside of traditional China’s ritual and orthodox order). To the problem of categorization that already exists in the Chinese language is added a further element of confusion when Western terms such as “cult,” “sect,” “sectarian tradition ,” “sectarian milieu,” or even “new religious movements” are used to designate these groups, despite all the caveats and well-argued sociological justifications used by scholars, including the author of these lines (Jordan & Overmyer 1986; Seiwert 2003; Palmer 2002; 2005:421–29; 2006; 2007:285–90). Indeed, their translation and their use in China have led to a new form of “translingual practice”—the invention of new categories based on Western concepts that take on a new meaning in the Chinese context (L. Liu 1995; Asad 1986). In the case that interests us here, the Western family of terms “sect,” “cult,” and “new religious movement,” which make possible a constant and ambiguous oscillation between anti-cult polemics and a neutral scientific idiom, lends itself perfectly to the needs of the Chinese authorities who, through the elaboration of a discourse circulating between ideologues, scholars, and officials, seek both to provide an a posteriori justification for the harsh repression of some groups and to develop a more objective understanding of the religious phenomenon in order to better manage it in the future. Discourse is not merely a reflection or representation of the reality being talked about: by defining and producing the objects of our knowledge , it shapes and orients our interactions with the world; it is thus inseparable from the exercise and circulation of power (Foucault 1980). The case of xiejiao described here can be seen in two ways. On the one hand, we see how the Chinese state has used the production of discourse to control the religious field, adapting to changes in ideology and political regime by using different idioms (cosmological, revolutionary, social scientific) to elaborate and...

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