Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou by Nanlai Cao (review)

Nanlai Cao’s Constructing China’s Jerusalem is an impressive achievement. It both fills an important gap in the literature and also gives us a scholarly understanding of contemporary Chinese Christianity. There are few such works, and more works like it are needed.

Cao is a particularly deft guide of the local Christian community in the southeast coastal city of Wenzhou, a dynamic center of global capitalism and China’s largest urban center of Christianity, with over one million Protestant Christians (p. 1). He is uniquely suited for his task because — over a nineteenmonth period between 2004 and 2006 — he did both formal and informal interviews in Mandarin with about seventy church members, some of whom he repeatedly interviewed. Indeed, during his many months of fieldwork, he would often rush from one church to another, and so he had a personal view of some of the complexities of the contemporary church scene. Cao also has family based in Wenzhou, which allowed him a more profound understanding of the local situation. In this process, Cao also gained the trust of some powerful church leaders who gave him nearly free rein to investigate the inner workings of the Wenzhou church. They were looking for prestige; he was looking to do a thorough study.

Further, Cao has a unique perspective in understanding Christianity from the inside as well. He had studied at Fordham University and done research on the immigrant Chinese church in New York City. He also identifies himself as a cultural Christian, a sympathizer with no personal commitment. Indeed, some church members told him that they were comfortable sharing delicate internal politics and other subject areas with him, because of his sympathetic stance, but also because of his outsider (and thus more objective) status.

In addition, Cao has also done the hard work necessary to produce this strong volume. As the author himself implies, doing ethnographic work on contemporary Christianity in China is not always easy. There are the obvious source limitations, the still existing political sensitivities of studying what some still consider a foreign religion, and the lack of a critical apparatus on the part of local Christians to articulate fully their own experiences. Nanlai Cao has been able to turn all of these limitations to his advantage. He has accessed important historical documents, he has benefited from the now semiprivileged status that Protestantism seems to enjoy in the city (and which he describes so well), and he has turned his conversations and observations of Wenzhou Christians into ethnographic gold. He has also engaged the finest and most current social science research. Finally, he — quite deliberately — employs a narrative approach to describe his findings. This fact makes the work quite readable and — often times — quite enjoyable as well.

Some of the author’s main questions are: “How has it been possible for Christianity to achieve such high visibility and popularity among diverse groups of people in one of China’s most commercialized regional economies?” “Who are the key social actors maneuvering behind such high-profile activities?” “How have they managed to negotiate such a massive space for the local church and refashion a nontraditional religious identity in the public arena?” (pp. 3–4).

Throughout his work, Cao calls into question the usefulness of always seeing a dichotomy between civil society and the state. He also questions the paradigm of state domination and religious resistance. Indeed, the Wenzhou “Christian revival has taken place under the conditions of a modernizing state, lax local governance, an emerging capitalist consumer economy, and greater spatial mobility among individuals” (p. 11). With such conditions being met, we are thus a long way from the situation of Christians during the socialist high tide and during the Cultural Revolution.

At one point, one of Cao’s interlocutors, a Christian businessman — or “boss...