The Religious Question in Modern China (review)

This book is an extremely ambitious effort to pose, and partly to answer, large questions concerning “religion” in China’s recent past. The authors are largely successful both in articulating these questions and analyzing them cogently. But the most remarkable feature of the work is the example that it sets for interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together insights from history, religion, sociology, and anthropology.

The authors’ task is to view the history of “religion” in China since the late nineteenth century to the present as a single fabric. They claim that although Chinese religion was diverse before 1900, it had an “ordering center of gravity: the religio-political state” (3). Destroyed by the cumulative assaults of the Revolution of 1911, the May Fourth Movement, the secularizing pressure of the kmt (Guomindang), and the extreme disruptions of the Communist decades, this religion was reduced to a mere shell of its once-vibrant life, thereby de-centering society. Notwithstanding its handicaps, however, religion remains surprisingly active in China, partly because the modernist and statist nation-building ambitions and programs of the kmt and the Communists alike have both failed to provide a substitute for the old religious culture. In recent years, the state, perhaps less insecure than in the past, has given a little more behavioral latitude to religious activities than it did forty or fifty years ago, though the wounds inflicted by the relentless secularizing campaigns of the twentieth century are still raw.

The authors trace the process of declension in the old broad-band and ubiquitous traditional religion to the reforms of 1898, when the Chinese elite first began to acquiesce in the Western separation of “religion” and “superstition.” At this point, organizational or institutionalized religions became legitimate, whereas local cults, spirit mediums, and village temples were relegated to the category of “superstition.” This process, which has taken many decades, is still evolving in Chinese communities around the world (the past twenty years has also witnessed a wave of new temple building and reconstruction, and a stunning growth of Protestant Christianity).

The authors have adopted a broad and eclectic approach. They are familiar with the literature of this ungainly field, and they never introduce a contemporary topic without solid historical grounding. This work also covers Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore in some detail. The sections about qigong, Falun Gong, and Christianity (especially those on evangelical Protestantism) are impressive. The authors insight-fully view Christianity as well placed to attract considerable adherents within China’s competitive religious context. They point out that a combination of the flexible network organization of the unregistered congregations and the appeal of such practices as healing, speaking in tongues, and prophecy could sustain a high growth rate, especially for Protestants.