Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China ed by Yoshiko Ashiwa, David L. Wank (review)

96 Journal of Chinese Religions Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China Edited by YOSHIKO ASHIWA and DAVID L. WANK. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. vii, 294 pages. ISBN 978-0-8047-5842-0. US$24.95 paper. Making Religion, Making the State sheds new light on the interaction between religion and the state in modern Chinese history by stressing the ways in which a wide range of actors (including officials, elites, and specialists) have negotiated religion’s development and the state’s attempts to regulate it. The editors, both of whom are social scientists working in Tokyo (Ashiwa at Hitotsubashi University; Wank at Sophia University), have put together an impressive set of papers based on a 2004 conference held at Stanford University, all of which consider the problem of how the category of religion has been conceptualized and reworked from the late Qing to the present day. The book’s Introduction focuses on the problem of how the development of religious traditions has constituted an integral component of modern state-making (hence the book’s title). Ashiwa and Wank present a systematic review of previous scholarship, followed by an explanation of their own analytical framework based on Talal Asad’s discussion of religion and modern state formation (see pp. 6-9). They also present a typology of different processes of institutionalization, including debates among politicians and bureaucrats (the planning process for policies), state imposition of new categories (a top-down process), the accommodation of state institutions (one result of the aforementioned top-down processes), and the roles of religious and communal institutions (their potential for a bottom-up response) (pp. 12-17). The first paper, by Timothy Brook, examines the range of responses to religious activities on the part of the imperial state, namely patronage, prohibition, and regulation (p. 23; I would modify this as a five-part typology encompassing absorption, patronage, acceptance, tolerance, and suppression, all of which constitute different forms of regulation). Brook convincingly demonstrates the importance of local gazetteers as sites for the negotiation of state and local agendas (pp. 35, 37), while also pointing to a number of topics that merit further investigation, including the marginalization of Buddhism and Taoism in instances when they were labeled as “superstition” (mixin 迷信) (pp. 38-39). One only regrets that Brook did not discuss Daniel L. Overmyer’s classic study of imperial state attitudes towards religion, which was published in the 1989-1990 issue of Cahiers d’Extrême Asie.1 The papers by Ashiwa and Wank consider the case of modern Chinese Buddhism, including a case study of the same temple, the Nanputuoshan 南普陀山 monastery in Xiamen 廈門. Both authors present dynamic discussions of how religious leaders and other non-state actors have contributed to Buddhism’s development during the modern era (see especially pp. 44-49, 66-67, 137-138, 145-146), with Ashiwa emphasizing Republican-era anti-superstition 1 “Attitudes Toward Popular Religion in Ritual Texts of the Chinese State: The Collected Statutes of the Great Ming,” Cahiers d'Extrême-Asie 5 (1989/1990): 191-221. Book Reviews 97 campaigns (pp. 49-55) and Wank the problems and challenges facing Buddhism in China today (pp. 141-144). Ashiwa’s paper draws on Asad’s theories to stress the importance of power, intentionality, and secularism, as well as the problem of belief moving from public spaces into individual private ones (pp. 44-45, 64, 68-69). His paper is also noteworthy for exploring the key roles played by overseas Chinese (pp. 61, 65), as well as similar processes that occurred in other countries (pp. 46-47). The paper by Wank presents thorough discussions of how officials and Buddhist clerics attempt to exploit Buddhism’s material resources (pp. 142-143), while also making the important point that engaging in acts of philanthropy has enabled Buddhism to expand into new areas of public life (p. 146). Given their many common points, it seems odd that the above-mentioned two papers bracket the articles on Christianity. The first, by Richard Madsen and Fan Lizhu 范麗珠, provides a vivid description of pilgrimage rites at the Catholic Marian Shrine of Sheshan 佘山. The authors pay close attention to the...