Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900–1937

Introduction

Most Chinese children hear the story of Sun Yat-sen’s vandalism of temple deity images when they are in primary school. They learn from their teachers or from their textbooks that when still a young boy, Sun, “the father of the Chinese Republic,” made a courageous attempt to civilize his superstitious fellow villagers by destroying the images of the patron deity in the temple of his home village in Xiangshan 香山 (now Zhongshan 中山) county, Guangdong province. The lessons of this story are simple enough for young students to understand. First, it is superstitious , and thus wrong, to worship deities. Second, one of Sun’s great contributions to the country was his effort to lead the Chinese people out of backwardness and towards modernity. It is not known how much of the story is based on actual fact, nor when it began to be used as a means of teaching Chinese students to oppose superstition.1 The story illustrates an important phenomenon in modern China: how popular religion, including temples and deity worship, began to experience a tense relationship with the modern state, as then represented by Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Nationalist regime. To the Nationalist regime, the custom of worshiping deities was an obstacle to the nation’s efforts to modernize, and hence, it was the obligation of the government to remold citizens’ behavior by eliminating deity images and temples. What is downplayed in this story is the villagers’ reaction to Sun’s ambition to “modernize” their way of thinking. Ernest Gellner has pointed out how the emergence of the modern state, empowered by the centralization of resources to facilitate mass education, has led to the growth of a homogeneous and secular culture.2 This secularizing trend was particularly obvious among the so-called revolutionary regimes, which sought to turn imperial subjects into citizens by indoctrinating them in a new and modern national culture. Yet, confrontations between the state and the people ensued when the latter introduction Negotiating Religion.indd 1 2010/11/30 4:40:51 PM 2 Negotiating Religion in Modern China chose to cling to their traditional culture and religious practices. In France, after the 1789 Revolution, the large-scale closure of churches by the revolutionaries provoked widespread religious riots in which women took an active role. The new regime was outraged to see the persistence of local religious ceremonies, such as carnivals and the worship of the statues of the Black Virgin. A similar process of “dechristianization” also took place in the Soviet Union, where the churches were closed down after the 1917 Revolution as part of the Communist regime’s assault on the peasants’ religious faith. Religious holidays that were pagan in nature, however, became even more enthusiastically celebrated in villages. The celebration of religious holidays, Sheila Fitzpatrick points out, “looks less like piety than a form of resistance,” as it meant that the peasants could take a break from their work in the fields.3 So, what Gellner has overlooked is the fact that the modern state’s endeavor to institute a homogeneous and secular culture has provoked strong popular resistance in the past two centuries of human history. Religion does not vanish. Rather, it adapts itself to the changing political environment. Contestation and negotiation between the modern state and the common people in the religious domain started to unfold in China at the turn of the twentieth century, and its repercussions still linger. The 1911 Revolution brought into being a secular regime in China. Strongly influenced by modern concepts, such as evolution, progress, and rationality, and believing that the common people’s religious observances were responsible for the country’s backwardness, the new government condemned religious practices as “superstition” and attempted to integrate people of all social classes into a unified state culture that featured new civic rituals and festivals. How far did the Republican regime’s modernizing projects succeed in standardizing and secularizing the people’s beliefs and practices? Did the common people readily give up their religious traditions and surrender to the new national culture in the making? Recent scholarship by Prasenjit Duara and Rebecca Nedostup provides valuable insights into the Republican government’s formulation of religious policies. They both examine the impact of “modernist” values on government officials’ belief in the religion-superstition dichotomy. Nedostup goes a step further to explain the way in which the government’s system of classification, due to its inherent inconsistencies and ambiguities, provoked numerous disputes over temples and temple property...