Organizer: Susan K. McCarthy, Providence College, USA Chair: Carsten T. Vala, Loyola University, Maryland, USA Discussant: Richard P. Madsen, University of California, San Diego, USA Religious revival in contemporary China has entailed the turn by millions to state-sanctioned and illicit faiths. To manage this revival, the party-state has established supervisory structures including national religious associations and a registration system for sites of worship representing the five officially recognized faiths. Despite the regime’s legal, spatial and discursive efforts to contain religion, religious actors are spilling outside official boundaries, at times with official approval. Moreover despite its interest in control, the regime encourages religious revival, supports faith-based social welfare provision, and frequently forgoes repression of unregistered groups. In all these ways the regime’s actions undermine simplistic control-and-resistance paradigms.
This panel analyzes the complex ways religious and state actors blur boundaries between sanctioned and illicit religious practices, and what this blurring means for our understanding of state-society relations in contemporary China. The paper by Teresa Wright and Teresa Zimmerman-Liu explains variation in local state treatment of unregistered Christian churches, and its implications for center-local state relations. Susan McCarthy’s analysis of faith-based social service provision finds that religious charity allows believers to thwart restrictions on faith expression by “repurposing” state-approved categories like the NGO. Anna Sun argues that despite state efforts to cast Confucianism in moral-philosophical and cultural terms, ritual practices at the grassroots highlight its increasingly religious character and meaning. Carsten Vala’s paper comparing the behavior of actors in official and unofficial religious groups questions the utility of viewing state-religious interactions through the lens of state corporatism or the paradigm of resistance and control.
As the popularity of unregistered Protestant “house churches” has grown over the past two decades, the CCP increasingly has focused its attention on the management of religion. While it is tempting to view the Chinese state as a monolithic entity bent on either destroying or coopting popular religious groups, a closer investigation reveals great complexity and variation in the response of governing authorities to unregistered Protestant house churches. Drawing on roughly ten interviews with members of these churches and human rights lawyers who have defended these individuals; the personal experience of one of the co-authors as both a member of one of these groups and a translator for political asylum cases involving group members; primary documents produced by these groups; and secondary analyses, this paper finds that there are five major sources of variation in relations between government authorities and unregistered house church members in China today. Overall, these findings suggest that the efforts of central political authorities to either coopt or control popular religious groups will not proceed smoothly or uniformly.
As the popularity of unregistered Protestant “house churches” has grown over the past two decades, the CCP increasingly has focused its attention on the management of religion. While it is tempting to view the Chinese state as a monolithic entity bent on either destroying or coopting popular religious groups, a closer investigation reveals great complexity and variation in the response of governing authorities to unregistered Protestant house churches. Drawing on roughly ten interviews with members of these churches and human rights lawyers who have defended these individuals; the personal experience of one of the co-authors as both a member of one of these groups and a translator for political asylum cases involving group members; primary documents produced by these groups; and secondary analyses, this paper finds that there are five major sources of variation in relations between government authorities and unregistered house church members in China today. Overall, these findings suggest that the efforts of central political authorities to either coopt or control popular religious groups will not proceed smoothly or uniformly.
This paper explores issues of loyalty and resistance to authoritarian rule through an analysis of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in contemporary China. The subjects of my research are three non-profit charities connected to the Catholic, Buddhist, and Muslim faiths, respectively. Chinese FBOs represent the confluence of two recent trends, religious revival and the rise of a non-state associational realm. FBOs are tolerated and even promoted because they are seen as helping construct the "harmonious society." Yet FBOs are also sites of resistance to regime policies, particularly those governing religious practice and expression.
Research on religious resistance in China typically focuses on illicit groups (e.g. Falun Gong) or on approved faiths implicated in political controversy (e.g. Tibetan Buddhism). In these situations, opposition in the form of what Hirschman calls "exit" and "voice" is evident in the actions and intentions of resisters. In contrast, the activities of the FBOs I examine appear to, and do, express "loyalty" to the regime. I argue, however, that through charity FBOs "repurpose" state-sanctioned institutions and categories in ways that enable believers to elide religious restrictions. The melding of religion with institutional forms sanctioned by the state (the NGO) allows adherents to circumvent constraints on religion, and facilitates its entry into the public square. Whether this resistance will help transform the norms and practices of the regime or enhance its "authoritarian resilience" (Nathan) is inconclusive. Nonetheless my findings highlight the complicated nature of resistance and accommodation under authoritarian rule.
The religious nature of Confucianism has been long debated among sinologists, historians, religious studies scholars, anthropologists, and sociologists. In this paper I further this debate through an examination of actual Confucian ritual practice, along with archival research on the making of Confucianism as a religion in the West, and analysis of the controversy over the religious nature of Confucianism in contemporary China. No matter how we define the nature of Confucianism (as philosophy, as way of life, or as religion), the very existence of personal rites conducted in Confucius temples, such as incense burning, praying to Confucius for blessings, and writing personal wishes on prayer cards (xuyuanqian), shows that there is a noteworthy religious dimension to the Confucian tradition.
This paper examines personal rites performed in Confucius temples in different regions of China, based on ethnographic research conducted between 2003 and 2010 at approximately one-dozen Confucius temples (kongmao or wenmiao). Interviews with visitors to these temples, observation of their actions, and analysis of the material objects related to the rites they perform (such as prayer cards) underscore the significant and diverse revival of ritual Confucius worship in the temple setting, and highlight its religious meanings.
In overviews of state-society relations in contemporary China, scholars have applied corporatism to conceptualize the dynamics between recognized religions and the state but then applied the concept of resistance to characterize the interaction between popular religion and state. This dual characterization stresses the dimension of Party-state control over activities within authorized religious sites as it highlights the assertiveness of religious actors outside them. By stressing the structure of regime monitoring of official religions, such a blanket perspective misses the agency of grassroots religious actors within official boundaries to expand their activities. In addition, it fails to identify how the Party-state evaluates the potential threat posed by different religions and selectively promotes religions that offer strategic benefits.
Similarly, although practitioners of popular religion surely may resist regime encroachment, they are more likely to seek to engage local state officials and sustain a mutual relationship in which popular religious actors offer material benefits in return for official legitimation. In this paper, I draw upon interviews with religious adherents in China, cadre training manuals, collections of religious policies, online reports of religious policy implementation, and an account of ten years’ experience in management of religion by a provincial official. I suggest a way to capture the top-down hegemonic agenda of regime control as well as address the bottom-up assertiveness of local religious actors that seeks to expand religious activities without directly confronting regime power.
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