This book offers an overview of Chinese folk religion, mainly in the period from 1949 to 1976, when Mao Zedong presided over a period of unprecedented political turbulence and steady modernization of economic, social, and cultural life. It explores the involvements and investments of ordinary people in sustaining folk religion through these hard times and seeks to understand why it survived in spite of all the efforts made by the Mao regime to suppress it. The starting assumption – one seldom articulated in histories of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – is that when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949, it did so in an overwhelmingly religious society. The CCP declared freedom of religion but restricted it to five religions that it believed conformed, if only potentially, to the model of a modern religion. These were Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Roman Catholicism, and each of these was placed under fairly strict state regulation under a national association. The religion of the vast majority of the populace, however, was deemed by the CCP not to correspond to a religion at all, but was dismissed as ‘feudal superstition’ (封建迷信 fengjian mixin), a loose congeries of unscientific beliefs and disabling rituals that prevented the masses from taking control of their lives, promoting dependence on gods and cosmic forces.