Building on the work of Prasenjit Duara, Vincent Goossaert, and Talal Asad, among others, Rebecca Nedostup's Superstitious Regimes offers a penetrating analysis of the complex confrontation between the Chinese Nationalist regime and the many faces of Chinese religion, largely during the Nanjing Decade. Her major theme is secularization, which Nationalist leaders saw as a necessary element of modern state building; traditional Chinese religion—much of which was relabelled as “superstition”—was viewed as an obstacle to mobilization and state penetration of society, as well as an international embarrassment. As part of the constitutional framework of modernity, freedom of religion was to be accorded to those religions who recast themselves along Western, generally Protestant lines, but the rights of most religious practitioners were not at the forefront of Nationalist concerns. While Islam, Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism, and Christianity were largely left alone for geopolitical and diplomatic reasons, Buddhism, Daoism, redemptive societies. and local cults became frequent objects of struggle.

The broad outlines of this struggle are well known, at least to scholars of Chinese religion. Nedostup's signal contribution is to examine in much greater detail a number of case studies from the Nationalists’ base area in Jiangsu, grounding her work in an impressive variety of legal cases, archival materials, memoirs, newspapers, and magazines. Her efforts on this front are nothing short of herculean; the notes and bibliography come to 125 pages.

The portrait that emerges from this finely detailed study is one of immense complexity. In some instances authorities sought to confiscate temples and temple properties for “simple” material reasons: temple buildings would house new, modern schools, and temple properties would pay at least some of the expenses of these schools. More broadly, Nationalists hoped to decenter what Prasenjit Duara has called the “cultural nexus of power” and insert state agents in sites previously occupied by local cults and local power-holders. At the same time, Nationalist officials devoted a great deal of time to charting new regulations and standards designed to separate proper, respectable religions from those that should be discarded. Such efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, as the messy diversity of Chinese religion as practiced on the ground consistently defeated laboratory efforts to identify shrines devoted to “former worthies” and “religion” as opposed to “improper cults” and “ancient gods” (p. 81). A further difficulty is that the Nationalists' iconoclasm remained partial and ambivalent. As cultural nationalists, they hoped to reappropriate certain elements of China's traditional religious symbolism for their own purposes, even as they sought to impose the solar calendar and new civic rituals on the Chinese people.

Indeed, it is the ultimate failure of the Nationalists' efforts to create a modern, secular order that stands out most clearly in this study. One reason for the failure is intellectual: the Nationalists' critique of traditional religion was incoherent and unconvincing, particularly in the context of the “affective regime” the Nationalists sought to create so as to win the loyalty of the Chinese people even while transforming them into modern citizens. Nedostup finds this “affective regime” empty and arbitrary in its forced efforts to marry traditionalistic symbols to scientific and constitutional values. Hence the reference to “superstitious regimes” in the book's title. Another reason for the failure was political. Not only did the Nationalists frequently lack the muscle to impose their vision on local society, but local society was quick to display its agency, often in surprising ways. When the regime condemned fortune tellers, for example, the blind diviners of Shanghai organized a public association and established links to other professional associations and unions in the city, and cast their demands in terms of the “people's livelihood,” one of the Three People's Principles. The diviners, in other words, had learned the discourse of modernity and applied it to their own ends, circumventing the secularizing project of the Nationalists. They were not the only group to do so. Despite the considerable violence done to Chinese religion and Chinese temples during this period, the Nationalists did not come close to realizing their vision, even in Jiangsu.

This is a superb study, deserving of wide readership. Its evidence and insights should be incorporated into more general studies of the Republican period, which have tended to treat religion as a side story. For scholars and China-watchers fascinated by the current religious revival in China, this volume is yet another proof that the Communists inherited rather than created their religious problems, and a model of the sort of research we should attempt to carry out in the context of contemporary China. Finally, Superstitious Regimes is a profound reflection on the nature and limits of secularism as part and parcel of the experience of modernity.