Long neglected by both social scientists and historians, tourism has recently been discovered as a lens eminently suited for inquiry into new social practices, meaning-making, and the interaction between the state, society and the market that characterizes contemporary China. This is a China where statues of Chairman Mao are being blessed at a newly built Buddhist temple at Dazhai, formerly the model oilfield of socialist industry, and where the statue of a Christian warlord placed by Communist authorities can become the object of worship in a Buddhist temple (to borrow two examples from the editors' introduction and Brian Dott's chapter respectively). Oakes and Sutton's edited volume, devoted to the interplay between religious revival, the tourism boom and state control, attests to the riches such inquiry can produce. It contributes to the growing body of evidence that secular modernity interacts with religion in complex ways.

The incorporation of tourism into urban Chinese lifestyles revives, constructs anew, and interferes with religious practices, while religious practices in turn fuel hybrid forms of tourism and pilgrimage. Rural spaces are reshaped under global and national auspices while claiming to reconstruct tradition and conserve heritage. State authorities use tourism to control religion and vice versa to maintain their “paramount authority over the realms of cultural production and national identity construction” (p. 13). But the encounter between young urbanites in search of the spiritual exotic and religious practitioners claiming truths of their own weakens that “paramount authority,” since local popular religion is, generally, subject to less cultural control than tourism. Local authorities may wish to “reconfigure a local popular belief with questionable ‘superstitious’ attributes as a ‘local custom’ with cultural and historical value” (p. 16), which generates income and solidifies the national narrative with tourists as witnesses. But this process generates conflicts not only with religious practitioners but sometimes also with the religious affairs bureaucracy; and it endows the performers of the newly reconfigured ritual with new power. Tour guides, while reciting state-approved versions of local history, often encourage tourists to participate in religious rituals, and can both clash and collude with religious practitioners.

The argument that tourism serves as a particularly important, but contested, arena of state cultural control in China is not new; nor is the insight into the blurred boundaries of tourism and pilgrimage. But the contributions by historians, geographers, anthropologists and political scientists, coming from a range of specializations from human rights to popular religion and imperial pilgrimages, give these insights more texture than any previous work and bear out the editors' argument that tourism is “one of the most important producers of … collective spaces in which practices of faith now occur” (p. 4). To pick a few from the almost uniformly high-quality chapters: Brian Dott describes the mixing of religious and secular tourist behaviours at the ancient pilgrimage site, Mount Tai, which an earlier effort by the state failed to convert into a site of revolutionary memory; Tim Oakes writes about the transformation of a parade involving local gods in Guizhou's remote Han villages into an object of national cultural heritage supposed to represent a pure form of an art no longer found in the Han heartland; Susan K. McCarthy explores the efforts of Xishuangbanna authorities to instil a great market orientation in the emerging Theravada Buddhist “religious culture industry,” some of whose senior Tai monks are somewhat ambivalent about embracing the state's development project; Marina Svensson notes the diverging fates of two temples at two tourist “water towns” near Shanghai: one on and one off the tourist route; in a particularly rich chapter, Charlene Makley describes, among other things, the tense and tentative attempts of reconstituting forms of mutual encompassment between the authority of senior Tibetan monks, now attracting non-Tibetan followers, and that of state officials.

An underlying question of the volume, as Ruby Watson notes in her Afterword, is why the inherent conflict between official atheism and the expanding, and now publicly displayed, array of religious practices does not result in more open hostility. This is a version of the most comprehensive question of all as regards today's China: why, despite all of its contradictions and tensions, the state project works as well as it does. Seen from this angle, the book is to be recommended to a far broader readership of academics interested in China than its subject matter – tourism and religion – suggests. At the same time, it will provide important concepts for researchers of public religiosity and of the social meanings of tourism anywhere.