In recent years, Chinese political studies in Western academia have broken away from old Western theoretical frameworks and have returned to the party-centric analytical paradigm. By employing quantitative empirical methods and textual analysis, scholars have pushed the discipline into a new stage. Under this paradigm shift, Steve Smith, Emeritus Professor at All Souls College, Oxford, returns to the discourse arena of Chinese political studies with his new work, Supernatural Politics. Different from previous studies of Chinese politics that prioritized macro-level state-building or high politics, this book examines the evolution of Chinese political power through the specific lens of religion. Centering his focus on the era of Mao Zedong, the first-generation political leader of the New China, Smith primarily analyzes the policy evolution of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under Mao’s leadership to regulate and attempt to eliminate religion over the 30 years following the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), as well as its implementation and reception at the grassroots. In doing so, he profoundly reveals the complex mechanisms mobilized by a modern political party in an attempt to reform traditional folk beliefs.

The author first introduces the theme in the Introduction by proposing the core concept of ‘supernatural politics’, pointing out that the relationship between an atheist party and the folk realm of gods and ghosts is not a one-way dynamic, but rather a two-way dialectical interaction of simultaneously striking and borrowing, resisting and co-opting. Subsequently, the author elaborates on the operational mechanisms of this ‘supernatural politics’ across 12 chapters. In the reviewer’s eyes, these 12 chapters appear miscellaneous at first glance, but actually conceal three logically progressive threads. The first thread (Chapters 1–5) focuses on theoretical categorization and institutional suppression: the author first analyzes the ideological roots of the CCP’s religious policy (Chapters 1–2) and then demonstrates how the new regime launched crackdowns on and transformations of various sects (Chapters 3–5). The second thread shifts toward grassroots governance (Chapters 6–9), first exploring the dissemination logic of supernatural rumors (Chapter 6) and the confrontations and compromises between local cadres and the populace during governance (Chapter 7), before analyzing propaganda mechanisms and anti-superstition campaigns (Chapters 8–9), thereby revealing the interactive game and boundaries between the state apparatus and popular spiritual life. The third thread ascends to a deep game between cultural matrices and political power (Chapters 10–12), discussing the cultural entanglements between the CCP and Confucian thought (Chapter 10) and the covert resistance of subaltern supernatural beliefs (Chapter 11). In the last chapter, Smith clarifies how pre-modern supernatural metaphors penetrated the political culture of the young regime, forming a marvelous spectacle of mutual borrowing between an atheist party and traditional beliefs, which serves as the finishing touch of the book. In the final Conclusion, the author points out the gains and losses of the landscape of struggle depicted by this concept of ‘supernatural politics’.

Reading through the whole book, the reviewer believes that the greatest contribution of this work to the field of Chinese political studies – and its most striking argument – is the ‘supernatural politics’ meticulously constructed by Smith. For a long time, when researchers of Chinese politics discussed the two-way interactive game between the atheist party and the Han folk cosmos in the Mao era, they either directly resorted to the term ‘political religion’ or glossed over it with accusations of the ‘state suppressing society’, thereby lacking a precise scholarly grasp. Smith’s conceptual innovation appears very fitting and precise when describing the inherent tension between modern party politics and pre-modern supernatural beliefs. Through tracing causal chains and deciphering grassroots politics, Smith endows this concept with a highly penetrating historical explanatory power.

Compared to conceptual innovation, an even greater highlight of this book lies in the author’s empirical textual research. As a veteran expert on China issues, Smith made clever use of a window of opportunity during the implementation of China’s Archives Law, frequently visiting grassroots archives across China. He gathered a vast number of dossiers classified as ‘past secrecy periods’ in local archives – dossiers to which access has now been restricted once again. Consequently, the ‘secret historical materials’ used by Smith as evidence in this book may well become a secondary source of historical material for other scholars of Chinese politics. Reading these archives, readers can discover a Lefebvre-style critique of everyday life: village fortune-tellers, spirit mediums, grassroots cadres, and surreptitiously circulating supernatural rumors are all brought vividly to life under Smith’s pen. His language is plain and simple, blending period-specific political rhetoric with folk vernacular, filling the whole book with restrained humor and a tangible texture of daily life.

Of course, this book exhibits certain limitations in terms of scope and the nature of the historical materials. The first is applicability: Smith’s ‘supernatural politics’ is primarily based on the game between the traditional Han folk cosmos and the CCP; its applicability to ethnic minority regions with traditional religions such as Tibetan Buddhism remains open to question. Secondly, regarding historical materials, as the author himself candidly admits in his conclusion, ‘Without access to the central Party archive and full access to the RAB archives of provincial Party organizations, it is not fully possible to elucidate the nature of organizational and ideological tensions between the UFWD… and the RAB’ (p. 328). At the same time, regarding official records, Smith cautions that ‘we should take with a pinch of salt reports that many who listened to the confessions by superstition professionals lost their faith on the spot’ (p. 335). This inevitably makes the evidence adopted in this book carry a degree of ‘survivor bias’, which also sets the stage for future research.

All in all, Smith’s research fits closely with the ‘revisionist’ or ‘social history/history from below’ paradigms mainstreamed in European and American academia since the new century. Adopting a neutral and objective stance, he refutes the long-standing biased perspective in the Western world that reduced Mao Zedongism to a monotheistic personal cult, demonstrating to readers the complex historical reality that an atheist modern party was forced to merge into the traditional cultural background before breaking through and establishing itself from the inside out. For scholars in political science, history, and religious studies, this book is undoubtedly a must-read masterpiece for decoding the relationship between contemporary Chinese religion and politics. If readers are left wanting more, the sister volume to this book, Communism in an Enchanted World, allows us to continue delving deeper into the investigation.