Yanfei Sun’s Religious Change in Post-Mao China is an ambitious book that offers an in-depth and theoretically innovative account of the development of several major religious traditions in contemporary China. Sun’s main site for both her historical and fieldwork research is “River County” in central Zhejiang Province (p. 21). This county serves as the empirical foundation for Sun’s discussions of broader national trends, but she also uses various kinds of national data throughout the study. In Sun’s words, the book “aims to map and analyze the changes and developments of major religions in post-Mao China, within the regions predominantly inhabited by the Han Chinese population” (p. 1). As she explains, “[t]he ethnic Han people constituted about 91 percent of the Chinese population according to the 2021 census. Regions in China’s northwest and southwest as well as Tibet, which are significantly populated by non-Han ethnic groups, have religious ecologies with distinct features and histories” (p. 217). Consequently, Sun notes that these regions fall outside the parameters of her study and merit separate treatment.

Using what she calls the “institutions-in-context” approach, Sun interprets “all religions co-existing in a specific time and space as constituting a ‘religious ecology’” (p. 1). As such, she “seeks to understand how the changing growth dynamics of each religion under investigation contribute to the evolving nature of the Chinese religious ecology and how the religious ecology emerging in the post-Mao era diverges from the historical religious ecology that crystallized during late imperial China (1368–1912)” (p. 2). What makes this excellent book different from other sociological studies of Chinese religions is its keen focus on historical change as well as continuity. Although other scholars have examined historical change in the twentieth century, this book is one of the very few projects that consciously looks for patterns in history to seek a better understanding of the present.Footnote ¹ The results are very fruitful indeed.

The book covers the Protestantism and its “phenomenal rise” (Chapter 1); the stagnation of Catholicism (Chapter 2); the diverse trajectories of Chinese popular religion and its “feminization, bifurcation, and Buddhification” (Chapter 3); the “high-potential” and “sporadic outbursts” of new religious movements (Chapter 4); and the “arrested competitive isomorphism” of Chinese Buddhism (Chapter 5). Daoism and Confucianism do not receive concentrated attention, presumably because they are two of China’s more diffused religious traditions. Islam is also absent, likely because of the book’s stated empirical focus on the religions of the Han people. (Muslims in China, constituting 1.6–2 percent of the total population, are mostly from the Hui and Uyghur ethnic groups.)

The chapters are well-written and full of insights. Sun’s account of the astounding rise of Protestantism in post-Mao China persuasively argues that the weakening power of lineages in rural China after 1949 paved the way for the growth of Chinese Protestantism, since lineages’ demanding ritual commitments were usually seen as incompatible with Protestantism. The chapter on the relative stagnation of Catholicism due to its institutional inability to respond, adjust, and grow under specific political conditions, a dynamic that traces back to pre-1949 China, is also nuanced and convincing. The “clergy-reliant, hierarchically organized” Catholic Church’s explicit and implicit association with European colonialism and its ongoing tensions with the Chinese state over the “supernational authority” of the Vatican made Catholicism far less adaptable to changing sociopolitical conditions of religious growth (p. 79).

Likewise, the chapter on new religious movements (NRMs) from the early Republican era to the present offers a fresh new take on the growth of Falun Gong that complements earlier works by David Ownby and David Palmer.Footnote ² Sun emphasizes that “we can never disregard state-level political context when analysing religious growth.” Only by examining the institutional features of Falun Gong alongside the activities of the post-Mao state within “a religious/cultural environment conducive to the rapid growth of NRMs,” she asserts, “can we truly comprehend the factors leading to Falun Gong’s meteoric rise and swift decline” (p. 138). Falun Gong is one among several types of NRMs in China, not typical, but Sun’s larger conclusion is still valuable. For instance, Sebastien Billioud’s major study of the Yiguandao suggests different institutional development, but also emphasizes interactions with the state in its discussion of Yiguandao’s strategy of defusing tensions with political authorities through its extensive use of Confucianism.Footnote ³

Sun’s chapter on Buddhism employs the idea of “competitive isomorphism,” a sociological conceptual framework used primarily in organizational analysis. It suggests that “competitive isomorphism occurs when organizations emulate their competitors to improve efficiency and to maintain or increase their ‘market’,” whereas institutional isomorphism “takes place when organizations are driven by the need to gain or enhance legitimacy” (p. 141). By analyzing the development of Buddhist organizations in Republican China (1912–1949), post-1945 Taiwan, and post-Mao mainland China, the author discovers different dynamics of competition. During the Republican era and in Chiang’s Taiwan, with the strong Christian presence, “the competitive energy of the Buddhist elites” was aroused, which led to profound structural and cultural changes in Buddhist organizations, displaying the mechanism of “competitive isomorphism” (p. 172). In contrast, in post-Mao mainland China, the “forces pushing for competitive isomorphism were largely missing,” and as a result Chinese Buddhism did not restructure itself to be more competitive, instead primarily seeking to “achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the state,” despite various efforts to have real social impact and influence (pp. 173–4). This is an excellent example of how sociological theory can be used to make sense of historical change.

The chapter on popular religions is perhaps the most intriguing. Sun frames the history of popular religions in post-Mao China in terms of how “the indigenous, or more indigenized, religions of China” have responded to the rapid rise of Protestantism (p. 83). Rather than discussing the “multifold beliefs and practices” that comprise Chinese popular religion, Sun chooses to focus solely on “territorial cults.” Among the various forms of Chinese popular religion, she claims, ancestor worship and territorial cults “were by far the most important because they were the cornerstone of the Confucianized Chinese society of late imperial China” (p. 84).

Much might be debated here. One could argue, as I have done in my own work, that Confucianism has been a major religious tradition in China. In lived religious practice, ancestral rites have taken on the Confucian mode both historically and in today’s China. At the same time, the “territorial cults” that Sun analyses might be understood as part of the Daoist network of local temples, since Daoist institutional actors have often controlled the temples of the City God.Footnote ⁴ In Shanghai, for instance, the City God temple is under the control of the priests of the Zhengyi School of Daoism. In other words, the category of “popular religion” is likely to overlap with both Confucian and Daoist sites and practices, which are two religious traditions conspicuously absent from the book’s central focus.

But the issue here is not whether this book should have included chapters on Confucianism and Daoism. It seems to me that categories such as “territorial cults” or even “popular religions,” analytically appealing as they might be, do not fully capture the messier realities of religions as they are lived on the ground. The empirical rigor of this project, with its rich qualitative and quantitative data collected from River County, could have been further strengthened by thinking beyond the self-contained categories of “popular religion” and “new religious movements,” which are frequently interrelated in lived experience.

Vincent Goossaert, David Palmer, Kenneth Dean, Adam Chua, and others (including myself) have suggested thinking of China’s religious ecology as a religious field or matrix. Not only have individual religious traditions been shaped by the social, political, and cultural elements that constitute the religious ecology—a point Sun demonstrates superbly—but the religious traditions have also coexisted and coevolved throughout Chinese history. The term “syncretism,” with its essentialist conceptual roots, does not adequately capture this deeply textured and lived phenomenon. Even when the religious traditions themselves have fairly well-marked institutional boundaries, many of the people who practice them—both historically and in contemporary China—have been stepping over the boundaries to engage in multiple traditions in their everyday religious lives. More ecological thinking about the “Chinese religious fields” or “Chinese religious systems” is needed, and this book is a fine example of rigorous, original, and exciting work that moves in the right direction.