The area around Wenzhou is a hotbed of religious belief and practice. It has been called “China's Jerusalem” because of its abundance of Christian churches. Its landscape is also filled with Buddhist temples and monasteries, local deity temples, enormous ancestral halls, and spectacular ritual performances, such as dragon boat races during the duanwu festival, which draw many thousands of participants and reach a wider audience through television. Where did this come from? To many Western scholars as well as many Chinese intellectuals (some of whom have confidently assured me that “we Chinese aren't religious”), it appeared that religion had been obliterated during the Maoist regime.
Now that the rise of religion is an indisputable fact, many, if not most, scholars have explained it in terms of a revival or reinvention of practices that were destroyed during the Mao years, in response now to spiritual needs generated by the market economy of the reform era. But Xiaoxuan Wang argues in Maoism and Grassroots Religion that many forms of Chinese religion never really died during the Maoist era. They were subject to enormous disruption by the political campaigns of that era, especially the Cultural Revolution, but rather than destroying them, this caused them to transform and evolve, often in very creative ways. The efflorescence of religion after Mao grew out of the roots that had been developed earlier. This is a finding that could change the direction of studies of Chinese religion today.
The book is based on thorough archival research from Rui'an County, outside Wenzhou City, supplemented by very rich oral history interviews conducted by Wang in Rui'an. The focus on a single county gives the research a great deal of depth, but, of course, it poses the challenge of determining to what extent the findings pertain to the rest of China.
Several aspects of the Wenzhou area make it unique. Flanked by mountains and home to a local dialect that is said to be one of the hardest to learn in China, the area has been able to stand apart from some of the forces of the central government. During the reform era, it became a spectacular model for private entrepreneurship. This cultural distinctiveness and entrepreneurial spirit certainly shaped the development of the area's religions. Wang, a Rui'an native who is fluent in the local dialect, is sensitive to these unique characteristics. But in my view, much of what he has found is more widely applicable, not only to studies of China's religion but also to its political economy.
Central government policies toward religion during the Maoist era were modified in unexpected ways by local officials and finally produced unintended consequences that no authorities could have predicted. This book is a testimony to the complexity, adaptability, and creativity of Chinese society.
The religious landscape is certainly part of that complexity. Different government policies targeted different religions in different ways. The People's Republic of China's constitution guaranteed freedom of religious belief even though the Communist Party was committed to promoting atheism. Most central government policy in the 1950s did not directly target religion, but land reform took away the property that supported local temples, leading to a “deterritorialization” of local religion. Salvation religions, such as the “Way of Pervading Unity” (Yiguandao), were crushed because they were considered a threat to social stability and national security. Political attacks against “counter-revolutionaries” led to the destruction of much of the Catholic hierarchy and to severe restrictions on communal Catholic worship. Protestant churches, on the other hand, were more autonomous from foreign control and less dependent on local property ownership; as a result, they were actually able to grow and develop, albeit in a fragmented way.
Mainly, the Maoist policies of the 1950s did not directly suppress religion but changed the fabric of the social economy in ways that had unanticipated consequences for religion. This culminated in the Great Leap Forward. But the social disruption of these campaigns also presented opportunities for local cadres to pursue ambitions, act on grievances, and settle scores in ways that directly harmed religious believers.
The Cultural Revolution led to brutal attacks against all forms of religion, but after its initial phases, it led to new forms of religious renewal. The breakdown of local government gave religious communities chances to carry out their practices in new ways.
The most interesting and most detailed part of the book concerns the effects of the Cultural Revolution on Protestant communities. With their churches destroyed and believers faced with the threat of persecution, Protestant Christians dispersed into small communities scattered far and wide into new locations, served by itinerant preachers. This actually led to the growth and expansion of Protestantism. The fragmentation into small communities was compensated for by networks of preachers shared among communities with different theologies. In the reform era, however, the differences in theologies and ritual practices led to a breakdown of unity. The reconstruction of the Three-Self Patriotic organization that the government established to supervise and control Protestantism led to further splits, between those communities that accepted its official support and patronage and those who refused.
New patterns of growth, development, and division were characteristic of all the forms of religion found in the Wenzhou area but these have been shaped profoundly by the history of the Mao era, a history which this book brilliantly illuminates.
