Rethinking Urbanization Campaigns and Religion

In the 2010s, the Zhejiang government launched two consecutive campaign-like programs to expedite urban expansion. The “Three Rectifications and One Demolition” project (san gai yi chai 三改一拆) ran from 2013 to 2015, followed by the “Great Demolition and Great Rectification” project (da chai da zheng 大拆大整) from 2016 to 2017. Both were intended to clear the way for new urban developments, in areas under both urban and rural administration, by comprehensively removing social spaces deemed to be unfit. “Three Rectifications” targeted old residential areas, old factories, and urban villages, while “One Demolition” targeted so-called illegal buildings. The “Great Demolition and Great Rectification” was launched in the same spirit but stressed that the campaign would be carried out with extra vigor and would extend into remote rural areas. The sweeping scale and violent execution of these projects led to the disappearance of numerous religious sites overnight.

More than any other religious issue, the demolition of Sanjiang 三江 Church and local Christian sites in Wenzhou—in particular, the violent removal of crosses from local churches in the name of “cleansing” illegal buildings—thrust church-state relations into the spotlight, attracting high-profile resistance and the attention of the public throughout Zhejiang. According to local churches, by July 2015, the campaign had led to the removal of crosses from the roofs of more than 1,700 churches.

Many scholars believe the Zhejiang campaigns signal the emergence of a new and more repressive mode of regulating Christianity (Ying Reference Fuk-tsang2016; Zhong Reference Zhifeng2016). In some other provinces such as He'nan and Jiangxi in the past few years, there are indeed signs of increased church demolition and cross removal.Footnote ¹ Nanlai Cao (Reference Cao2017), however, cautions that the Zhejiang campaigns should not be regarded as a categorically anti-Christian movement, but agrees that the central government is purposely acting to counter the penetration of Christianity in local society.Footnote ² It has also been suggested that as the government tightens its control of religion, “[t]he winners will likely be China's ‘traditional’ religions: Daoism, Buddhism, and folk religion,” which benefit from the Chinese leadership's preference for traditional values (Johnson Reference Johnson2017, 397).Footnote ³

Current studies of the Zhejiang campaigns have focused almost exclusively on Christianity, largely because of international media attention to popular resistance to the demolition of Sanjiang Church and the ensuing province-wide cross-removing initiative ordered by local governments. This focus, while underscoring the destructive side of urban development programs on Christianity, fails to reveal urbanization programs’ broader impacts on Chinese religion as a whole. In fact, far fewer local churches have been destroyed compared with village temples. A government report estimated that more than 10,000 “folk belief activity sites” (minjian xinyang huodong changsuo 民间信仰活动场所) in Zhejiang were either “dismantled, or rectified, or merged away” in the “Three Rectification and One Demolition” program.Footnote ⁴

The exclusive focus on the destruction of churches also risks obscuring the fact that urbanization is a transformative process that both ends and creates religious traditions. The organized closure of religious sites in the name of urbanization, village temples in particular (including both Buddhist monasteries and temples for local deities), may be second only to the events of the 1950s in the sheer scale of destruction. Most of the temples in question will likely disappear forever. So will many of the traditional communities they serve. In this sense, urban development is indeed iconoclastic (van der Veer Reference van der Veer2016).

Yet city planning also leads to the (re)creation of sacred spaces. Some religious sites have been allowed to relocate (chongxin anzhi 重新安置) or merge (duo miao he yi 多庙合一, literally “multiple temples into one”). The reterritorialization of those religious sites is creating new sacred spaces and leading to the formation of new ties between deities and territories or constituencies. And, as villages become cities, new offices and organizations emerge—an institutionalization of society that entails changes to religious structures and religious life.

Urbanization in China, it has been argued, is a state-building process in which the local government has reshaped its strategy of governance to heighten its control of society (Hsing Reference Hsing2010; Wong Reference Wong2015). In light of this, we should look beyond not only Christianity but also the religious sector to understand the ongoing transformation in religious governance. The recent overhaul of religious regulations, going hand in hand and concurrent with the push for urbanization, is no less a state-building effort, as the government redefines the governance of religion at the central level while facilitating urbanization at the local level, as I will discuss later. New technologies such as big data analysis, which both inspire and buttress newly formulated regulations and new systems of management, seem to make the population and society control easier than ever. How do these broader changes in governance and social control affect the politics of religion and religious life in China as a whole?

Making Sacred Spaces Legible

The Chinese government has been pushing relentlessly to make China urban, and it has been a driving force behind the tremendous expansion of Chinese cities in the reform era. Urban residents constituted only 17.9 percent of the country's total population in 1977.Footnote ⁵ Yet in the four decades that followed, the proportion of urban residents increased more than threefold. More than half the country's citizens—58.5 percent—now live in cities, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China's end-of-2017 figures. In recent years, urbanization has been listed as a top priority in social development projects, and the government considers the urbanization rate to be a concrete, measurable objective in the plan to build “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Issues of ownership and legality surrounding religious sites, on the other hand, have been a major obstacle confronting city planners and developers since the 1980s. Historically, religious groups were among the most important real estate owners in local society, but the nationalization of land and the ensuing expropriation of religious properties throughout the Mao era (1949–78) resulted in numerous disputes over religious buildings and land, many of which were taken over or destroyed. During and after de-collectivization, religious communities successfully reclaimed certain buildings and parcels of land. These reclaimed properties in most cases lacked formal legal recognition, though the restorations generally took place with the acquiescence of local authorities. When efforts to reclaim religious property failed or were simply impossible to set in motion, some villages and religious organizations built new temples or churches at new locations, equally lacking in official recognition. The government lacked the legal means and perhaps the political will to either regulate or effectively eliminate them, in spite of occasional initiatives against illegal religious sites, leading to an expanding legal gray zone. Paradoxically, the absence of legal recognition granted religious organizations a certain freedom from oversight, allowing members of village temples, monasteries, and house churches to build, rebuild, or expand their buildings.

However, this gray area of semi-deregulation could not persist, as efforts to turn vast rural areas into cities inevitably brought authorities into conflict with village temples and churches. With most religious sites located in the countryside, confusion over who owns and has rights to religious land and properties has hindered efforts at demolition, compensation, and relocation of these properties (Yu Reference Liyuan2012, 84). This has entailed, among other things, a vast expansion of the government's efforts to conduct surveys of religious life. As James Scott (Reference Scott1999) points out regarding modern development programs, surveys are a typical step in increasing the “legibility” of people, places, and communities. Making religious sites “legible” thus became a prerequisite for the urbanization process, a necessary step to allow them to be governed and properly handled in urban planning.

During the Mao era, and to a lesser extent the early reform period, the government conducted surveys to identify religious leaders and professionals, their political and social backgrounds, the size of the community, and their brief history. I was able to consult some of these surveys in the Zhejiang local archives. Some of the Mao-era surveys also recorded details concerning Christians and their families. Their main purpose was to monitor religious followers rather than religious sites.

New surveys are much more thorough. In addition to conventional items of canvassing, such as the history and organization of the religious community, many recent surveys involve extensive investigations of the sites themselves—photographing and filming the exterior and interior of religious buildings, land surveying, and satellite imagery positioning—to facilitate the regulation of religious sites, both as a locus for religious activities and as real estate.

Though the state has been carrying out surveys of religion since 1949, these efforts have recently expanded to village temples, as the government has experimented with the legalization of communal religious sites (Wang Reference Wang, van der Veer and Dean2018). Fujian, Zhejiang, and some other coastal provinces have been doing this for some time, while the rest of the country is now following suit. Village temples, both in the past and at present, very likely outnumber all other religious sites from other traditions combined. But before the late 1990s, even local governments did not conduct surveys of village temples because these were still classed as “superstition,” and thus they were a target of elimination, not a subject to be governed. In this sense, the new surveys mark a change not only in the surveillance of religious activity, but also in the way religion as a category is understood and defined.

A further concern of the surveys is the growing financial might of religious communities. In the 1950s and 1960s, political campaigns took away land and other properties belonging to religious organizations, and the religious surveys of the era typically did not investigate religious finances. Surveys of the early reform era are more or less the same, though they sometimes include brief records of annual income. As the Chinese economy has taken off, the financial capacities of religious organizations have vastly expanded. Official documents often accuse religious organizations of being chaotic or lacking transparency in their finances. Behind this rhetoric, there appears to be an overarching concern: that financially powerful organizations pose a threat to the social order which the government strives to maintain. Thus, new religious surveys have made financial information another prominent aspect of their investigations. Not only details of income and expenditures but also accounting systems, the existence of account books, bank account numbers, and even details such as accountants’ qualifications are now under government surveillance.Footnote ⁶

The bureaucratization (Weber [Reference Weber1956] 1978; Wu Reference Wu2017) of religious organizations can also be observed in tightened regulations on the finances of religious groups, following the enactment of the “(Provisional) Supervision and Regulation Methods on the Finances of Religious Activity Sites” (Zongjiao Huodong Changsuo Caiwu Jiandu Guanli Banfa [shixing] 宗教活动场所财务监督管理办法[试行]) in 2010—the first regulation of its kind since 1949. One noticeable measure is to urge all religious sites, including “folk belief activity sites,” to open corporate bank accounts.

In China, individual religious organizations, regardless of their legal standing, could not register as legal entities until 2017. They could not enjoy civil rights, assume civil obligations, or achieve civil qualifications or certifications in their capacity as religious entities.Footnote ⁷ Thus, banks generally did not allow individual religious organizations to open corporate accounts, even if they were registered with the government. This is one crucial reason that most temples and churches opened bank accounts in the name of individual members of their organizations, which is considered by many—including government officials—to be a common source of disputes over religious assets.Footnote ⁸ Since the late 1990s, local governments in some places have been asking banks to make exceptions for religious organizations. For instance, in Fujian, the Xiamen City government allowed village temples to open accounts in the name of the villages and town(ship)s where they are located.Footnote ⁹

A major overhaul of relevant policies on the bank accounts of religious organizations came in 2011, when the State Administration for Religious Affairs and the People's Bank of China co-issued a notification that allowed registered religious sites to open corporate accounts in the name of their “site of religious activities” (zongjiao huodong changsuo 宗教活动场所). It further stipulated that banks should not permit individual accounts to store money belonging to “sites of religious activities,” though in practice, it is very difficult for banks to track where money comes from and enforce the prohibition.

The notification does not seem to have been well received among religious organizations. Possessing bank accounts would help religious organizations operate smoothly and stably from a financial standpoint, but religious communities have legitimate reasons to be cautious. Once they open a corporate bank account, they must disclose its existence to the local religious bureau. This increases the risk of exposing their financial holdings and transactions to government oversight. Subsequently, in December 2015, the State Administration for Religious Affairs and the People's Bank of China reiterated the same notification inviting religious organizations to open corporate bank accounts.Footnote ¹⁰ By May 2018, with the government's forceful encouragement, many religious sites had done so, including 498 registered “folk belief activity sites” in Pingyang 平阳, Zhejiang.Footnote ¹¹

In Rui'an 瑞安, Wenzhou, the city government ordered Buddhist and Daoist associations to establish financial trusts and required member temples to entrust their finances to professional accountants hired by the trusts. During my fieldwork in 2017, I also learned that Elderly People's Associations (laoren xiehui 老人协会), the organizations in charge of many village temples in the Wenzhou region, were forced to hand over accounting to town and township governments. Local ethnic and religious bureaus are also conducting periodical financial audits in order to gain complete oversight of the finances of religious organizations.Footnote ¹²

Taken together, these financial surveys and directives signal a drive to achieve full “transparency” (Wu Reference Wu2017) of religious organizations to the state, which is now being harnessed to new technologies of legibility. Since 2018, the provincial governments in Zhejiang and Anhui have each launched their own online “Service Platforms for the Finances of Religious Groups” (zongjiao caiwu fuwu pingtai 宗教财务服务平台) to promote the digitized management of religious finances. All religious associations, schools, and sites in those provinces are now required to do their accounting via the online platform.Footnote ¹³ Although it remains to be seen whether similar service platforms will be made available elsewhere, the general trend suggests that the government is seeking to further tighten its grip on the finances of religious groups as it keeps pushing for the bureaucratization and digitization of religious management.

Registering and Legitimizing Religious Sites

From expanded surveys to interference in the finances of religious institutions, one can discern the state's efforts to “create a terrain and a population with [ . . . ] standardized characteristics,” aiming “to reduce the chaotic, disorderly, constantly changing social reality beneath it to something more closely resembling the administrative grid of its observations” (Scott Reference Scott1999, 81–82).

A further critical step toward making religious sites legible to the state comes in the form of property registration. Until very recently, the majority of religious sites—even those recognized by the state—did not have land titles (tudizheng 土地证, strictly speaking land use certificates) or property titles (fangchanzheng 房产证, property use certificates), in spite of some limited local efforts.Footnote ¹⁴ There were a number of complex reasons for this, but the most important was the government's lack of interest in sorting out land disputes and granting property rights to individual religious organizations. Religious communities were not encouraged to register property under the name of individual religious sites, and in fact, they were often discouraged from doing so, partly because of the Chinese government's fear of the financial might of religious institutions. As mentioned earlier, religious institutions are often perceived as a potential threat to social and political order.

Furthermore, there were no uniform regulations concerning the property rights of different religious traditions. In the 1980 “Report on Reinstating Policies concerning the Property of Religious Organizations” (Guanyu luoshi zongjiao tuanti fangchan zhengce deng wenti de zhishi 关于落实宗教团体房产政策等问题的指示), it was separately stipulated that Catholic and Protestant church property belonged to Chinese churches; mosque property was collectively owned by Muslims living in the neighborhood; and Buddhist and Daoist temple property was collectively shared by society at large, implying that control of these properties was in the hands of the state. Such vague language did not clearly acknowledge the rights of specific religious sites to own their property, creating a barrier that essentially prevented them from registering titles.

Starting in the 1980s, religious leaders and associations at various levels, particularly Buddhists, repeatedly called for the government to formulate a law that would protect religious properties. Those efforts eventually helped bring about the state-level “Regulations on Religious Affairs” in 2004, which have a chapter devoted to religious properties. The 2004 regulations list two types of religious properties that can be protected and registered, distinguishing properties belonging to individual religious activity sites from properties belonging to religious associations (zongjiao tuanti 宗教团体). Unlike the 1980 regulations, the 2004 regulations no longer stipulate different property regimes for different religious traditions.

In the last few years, as urban development campaigns gathered pace, the local government in Zhejiang began to push religious communities to register their property. The Zhejiang provincial government's “Opinions on Creating Titles for Religious Activity Sites”Footnote ¹⁵ set out a new general principle that local government should issue a land title if a religious site occupied the land before December 31, 1986. If occupation commenced between January 1, 1987, and December 31, 2009, a land title could be issued after any disputes were settled. Land occupied after January 1, 2010, would be subject to current regulations.

The directive also sets out conditions for the granting of property titles. For religious buildings built before October 1, 2010, religious communities may apply for property titles through their local land and resource department, on two conditions. First, they must have been granted a land title. The second condition is a critical caveat and much more difficult to fulfill. It requires evidence that construction projects were approved by local planning departments. However, few religious sites were built with a permit. Violations of urban and rural planning regulations would have to be legally resolved before a property title could be issued. By contrast, religious buildings built after October 1, 2010, are subject to current regulations. Consequently, religious sites built before 2010 may obtain land and house property certificates by paying a fine, scaling down their property, or undergoing some other punishment for violating the law. Those built after 2010 have slim chances of claiming legal property rights. The vast majority of them are illegal buildings, according to the “Provisions on the Handling of Unlawful Buildings in Zhejiang Province” (Zhejiang Sheng Weifa Jianzhu Chuzhi Guiding 浙江省违法建筑处置规定), because they did not have permission for construction from the authorities. Therefore, they cannot be registered.

It is worth noting that temples that were permitted to register lost the relative freedom they once enjoyed when they existed outside of legal regulations, and they now face further uncertainty regarding their property rights. Land titles for collective rural land have no clear limitations and are generally understood to be permanent. When villages become cities, however, all real estate becomes subject to the fixed terms of urban land titles, which vary from forty years to seventy years, potentially placing the rights of religious sites in jeopardy.

On the whole, the state's eagerness to allow individual religious organizations a limited recognition of certain property rights signals both a greater anxiety and a greater flexibility in response to evolving circumstances.

The most ambitious move, though, among other measures, has been the legalization of traditional communal religious sites. A large number of village temples in Zhejiang and other provinces have been given land and property titles in the last couple of years. Most importantly, they, too, were granted registration certificates as “folk belief activity sites,” a newly created administrative category. Thus, village temples were formally integrated into the state management system of the religious field.

The registration of village temples is striking given they have lived under the shadow of the “superstition” discourse for over a century. Nationalism in the twentieth century deemed traditional religion to be a symbol of the backwardness of old Chinese civilization and a barrier to modernization. The delineation of “religion” from “superstition” and the systematic attacks on the latter have been important features of secular modernity in China.

However, eliminating “superstition” as part of the attempt to separate the secular from the religious has always been problematic. The anti-superstition initiatives to stamp out traditional communal religion have in fact provoked practitioners of communal religion to continually engage with politics. Traditional religious practices in the end survived the tumultuous Republican and Mao eras quite remarkably (Chau Reference Chau2005, Reference Chau2011; Jones Reference Jones2004). At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it became clear that efforts to weaken the economic foundation of religious institutions in the twentieth century (in order to curb their sociopolitical influences)—from the temple-to-school movement to the land reform—were not as successful as previously assumed (Johnson Reference Johnson2017).

The historical invention of “folk belief activity sites” as an administrative category to legalize village temples was not purposefully devised to reverse the course of the twentieth-century secularizing projects. It saw neither the formal repudiation of “superstition” nor the formal acceptance of village religious tradition into the field of “religion” in official languages. “Folk belief activity sites,” it has been clearly stipulated, are different from “religion.”

Yet the government now deploys the same state machinery, and nearly identical regulations, to govern the registration and operation of both village temples and other religious sites (Wang Reference Wang, van der Veer and Dean2018).Footnote ¹⁶ This means that, from the perspective of religious work of the Chinese government, village temples, which once were permitted to register, are now subjects equal to sites of the five institutional religions, no more and no less. Nor do registered village temples enjoy less legal rights than sites of the five institutional religions. In this light, the Chinese government has redrawn the de facto boundaries of “religion,” marking a momentous change in the history of modern Chinese religion.

A further eye-catching move has been the institutionalization of “provisional activity points” (linshi huodong dian 临时活动点), brought about by the new “Regulations on Religious Affairs” (Zongjiao Shiwu Tiaoli 宗教事务条例) in 2017—a new measure widely believed to be designed to bring house churches under the state's management system (Ying Reference Fuk-tsang2018). In places such as Wenzhou, it has been very difficult to register new churches since the start of the twentieth-first century. The new regulation reopened the channel for legalization. “Provisional activity points” were further institutionalized with the “Vetting and Regulation Methods for Provisional Religious Activity Points” (Zongjiao Linshi Huodong Didian Shenpi Guanli Banfa 宗教临时地点审批管理办法), issued in 2018. Thus, similar to how village temples, previously considered illegal “superstition,” were brought into the orbit of state management via the new category of “folk belief activity sites,” previously taboo house churches now also occupy a legally ambiguous place in the new religious governance.

Technology, Creative “Social Governance,” and the Surveillance State

To understand the recent transformation in the governance of religion, it is essential to look at the use of new technologies of surveillance and bureaucracy. Together, these amount to what the government has sometimes touted as a “new model for the management of religious affairs” (zongjiao shiwu guanli xin moshi 宗教事务管理新模式).

The increased need for stability maintenance or weiwen 维稳 has introduced the ideas of “social management” (shehui guanli 社会管理) and later “social governance” (shehui zhili 社会治理) into the recent work of the Chinese government (Fewsmith Reference Fewsmith2012). At the core of both social management and social governance is a call for innovative ways to cope with mounting social tensions and maintain social order. Such a call is also reflected in the reformation of religious work.

The innovations include measures to “reinforce the construction of the social credit system,” “renew the comprehensive social security regulation system,” and “promote the construction of the social security prevention system buttressed by informatization.”Footnote ¹⁷ The social credit system that the Chinese government is currently building, among other things, is especially robust, as it affects numerous aspects of social life.Footnote ¹⁸ It requires all business, social, and state organizations, including registered religious sites, to obtain their own unique “social credit barcode” (shehui xinyong daima 社会信用代码).Footnote ¹⁹

Similarly, responding to the call for technological innovation, ethnic and religious bureaus in many cities have turned survey data into databases, digital maps, and online management platforms, which allow users to visualize and display most vital information on local religious sites with only one click, including details such as their history and current situation, their geographical location, their layout, even their registration number and the contact details of managers and representatives.Footnote ²⁰ This is something that previous governments could not have even imagined. Officials can access these databases through mobile apps, allowing them to look up information on religious sites in real time.Footnote ²¹ Some administrative work, such as policy consultation, can also be done through mobile apps. Different government departments share big data on religion, providing essential support for city planning and neighborhood redevelopments.

Not only are government departments using big data technology to monitor religious sites; they are also broadening the extent of this surveillance by helping religious associations set up their own data centers. Jiangsu Provincial Buddhist Association, for instance, established a big data center for the digitization of information on Buddhist institutions in 2017, the first of its kind in the country. The data center links a network of 1,168 monasteries within the province. In addition to basic information, visitors can remotely access accounts, documents, details of visiting monks, heat maps showing tourist activity, and even live CCTV footage of some monasteries.Footnote ²²

The nationwide “grid management” (wanggehua guanli 网格化管理) system for social control, which divided each place into small grids for effective control,Footnote ²³ has also been introduced to monitor the religious sector. In the towns of Dajing 大荆 and Yueqing 乐清 in Zhejiang, eighty-five villages have been divided into 135 grids, with information on each grid recorded in digital maps. One manager is assigned to each grid; he or she is in charge of daily management, monitoring, and information gathering of religious sites in that grid.Footnote ²⁴ The importation of “grid management” indicates the state's intention to extend direct rule of the religious sector to the village level.

In 2015, the State Administration for Religious Affairs followed the central government's request to reinforce the monitoring of public areas by issuing a notice on the construction of a network of public security cameras at religious sites, aiming for 100 percent coverage of all “important religious sites.”Footnote ²⁵ Since then, local authorities have begun to install surveillance cameras at churches and temples in the regions of Zhejiang, Henan, Anhui, Jiangxi, Gansu, Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Shanghai, and perhaps elsewhere (Ying Reference Fuk-tsang2017). While it has not been clearly indicated where the surveillance camera should be installed, there have been reports of cameras set up inside religious sites (e.g., within the main hall of churches), which I witnessed during my fieldwork in Wenzhou, in spite of Christians voicing their strong opposition to this measure.

With the support of big data technologies, the state has become a ubiquitous presence in religious life. Surveillance has never been so easy and pervasive as it is now. From finance to physical activities, religious groups are now under the close watch of a new network of state agents with different responsibilities. The state's vastly expanded capacity to monitor religious groups enables and underlines a growing set of mechanisms for prevention and prediction in religious work. A typical example of such a mechanism is the surveillance camera, which, even if it is malfunctioning, creates the panopticon effects of self-surveillance (Foucault Reference Foucault1995) for people at religious sites. In this sense, the state's governance of religion has surpassed the “high modernism” (Scott Reference Scott1996) of the Mao era in its thoroughness and remarkable capacity to penetrate social life.

Yet new modes of governance over the religious sphere are not simply a continuation of “high modernism.” The iconoclasm of the Maoist movements has disappeared. Even as numerous temples are destroyed, urban planning in Zhejiang often carves out or reserves space for religious institutions within new developments. New rules, institutions, and management methods constitute increasingly rationalized methods of religious control. New modes of governing religion therefore seem to be more accommodating, but at the same time they constrain religious organizations via increasing regulations and facilitate the propagation of values desired by the state.

The intrusions of new technologies and sophisticated management systems seem to foreshadow total government control of the religious sphere. Over the past few decades in China, there has been a “cycle of demolition and reconstruction” (Chen and Lin Reference Jinguo, Minxia and Yonghui2016) as temples and churches are destroyed in political initiatives, then rebuilt once more. Local communities may yet attempt to rebuild demolished temples, as they have been doing since the 1980s. Yet they will have to withstand, in addition to rising land and housing prices, much heavier government interventions and regulations empowered by new technologies.