In Constructing China's Jerusalem, anthropologist Nanlai Cao presents a vivid ethnography of the Protestant community in the eastern coastal city of Wenzhou. Wenzhou is a particularly apt site for such an investigation because in the post-Mao era, Wenzhou has been transformed “from an impoverished rural town to a dynamic regional center of global capitalism,” and so is representative of the sort of economic growth and accompanying modernization for which China has become famous, and because Wenzhou is home to about one million Protestants and two thousand churches, staggering numbers both (2). Cao conducted fieldwork in Wenzhou for nineteen months between 2004–2006, engaging in “participant observation” at many churches and church functions, and conducting “life-history interviews” with about seventy-five church members (18). The majority of his informants are from the evangelical “house churches” of Wenzhou, and so Cao's work provides some much needed light on this aspect of contemporary Chinese Christianity, often mentioned in English-language media, but little understood. Cao's ethnographic approach necessarily takes him in several directions, but the continuing thread is his emphasis on the cooperative (or at least not hostile) relationship between the Christians of Wenzhou and state-led modernization efforts. Cao's research leads him to reject any notion of a stark binary between church and state, or civil society and state in contemporary China, house churches included. As he puts it in the conclusion: “Chinese Christians are not simply victims of the state modernizing project; nor is the post-Mao Christian revival a process of faithful believers resisting state ideology” (164). Rather, as he shows, Christianity is often understood in terms amenable to state goals for development.

The protagonists in Cao's account are the so-called “boss Christians,” usually male entrepreneurs or other white-collar workers. Their presence looms large both in Wenzhou industry and finance and in the local churches, many serving both as owners of the former and preachers in the latter. These Christians feel blessed by both God and state, and make little effort to hide their faith in public, even naming their prominent local businesses with names like the Canaan shoe factory, the Bethel button factory, and the Micah valve factory (25). Although the government's Religious Affairs Bureau typically refuses to register these boss Christians' churches, thus making them legal and thereby protected from indiscriminant police harassment, the boss Christians do not seem to mind too much and instead make tacit agreements with local officials and Communist Party leaders. Even very large house churches can continue to meet without trouble on condition that the boss Christians continue to aid in the region's economic development. This, it turns out, is exactly what the boss Christians want to do some seeing the Bible as a businessman's guidebook and Max Weber's Protestant Ethic as a how-to manual (75). The boss Christians capitalize on Christianity's apparent connection to the capitalist West, and draw people to their churches and their businesses in part on that basis. At the same time, they show support for the state by spiritualizing the language of development used by the state. So for instance, one young Christian entrepreneur explained to Cao how the church could help build President Hu Jintao's “harmonious society” (37), and another described how the 2006 “Eight Honors and Disgraces” socialist morality campaign, meant to promote continued social stability and economic development (and one-party rule) “are just what the Bible taught long ago” (68).

While the boss Christians and their “to get rich is glorious” attitude dominate Cao's text, other Wenzhou Christians are also heard from, though usually with an emphasis on their relationships with the boss Christians. Wenzhou Christianity is noticeably masculine in orientation (Cao points this out as a contrast with rural Chinese Christianity); still, women play important parts in the Wenzhou churches. In some cases, women are quite clearly put in subordinate roles, such as when they are utilized as greeters and wait staff for male-centered banquets where the well-to-do Christian men gather to hob-knob and hear guest preachers (though never preachers who disparage wealth, Cao notes) (108). In some cases, however, Christian women find solidarity in women-only small groups and retreats, most notably the “spiritual cultivation meetings,” where they pray intensely and seek spiritual experiences, eschewing the men's emphasis on text and doctrine, and so implicitly threaten male spiritual authority (114). The rural migrants who move to Wenzhou in search of work also receive some of Cao's attention. In his discussions with migrants, Cao suggests a tension whereby migrants almost unanimously state a preference to work for boss Christians for they believe that they (and their wives) are much kinder than non-Christian bosses. Further, some migrants view the Christianity of the bosses as a potential lubricant to social advance in Wenzhou, and it sometimes can be. However, Cao notes, the boss Christians also espouse a theology that requires workers accept long hours and low pay without complaint, and so help to ease the way for global capitalism into Wenzhou by lessening workers' demands.

Constructing China's Jerusalem is a slim volume, and much of course had to be left out. I for one would have liked to learn more about the operations of the house churches and other church-related gatherings on an organizational level. Also, there is very little about how these evangelical churches relate with the (only two) official Three-Self Patriotic Movement churches in Wenzhou or with the more Pentecostal house churches presumably common in rural areas around the city. On a more theoretical level, Cao could have put some of the boss Christian practices more squarely within contemporary Chinese cultural practices (the banqueting, for instance), and thus provoked some stimulating thoughts on Christianity and cultural accommodations. However, none of that is strictly necessary, for Cao has judiciously selected his material and has presented an outstanding account of Chinese Christianity as China's new, urban-based rich experience it. For the scholar or layman interested in Christianity in contemporary China, Cao's account is absolutely indispensible.