This outstanding book provides valuable findings and insights on the centrality of religion in modern China. Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer have built on the latest scholarship on Chinese religions by Rebecca Nedostup, Thomas DuBois, and John Lagerwey to examine the complexity of religion-state interaction from the late Qing to the contemporary era. They argue that religiosity is more than a matter of personal belief, but rather closely linked to collective rituals and deeply embedded into political, social, and economic life. However, since the early twentieth century, modernizing governments sought to control religious practices that fostered localism and ethnic distinction in order to maintain national unity. Consequently, the pursuit of a secular polity against religions led to “a de-centered China: a Middle Kingdom that has lost its Middle” (p. 3). The anti-religion policies took shape in three periods. From the late Qing to the Nanjing decade, the authorities reshaped the organizational structure and ritual practices of both institutional and diffused religions in the name of “anti-superstition.” After the Communist Revolution (1949), the state suppressed religions by destroying temples and churches, banning religious activities, and imposing a quasi-religious cult of the state. Since the Reform era (1978-present), the state has restricted proselytization under the five legitimate religions (i.e., Buddhism, Daoism, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam) and co-opted religious leaders into patriotic bodies. But these measures have failed to tame religions at all levels.

Using the “religious question” as an analytical tool, Goossaert and Palmer divide the thirteen chapters into two parts, addressing the politics of secularism, the detachment of the modernizing state from local religious communities, and religious actors’ resistance against official indoctrination. The seven chapters in part one review the religion-state encounter from the late Qing to the Maoist era. Goossaert and Palmer highlight the dual agency of secular officials and religious actors, showing that the authorities and religious communities frequently engaged one another in the anti-religion campaigns. Religious leaders and followers constantly reacted to the top-down institutional change by shifting their bargaining strategies, which in turn affected the outcomes of the anti-religion policies in the Nanjing decade and the Maoist era. Some religious groups even appropriated the discourse of revolutionary nationalism and played a mediating role in the state-religion interaction, partly out of self-protection and partly in the hope that they could ameliorate the harshness of these hostile policies. As a result, the anti-religion campaigns became political weapons used by religious actors to empower themselves.

The six chapters in part two look at the multiple religious realities that flourish in different parts of the Chinese world in the early twenty-first century. Today, most Chinese not only embrace different faiths and ritual practices but also display a high level of religiosity in harmony with modern secularity. The local and global dimensions of the Chinese religious renaissance are manifest in the expansion of autonomous Catholic and Protestant churches, the growth of Buddhist, Daoist, and Muslim institutions, the revival of temple religions, and the search for health and morality based on qigong. Such religious resurgence demands new space for the expansion of its activities outside the official category of five legitimate religions. Their proselytizing activities, transnational fund-raising networks, and strong patronage ties with local powerbrokers reveal the innovative strategies that religious actors have employed to diffuse tensions with the state. Therefore, the Chinese religious field has evolved out of ambitious interactions with the modernizing state, and such interactions will evolve in line with the simultaneous expansion of state power and of religious communities.

Methodologically, Goossaert and Palmer have made three contributions to the field. First, they highlight the diverse linkages between religion and secular politics. Scholars have long questioned the causal relationship between modernization and secularization. But in China, religions and rituals permeate every level of society and shape collective identities and behaviors of the people. It is important to combine religion and politics, private and public spheres into related categories for analysis. Second, they move beyond the dichotomy of repression and resistance or the theory of an unregulated religious market to develop a sophisticated understanding of religion and politics. It is the way in which the religious actors manipulated the state's policies towards religions, rather than the policies themselves, that have shaped the state's penetration of the religious domain. This observation rejects the teleological view associated with the rise of secular nationalism in Chinese historiography. Third, the authors show us a fine example of how to combine historical materials with ethnographic data to reconstruct the importance of religions in Chinese everyday life. They integrate conceptual insights with examples from archives and fieldwork. It is refreshing to come across the narrative with such good balance and clarity. This approach reminds us of the multiple layers of interpenetrating forces that had impacted the development of Chinese religions since the late nineteenth century.

In short, the major strength of this book lies in its clear theoretical framework. This highly readable and informative work is essential reading for China specialists; it will also be of interest to historians, religious scholars, and anthropologists in other fields.