Religion and State in Post-1949 China
Christianity in its various forms, and other religions such as Buddhism, Chinese folk religion, Taoism and Islam, have had and still have different relationships with the state in China but have all been subject to its strong control since the early twentieth century. Especially since 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established the People’s Republic of China (PRC), there have been three broadly defined stages in the development of religion: strategic tolerance; suppression; and relaxation.
Strategic Tolerance: 1949–1957
Religious policy was relatively tolerant because the CCP needed to legitimate its authority by uniting and consulting with religious leaders, and institutionalizing the five recognized religions. While communism was ideologically opposed to religion and had the ultimate goal of eliminating it completely, the CCP’s experience of the Long March and of the Sino-Japanese war made it realize this could not be achieved in the short term and that, as the government, it needed to unite and integrate itself with such forces in the interest of rebuilding the socio-economic foundations of society. In this historical and political context, ‘the strategy was to reinforce friendly elements within each religious community’ (Goossaert and Palmer 2011:153). By contrast, so-called ‘redemptive societies’ (such as the Yiguandao 一貫道, the Daoyuan 道院, the Tongshanshe 同善社, the Wushanshe 悟善社, and others which were very popular, widespread and of considerable socio-religious influence during the pre-1949 Republican period (Duara 2004)) were regarded as ‘counter-revolutionary huidaomen 反动会道门’ and were eradicated, while temple cults were categorized as ‘feudal superstitions’. However, Buddhism, Islam, Protestantism, Roman Catholicism and Taoism were officially recognized, and co-operative religious leaders were appointed to political positions in the People’s Congress or the People’s Consultative Conferences. From 1953 to 1957, a single ‘patriotic’ association for each religion was established successively through the initiation of these religious leaders. These associations were in fact under the control of the Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB) of the State Council, whose main function was to educate religious leaders with CCP indoctrination sessions through group learning and discussion.
Each religion presented distinctive issues for the CCP to deal with. Tibetan Buddhism and Islam were treated carefully and with great respect, and not forced to make big changes, as a result of government sensitivity concerning minority ethnic and border relations, with communities thus retaining most of their religious structure and freedom. Buddhism elsewhere and Taoism were, however, controlled through cuts to their major income from land estates and ritual services, and by being forced to hand over all temples to the government, which banned temple rituals as ‘superstition’.
As for Christianity, the major problem was the deep connection with Western imperialism. The strategy of the CCP for Christianity was therefore to sever all foreign ties by expelling foreign missionaries and encouraging the ‘three-self’ movement aimed at establishing a ‘self-propagating, self-governing, and self-financing’ church, i.e. a state-sponsored Chinese church. The Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement was established in 1954. A distinction within the organization of Christianity developed when, alongside the ‘Three-Self Church’, independent ‘house churches’ emerged, though this name was not used until the 1980s. One of the major founders of the ‘Three-Self’ church was Wu Yaozong, the publications secretary of the YMCA. He actively supported the CCP by writing ‘The Communist Party has educated me’ and promoting the slogan ‘love the nation and love the church’ (ai guo ai jiao 爱国爱教). However, he was publicly opposed by Wang Mingdao, who, in avoiding involvement in government sponsorship of Christianity, was widely regarded as ‘the spiritual leader of the Chinese Church’. As a well-known leader of independent churches in China and the founder of ‘The Beijing Christian Church’ (Beijing jidutu huitang 北京基督徒会堂), he claimed that Wu Yaozong led ‘the group of disbelief’ (buxin pai 不信派), i.e. inauthentic non-believers.
Although Wang Mingdao and such other Chinese independent church leaders as Song Shangjie 宋尚杰, Ni Tuosheng 倪柝声and Jia Yuming 贾玉铭had their own distinctive ways of running their churches, they shared a conservative theology and refrained from engaging in discussions regarding social and political issues and reforms. This socio-political non-engagement contrasted with the social reformist and modernist theology of ‘The Three-Self Patriotic Movement’, as represented by Wu Yaozong 吴耀宗 and Ding Guangxun 丁光训.1
By focusing their beliefs and concerns on God alone and not on any other authority or ideology, Wang Mingdao and his fellow house church leaders did not manifestly support or co-operate with the CCP, indicating instead a complete, though non-combative, separation of political party and church. Reflecting this separation, contrasting political and theological orientations have since emerged: a state-inspired modernist social reformism and a conservative apolitical fundamentalism as the basis of, respectively, the ‘Three-Self Church’ and the ‘house church’.
Suppression: 1958–1979
From 1958 there was a total reversal of government policy, with all religious activities forbidden, even those of the officially sanctioned religious organizations whose temples, churches and mosques were forced to close. In fact many such places of worship were obliterated, deity statues and religious symbols destroyed, and religious leaders condemned as ‘ox demons’ and ‘snake spirits’ (niu gui she shen, 牛鬼蛇神) through various campaigns, including the Anti-Rightist of 1958, Socialist Education of 1964, and ‘Smash the Four Olds’ of 1966. Public religious expression was therefore completely suppressed. Yet these changed political circumstances did not make religions disappear, instead pushing them underground and into non-public spaces. Christians started to meet privately at home, in both rural areas and cities. The house church continued to take shape and grow secretly.
The influence of the CCP has been significant. The party’s early suppression of Christian foreign missionary contact had the paradoxical effect of strengthening the indigenous growth of independent churches. This was because, before the crackdown, foreign missionaries, local church leaders and believers had been in conflict with each other, so that, when the CCP repulsed foreign connections, Chinese indigenous church leaders were given the scope to develop their own church styles and theology independently. Moreover, with the CCP’s simultaneous suppression of Buddhism and Chinese popular religion, the churches had even more ‘religious space’ in which to develop and expand at the expense of these other truncated religions. The house churches also retreated from public view and so became less visible as the CCP encouraged growth of the officially recognized Three-Self Church as part of its attempt to curb the expansion of the indigenous house churches. The house churches were obliged to go underground and, again paradoxically, under the cover of being hidden from the state, were able to retain their vitality, especially in rural areas, where miracles, healing and the casting out of evil spirits constituted core activities attracting a cumulatively large following.
Relaxation: 1979 Onwards
The right to worship was allowed in 1978, and along with the economic and political opening up of China from 1979, formal religious policy was relaxed. Religious associations were set up or reorganized. As mosques and temples were reconstructed, religious professionals again engaged in public religious activities, with Christianity undergoing increasing transformation from about 1980. The effects of China’s ‘open door’ policy on the practice and study of religion continued in the 1980s, though social science research on religion remained politically sensitive. As regards Christianity, most studies before 1990 were historical and focused on missionary work in China. They were carried out either by foreigners based in the West or, from an opposite viewpoint, by Chinese scholars addressing the Communist Party’s earlier position that Christianity was a tool of Western imperialist aggression towards China.
For the latter, the growth of Christianity was thus regarded as a socio-political issue and studies of it were sometimes carried out to inform policy recommendations of the Communist Party. A significant publication is Religion under Socialism in China (zhongguo shehuizhuyi shiqide zongjiao wenti 中国社会主义时期的宗教问题) (Luo 1987). This was regarded as a standard example of Chinese socio-religious research during that period, which tended to emancipate itself from the earlier classifications of previous ideological debates. Much research, however, is still governed by a debate motivated by a political perspective: namely, whether religion might be regarded as a possible opponent of the state and as threatening its authority and power. Studies remain subject to careful checks before publication. As a result of this, and of the fact that sociological study by international scholars has not been easy, researchers often continue to adopt an historical, philosophical or cultural perspective, rather than a socio-political one (Leung 2005; Kindopp 2004; Cohen 1963; Lutz 1971; Charbonnier 2002; Lian 2010; Bays 1996, 2012; Ng 2012a). It is in this context that the division between the state-sponsored Three-Self Church and unofficial, so-called house churches has become more relevant for scholarship: study of the former meets with government acceptance and understanding more than the study of house churches.
This book is about such house churches in the rural and urban areas of Linyi district in Shandong Province, where the field research for the study was carried out. It is written from a social anthropological perspective, to which an increasing number of scholars have contributed, and so is part of a growing trend for social science approaches to the study of religion.
New Approaches to the Study of Chinese Christianity
Research had focused, and still does to some extent, on how a non-indigenous Christian ethic was imported into China. From 1990 onwards, however, scholars such as Daniel Bays (1996) shifted from studies of missionary history to the history of Christianity itself in China seen from a China-centric view. Peter Te Ming Ng (2012b) later referred to this changing paradigm as involving a development from ‘Christianity in China’ to ‘Chinese Christianity’; that is, from missionary to indigenous Chinese Christian communities, and from treating Christianity not as a ‘foreign’ but as an ‘indigenized’ religion.
In Hong Kong, scholars had already started to undertake empirical studies of Chinese Christianity. Leung’s work illustrates vividly rural Chinese Christianity at a macro level (Leung 1999) and has provided much useful material for later studies. Jonathan Chao’s work, A History of Christianity in Socialist China, also describes the historical development of Chinese Christianity and offers a foundation for later research (Chao 1997). Nevertheless, in mainland China there was little local-level empirical research on Christianity until 2000, possibly because the government did not encourage this out of concern that such research might reveal by how much Christianity was growing. From 2000, along with China’s increasing openness to the outside world, increasing numbers of exchanges between Chinese and Western scholars have taken place, and research on Christianity has entered a new era.
First, there has been the appearance of studies in the emerging ‘sociology of religion’ (zongjiao shehui xue 宗教社会学) based on the market theory of religion imported from the USA, including translations by Chinese scholars (e.g. Stark and Bainbridge 1985, 1996, 2000) keen to promote the ‘Copernican’ revolutionary concept of religious sociology (Warner 1993: 1044) in China. Market theory has been applied widely in research on Chinese religion. In the light of current Chinese political circumstances, Yang Fenggang (2006) makes a division between three religious markets—red, black and grey, meaning, respectively, officially permitted, officially banned, and religious organizations and practitioners of ambiguous legal status. Lu Yunfeng’s use of market theory to explain the development of Yiguan Dao (一贯道) in Taiwan, which went from being illegal to legally registered (Lu 2008), is seen as a good example of its application to explain the change in the pattern of the ‘black market’ (Yang 2009). Wei Dedong (2005, 2009, 2011) of Renmin University is regarded as the pre-eminent advocate of religious market theory in China, with the sociologist of religion, Li Xiangping, discussing market theory from the perspective of power relationships (Li and Yang 2011). However, there are critiques of market theory, such as that by Fan Lizhu (Fan 2008), who says that the theory confounds two different kinds of rationality—instrumental rationality (people seeking the tangible benefits of religious membership) and value rationality (converts emotionally attracted to a religion).
Van der Veer points out in his critique of Yang’s division of three markets that the relationship between the market and the state is a ‘dynamic situation that cannot be reduced to a static model’, because ‘the state is not monolithic and state actors often work in different and sometimes mutually contradictory ways’ (van der Veer 2012: 186–187). Moreover, the line between formal/official and informal/unofficial activities is dynamic and unstable, as in developing countries generally. This is so in China with regard to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the financial sector, as well as religion. van der Veer’s criticism also holds for the house churches in Linyi. There, Christian organizational complexity cannot be reduced to three markets subject to different governmental regulations. The boundary between the Three-Self Church and house churches is often blurred, and, while some house churches have indeed registered as official legal churches, they do not always follo...