The Rise of Protestantism in Post-Mao China: State and Religion in Historical Perspective

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Yanfei Sun Zhejiang University

This article, using fieldwork from a Chinese county, seeks to explain why Protestantism has experienced explosive growth in post-Mao China, but not before. It identifies six institutional features of Chinese Prot- estantism vital to the religion’s rapid growth, but it does not make a simple institutional argument. Instead, it contends that each of these institutional features can facilitate or impede the spread of Protestant- ism depending on the context. Protestantism flourished in the post- Mao era because the Maoist state had dissolved the locally entrenched social/cultural resistance to Protestantism and because the post-Mao state’s market-oriented economic reform created an environment conducive to the expansion of Protestantism. Theoretically, this article makes a claim that the effect of any religion’s institutional features on its growth is contingent on the sociopolitical context of the religion, and that the state is the most powerful actor in creating and shaping that context.

Protestant missionary work began in China in 1807 (Bays 2012, p. 37). Yet, despite the heavy investment of the Western missionary enterprise,2 Protes- tantism did not achieve much success during the almost one and a half cen-

1 Helpful advice from the late Martin Riesebrodt as well as Rob Weller, Shizheng Feng, Yang Zhang, Sam Nelson, Brook Ziporyn, Margaret Mitchell, Valerie Hansen, and particularly Dingxin Zhao in revising this article is gratefully acknowledged. I thank the AJS reviewers for their comments, which greatly helped to improve the manuscript. Thanks are due also to Richard Gunde for his meticulous copyediting. Direct correspondence to Yanfei Sun, Department of Sociology, Zhejiang University (Zijingang Campus), Hang- zhou, Zhejiang Province, 310058, China. E-mail: [email protected] 2 According to Dunch (2001, p. 198), there were 170 different missionary bodies operating in China between 1867 and 1941, representing a wide variety of Protestant denominations, with headquarters in Europe and North America. The number of Protestant missionaries reached a peak of 8,235 in 1926 (Stockwell 2002, p.100).

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turies following its ﬁrst mission in China (Fairbank 1974, p.1). In 1949, when the Communists came to power, the number of Chinese Protestants had barely reached 1 million (Bays 2012, p. 147), or 0.2% of the Chinese population. Protestantism was signiﬁcantly weakened after 1949 and disappeared altogether from public view during the Cultural Revolution of 1966–76, when the Chinese state strove to erase all religion from society. Yet, after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Protestantism began to grow exponentially. By 2010, the number of Protestants reached 58 million, or 4.3% of China’s population.3 This growth is even more impressive when we consider that it occurredwidelyacrossChina,inbothruralandurbanareas(HunterandChan 1993; Leung 1999; Aikman 2003; Gao 2005; Huang and Yang 2005; Yang 2005), and in a wide range of groups with different socioeconomic characteristics (Chen and Huang 2004; Cao 2010; Xie 2010; Han 2012; Huang 2014). It has been speculated that, if the current trend continues for another decade, China will become the world’s largest Christian country (F. Yang 2014; Stark and Wang 2015, p. 2). How should we account for the phenomenal growth of Protestantism in post-Mao China given that, as many have observed (e.g., Potter 2003; Leung 2005), China still has a very restrictive religious regulatory regime? A look at the history of Protestantism in China raises a related question. Up to the 1940s, Protestantism in China was supported by foreign missionaries who enjoyed extraterritorial rights (Bays 2012, pp. 48, 75–76, 108). During the Republican era (1912–49), Protestantism also received support from the new political elite.4 Under the religious policy of the Republican state, Prot-

3 Estimates of the Protestant population in China today vary greatly, ranging from a low figure of 23.05 million, provided by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences based on a national survey and often cited by the Chinese authorities, to a high figure of 130 million by Christian Today (http://www.christiantoday.com/article/church.in.china.experienc ing.tremendous.growth/26420.htm, accessed July 7, 2015). Whereas the survey method for the former claim has been criticized for leading to a vast underestimation of the number of Protestants affiliated with churches not officially registered and sanctioned (Liu 2014), the latter claim has not been substantiated. The 58 million estimate adopted in this article is from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life and has been well received by scholars in the United States and China. On the methodology behind this estimate, see http://www.pewforum.org/files/2011/12/ChristianityAppendixC .pdf, accessed July 7, 2015. The Pew Research Center estimate has been corroborated by a national survey carried out in 2007 by Horizon, a reputable polling firm in China. Based on a sample of 7,021 individuals, the Horizon survey initially came up with an estimate of 28 million Protestants in China. However, after the survey was similarly faulted for not taking into account the high percentage of Christians who refused to be interviewed or who concealed their religious identity to avoid possible political risks, a follow- up study was launched to correct the problem. It adjusted the estimate of Chinese Protes- tants to a little more than 60 million (Stark and Wang 2015). 4 Sun Yat-sen (1886–1925), the first president of the Republic of China, was a baptized Protestant. Sixty of the 274 members elected to the first national parliament of the Repub- lic of China were Christians (Goossaert and Palmer 2011, p. 70). Chiang Kai-shek (1887–

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estantism not only was regarded as a legitimate religion and enjoyed the rights associated with that status (while Chinese religions were struggling for such a status; Nedostup 2009, pp. 36–37), but it was also treated as a model for other religions to emulate (Goossaert and Palmer 2011, pp. 73–79). Hence, we may ask, why did the explosive growth of Protestantism take place in post-Mao China, but not before 1949? This article seeks to account for not only the rapid growth of Protestant- ism in post-Mao China, but also the timing of this upsurge. While the article acknowledges the importance of Protestantism’s institutional features to its development, it also argues that an analysis of the growth and decline of a religion centering on its institutional features is always inadequate. This article focuses on how the Maoist and post-Mao states gave rise to conditions that unintentionally allowed some institutional features of Protestantism to play a positive and vital role in facilitating its historically unprecedented growth in Chinese society.

EXPLAINING RELIGIOUS GROWTH Existing explanations of the rapid growth of Protestantism in post-Mao China roughly follow two lines of thought, namely, deprivation theory and the institutional approach. Inﬂuenced by Durkheim’s ([1897] 1951) concept of anomie, some scholars have suggested that social changes in post-Mao society have engendered a state of deprivation among individuals and social groups, propelling them to seek remedies and salvation in Protestantism. Yang (2005), for instance, argues that the rapid rise of a market economy in conjunction with the stiﬂing political system in post-Mao China has created social dislocation and existen- tial anxiety among urban young people, who have turned to embrace Protes- tantism in massive numbers. Scholars who have studied the rapid growth of Protestantism in rural China similarly argue that economic reforms and the subsequent rapid social transformation have led to the disintegration of the rural communities, the breakdown of traditional value systems, the dissolu- tion of the rural medical care system, and the weakening of social support networks, creating conditions favorable for the spread of Protestantism (Liu 2007, pp. 242–57; Yang and Tian 2010; Du 2011; Li 2012). Deprivation, however, cannot explain why Protestantism experienced little growth before 1949, when deprivation in Chinese society was arguably more severe due to prevalent poverty and social turmoil brought by inces-

1975), who ruled China from 1928 to 1949, was publicly baptized a Methodist in 1929. Seven of the 10 cabinet ministers in his Nationalist government, established in 1929, were Christians as well (Goossaert and Palmer 2011, p. 72).

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sant wars of various kinds. Nor can it explain why Protestantism has enjoyed much faster growth in post-Mao China than many other religions have. Another line of argument emphasizes institutional features, including organizational structure, beliefs, practices, and networks of the religion. For instance, the contemporary rapid growth of Protestantism has been attributed to its fervent evangelical drive, tightly bound religious community, flex- ible organizational structure, and strong ties with the West (Hunter and Chan 1993, pp. 170–73; Bays 2003, p. 502; Chen 2012; Koesel 2013). The institutional approach is also an influential perspective in the sociology of religion in explaining the growth and decline of religious groups. An emphasis on the institutional dimension of religious groups can be found in studies of conversion to new religious movements that have proliferated in the West since the 1960s. Researchers have found that the success of these religious movements hinges largely on their capacity to forge personal bonds with potential recruits and to socialize recruits into active members through intensive interaction (Lofland and Stark 1965; Lofland 1966; Beckford 1978; Greil and Rudy 1984; Snow and Machalek 1984). Kelley (1972) also used the institutional approach to account for the decline of liberal “mainline” Prot- estant denominations and the rapid growth of conservative groups in the United States, arguing that more demanding religions tend to enjoy stronger growth than less demanding ones. The insights from the sociology of conversion and Kelley’s thesis have been incorporated into a theoretical framework, generally known as the religious economies (or rational choice) model, advanced by Rodney Stark and his associates (e.g., Stark and Bainbridge 1987; Iannoccone 1991, 1994; Stark and Finke 2000; Stark 2001). To explain differential growth and strength of religious organizations, Stark and his associates propose a number of propositions that pinpoint a host of institutional features essential to the growth of religions. They suggest that religions propagating monotheism, practicing ex- clusivism, exerting strict demands on followers, and maintaining a high degree of tension with the sociocultural environment are likely to boost evangelistic drive, reduce free-rider problems, strengthen bonds among followers, and enhance followers’ commitment, thereby enjoying robust growth. Having applied their propositions to explain the growth and decline of religions of divergent natures under different sociopolitical contexts, such as the potent growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Stark 1996), the ascen- dance of Methodists and Baptists as major denominations in 19th-century America (Finke and Stark 1992), and the rise of Mormonism as a new world religion (Stark and Neilson 2005), religious economists assume that the same institutional features would generate the same impact on the growth dynamics of religions regardless of the larger contexts in which the religions are situated. This is why they have dubbed their propositions “general theories.”

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The effect of institutional features on the growth dynamics of religions, however, is not invariant. The same institutional features might be conducive to the growth of a religion in one context, but act as hurdles to its growth in a different environment. For example, Stark and Finke (2000) propose that a religious group that has higher tension with the surrounding environment tends to generate stronger growth. Their rationale is that because a higher- tension religious organization demands more commitment from members, it is more able to screen out free riders, boost confidence in the otherworldly promises of the religion, and provide more worldly rewards to its members. Yet they seem to have overlooked the possibility that high tension with the surroundings might elicit from other social actors animosity and opposition so strong as to jeopardize the very survival of the religious group. When we speak of the importance of the institutional features of a religious group, we are generally talking about two things: a crystallized pattern of practices of the religious group as a social actor and a set of mechanisms engendered by institutional features and supposedly having predictive power over social outcomes. Therefore, when we make an institutional argument, we are implicitly assuming that the religious group is the primary actor whose actions shape its own growth, and that the mechanisms associated with the institutional features are the most crucial to the growth of the religious group. These assumptions, however, are untenable. First, a religious organization is not the only social actor, or even the dominant actor, in society. Second, each institutional feature can generate more than one mechanism, each of which may have a differing effect on the growth of a religious organization. As any religious organization is endowed with multiple institutional features, a whole set of mechanisms of a very different nature is involved. How much weight each mechanism carries and how these mechanisms relate to one another are contingent upon macrostructural conditions (Zhao 2015, pp. 22– 27).5 Macrostructural conditions, in turn, are shaped by the nature and patterned behavior of the dominant actors in a given society. Among the dominant actors that constitute the “environment” of a given religion, the state stands first and foremost. As “coercion-wielding organizations that are distinct from households and kinship groups and exercise clear priority in some aspects over all other organizations within substantial territories” (Tilly 1992, p. 1), states inevitably impinge on other organizations, including religious organizations, in the territories under their control. Moreover, in the past millennia, state power has been fluctuating toward a

5 The contingent effect of the mechanisms generated by institutional features on the growth of religious organization will be elaborated on later in this article when I detail the six institutional features of Chinese Protestantism.

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general expansion, often at the expense of other organizations (Mann 1986, 1993; Tilly 1992; Finer 1999), and consequently has become more capable of influencing the growth dynamics of religions. In addition to its mighty power, there is yet another fundamental reason why the state should be considered the primary actor in shaping religious dynamics. While religion is a major embodiment of ideal-typically diffused and noncoercive ideological power, the state is a centralized and coercive political power par excellence (Mann 1986; Zhao 2015). To sustain its rule, the state cannot rely on coercion alone but also needs to resort to legitimating ideologies, which, before the rise of modern secular ideologies, were usually in the form of religions. On the other hand, religious organizations need to court the support of state actors to increase their centralized coercive capacity in order to expand their influence and suppress competitors (Zhao 2015, pp. 41– 43). Thus, state and religion are bound to enter into a close relationship, so long as a state needs religion for legitimation (Hall 1986; Mann 1986; Zhao 2015). The state influences the rise and fall of religions both directly and indirectly. State actors can take actions that promote, repress, regulate, or mold a religious organization. State actions that do not target a religion can also affect its growth dynamics because they can carry unintended consequences for that religion. The patronage of chieftains, princes, kings, and emperors was critical to the historical rise of the three most widely distributed world religions— Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.6 The power and influence of a religion expanded when the state, after conquering new territories, imposed the religion on its newly acquired subjects and curtailed and suppressed indigenous religions in the conquered territories.7 Examples abound of rulers in-

6 The patronage of King Asoka (304–232 BCE) was instrumental in the rise of Buddhism in India (Strong 1984; Hirakawa 1993, pp. 95–104). The spread and ﬂourishing of Bud- dhism in Sri Lanka (Adikaram 1946; Rahula 1966), China (Zürcher [1959] 2007; Ch’en 1964; Gernet 1995), Korea (Vermeersch 2008), Japan (Kitagawa 1966, pp. 3–45), and Ti- bet (Kapstein 2000) can all be attributed to the conversion of particular rulers and to royal patronage. Needless to say, the historical transition of Christianity to the dominant religion in Europe owed a great deal to the patronage that Christianity received from Con- stantine and succeeding Roman emperors (MacMullen 1984; Cameron 2006) and the mass conversion of the Germanic tribes (Fletcher 1999) and Scandinavian peoples (Winroth 2012) following the conversion of their leaders. Similarly, the conversion of the rulers of Turkic tribes and Mongolian peoples had historically propelled the Islami- zation of Central Asia (Deweese 1994). 7 Charlemagne’s (c. 742–814) preaching the Gospel with “an iron tongue” among the Sax- ons is a quintessential example of forced conversion by conquest (Fried and Lewis 2016, p. 125). The Christianization of Latin America was coextensive with the colonization of the continent by the Spanish and Portuguese empires (Barnadas 1984; Hoornaert 1984).

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volving themselves in religious affairs, including the appointment of leaders, theological disputes, and factional fights.8 Modern secular states, too, directly act upon religions. Modern nation- state building is concomitant with the demarcation of the religious and the secular (Asad 2003). The modern state defines what kinds of religions or religious forms are to be included in the category of religion and delineates the rights, benefits, and restrictions associated with the status of a recognized religion. Groups not admitted into the category of religion, such as the religious traditions of the aboriginal people in Indonesia (Schiller 1996), Shinto and the popular practices of shamans in Meiji Japan ( Josephson 2012), Confu- cianism (Chen 1999; Sun 2013) and local temple cults (Nedostup 2009; Goos- saert and Palmer 2011; Poon 2011) in Republican China from 1912 to 1949, enter into a different sphere of activities that presents different structuring orders. It should be noted here that state actions intended to affect one religion often result in unintended consequences for other religions. For instance, when a state persecutes a religious group, it may inadvertently expand niches for the rivals of the suppressed group. Following the Chinese government’s heavy-handed suppression of Falun Gong, a new religious movement that started as a qigong group and enjoyed tremendous growth in the 1990s, a good number of Falun Gong practitioners converted to Buddhism or Protes- tantism.9 When sociologists touch on the role of the state in shaping religious development, they usually focus narrowly on the state’s religious policy, particularly the state’s regulation of the “religious market” (Iannaccone 1991; Chaves and Cann 1992; Finke and Stark 1992; Finke and Iannaccone 1993; Iannac- cone, Finke, and Stark 1997; Yang 2006). Yet state actions, even when not

8 For instance, Constantine and other Roman emperors convoked ecumenical councils to establish orthodoxy and enforced the decisions of those councils (Grant [1970] 2004; Ed- wards 2006). Similarly, major Buddhist councils were convened under royal aegis in the formative period of Buddhism (Strong 1984). The Spanish Inquisition was established and under the direct control of the Spanish monarchy (Kamen 1997). Emperor Yong- zheng (1678–1735) in Qing China personally penned polemical essays in a doctrinal dispute between two Buddhist Chan masters and issued imperial edicts to ban a Dharma lineage (Wu 2011). 9 Falun Gong was founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992. It started as a qigong group, teaching body exercises and breathing techniques. Since 1994, it has acquired a stronger religious character and transformed itself into a syncretic new religious movement. Li has pro- claimed himself to be a god-like ﬁgure capable of assuming countless incarnations to protect his followers, as well as a savior holding the key to the secret of the cosmos and human salvation. According to Falun Gong, truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance are the three fundamental principles of the cosmos. Falun Gong practitioners are required to cultivate ethics according to these principles. See Penny (2012) for an excellent introduction to Falun Gong’s teachings and practices.

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oriented toward religions, can have a decisive impact on religious dynamics, as the following discussion suggests. Many gods of Chinese popular religion were imagined to be the celestial counterparts of imperial bureaucrats—they were organized into a hierarchical pantheon headed by the Jade Emperor and were promoted and de- moted according to their job performance (Wolf 1974). Here, the state provided a source of imageries and organizational models for religions. The state could induce religious changes sometimes by simply bringing social groups together or setting them apart. For instance, the expansion of empires facilitated the intermingling of different peoples and the fusion of different cultures, creating conditions for religions to spread or even to arise de novo. The Roman Empire not only enabled gods of Eastern origins, such as Mithras, Isis, and Serapis, to find their way into the Roman pantheon but also made it possible for Christianity, an obscure Jewish sect from the edge of the Roman Empire, to spread widely among diverse peoples (Rüpke 2007). A modern state, in adopting a more liberal immigration policy, can enable a massive inflow of immigrants of other religious traditions, which in turn can result in significant changes of the religious ecology of the receiving society.10 The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended racially restrictive immigration quotas, enabled a sharp rise of immigrants from Latin America and Asia, thereby triggering significant changes in Amer- ica’s religious ecology: the European foundations of American Christianity were reshaped, world religions other than Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism started to take hold, and new religious movements inspired by Asian religions emerged (Finke 2006). Religious groups can exploit the transportation, communication, and other infrastructures developed by the state, just as early Christians piggybacked on the infrastructures created by the Roman Empire (Mann 1986, pp. 310– 17) and as Christian missionaries took advantage of those built by colonial governments (Hastings 1994, p. 404). A state’s economic policies can have a number of consequences for religious development. For instance, the momentous development of Buddhist organizations in Taiwan since the 1970s has benefited from the rise of a large urban middle class, which in turn was a result of the economic boom brought by the modernizing state (Madsen 2007). State actions, whether or not directly oriented toward religions, can be motivated either by ideology or practical concerns. Empirically, it is always

10 Religious ecology refers to the composition of all religious groups in a given time and space. Each religious group occupies a niche in the conﬁguration, interacting with other religious groups and entering into relationships with the state and society. The concept of religious ecology aims to capture the diversity of religions and to highlight the interrela- tions between religious groups and the embeddedness of religious groups in the sociopolitical environment (Sun 2011).

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hard to pin down the exact motivation behind a state’s religious policy. None- theless, under certain types of regimes, during some speciﬁc historical periods, and behind certain state actions or policies, one type of consideration could outweigh another. History has seen many cases in which a ruler, driven by religious zeal, promoted a certain religion or some version of it, and suppressed the rest as het- erodox or heretical. The driving ideology can also be of a secular nature. When they began to embrace the Western ideology of progress, rationality, and modernity, the state elites in countries such as Japan and China launched similar projects to differentiate “religions,” which they regarded as under- pinned by rational and moral teachings and useful to the country’smodern- ization, from “superstitions,” which they deﬁned as deluded magical practices and beliefs and an obstacle to modernity (Yang 2008; Nedostup 2009; Goos- saert and Palmer 2011; van der Veer 2011; Josephson 2012). Spurred by the ideology of radical secularism, the revolutionary elites during and after the French Revolution (Bertocci 1978; Kuru 2009), the Mexican Revolution (But- ler 2007), and the Communist revolutions in various parts of the world (Marsh 2011) were vehemently anticlerical. Some even sought to extirpate religion altogether. Ideologically inspired state actions that carry consequences for religions also include social programs initiated by the political elites to restructure society in order to make it conform to their preconceived ideal. These programs are not necessarily directed at religions, but they can stir up seismic social changes that are bound to affect religious organizations. This point will be highlighted when I analyze the effect of the Maoist state’s social engineering programs on China’s religious ecology. The state can also act primarily out of practical concerns, including geopo- litical interests, regime stability, and the instrumental interests of different kinds of actors that constitute the state machinery. For instance, the Chinese government’s suppression of Falun Gong was motivated not by its urge to defend state orthodoxy, but by its fear of Falun Gong’s high mobilization potential (Ownby 2008, pp. 174–79). In dealing with a particular religion, the state often takes into consideration the religion’s foreign ties. When a state seeks to form an alliance with certain foreign powers, it tends to extend favorable policies toward the religions that the foreign powers support;11 when a state is at war, it may suppress religious groups with connections to the enemy.12

11 For instance, Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Taiwan from 1949 to 1975 privileged Christianity over other religions because of the regime’s need to maintain favor with the United States (Rubinstein 1991, pp. 33–34; Madsen 2007, p. 12). 12 For instance, the Ottoman empire generally was fairly tolerant of different religious and ethnic communities. However, when the Sunni Ottoman empire entered wars

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The extent of the impact of state actions on religions is also related to the state’s capacity to penetrate society, which in turn is shaped by the state’s transportation and communications infrastructure, bureaucratic efficiency, and capacity to create a widely shared sense of political legitimacy (Mann 1984; Zhao 2001, p. 18). The Maoist state from 1949 to 1976 was able to fun- damentally alter China’s religious ecology not only because it commanded great repressive power, but because it also enjoyed a high level of voluntary cooperation from the people. For the sake of brevity, I have spoken of the state as if it were a unitary actor. In actuality, the state consists of different actors in different functionary departments and at different levels who are motivated or compelled to act according to their interests, values, and network positions. One branch of the state apparatus often takes actions with logics at odds with another branch. The extent to which one should disaggregate the state depends on one’s research agenda as well as the nature of the state in question (Sun and Zhao 2008). For example, to address the research questions of this article, it is sufficient to treat the Maoist state more or less as a monolith, but it is a necessity to disaggregate the post-Mao state because it has undergone fragmentation (Lieberthal 1992; Landry 2012), with important consequences for religious groups. Although I emphasize the role of the state, I by no means consider religion as passive in the face of state-generated forces. Not only does a religious organization have its own internal mode of operation, it also actively adapts to, exploits, and contests the structuring forces of the state. These actions are shaped by the institutional features of that religion. Institutional features are important for the growth dynamics of a religious organization in two ways: they mold the drive and the capacity of a religious organization to create, reproduce, strengthen, and expand the religious community; they also condition how a religious organization interacts with other social actors, particularly the state. Stark and his associates tend to narrowly focus on the first aspect but almost totally overlook the second. Again, this is due to their inadequate appreciation of the embeddedness of religious organizations. To summarize, my approach to the growth and decline of religions high- lights two actors, namely the state and religious organizations, and their patterned interactions. This approach requires the researcher to identify a set of institutional features of a religious organization that not only shape its internal growth mechanisms but also condition its relationship with other actors, particularly state actors. Above all, this approach requires an anatomy of the

against the Shi’a Safavid empire, bouts of persecution against the Shi’a populations took place because the Ottomans feared that Shi’as might act as a ﬁfth column inside the Ot- toman territories (Barkey 2005).

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state, that is, how state actors, out of ideological and practical concerns, constrained and facilitated by state capacity, directly and indirectly create an environment that religious organizations can tap into or are compelled to wrestle with. Following this approach, my explanation of the rise of Protestantism in post-Mao China will start by identifying six key institutional features of the religion before moving to analyze the structural conditions generated and shaped by the state in pertinent historical periods. The investigation will then dwell on how leaders and followers of Protestantism, shaped by the institutional features of their religion, have reacted to the structural conditions generated by the state, as well as how state actors, constrained by their own logics, interests, and capacity, have responded to the actions of these religious actors. Last, my analysis will reveal how the growth dynamics of Protestant groups during the post-Mao era have been fashioned by the patterned interactions of state actors and religious actors.

RESEARCH METHODS River County, the field site of my research, is located in Zhejiang Province in Southeast China.13 It encompasses close to 400 square miles and has a population of a little over half a million. The purpose of my larger project was to map and analyze the changes in the religious ecology of post-Mao China. I needed to select a unit of investigation that is suitable for qualitative ethnographic work, but at the same time one that could lead to findings that re- flect general trends in China. The choice of a county rather than a church, a neighborhood, a village, a township, a municipality, a prefecture, or a province as the field site was based on the following rationale. First, unlike a church, a neighborhood, a village, a township or a municipality, a county in China covers a sufficiently large territory that contains both rural and urban populations and significant religious diversity. Hence, the results from a county- basedstudyaremorelikelytoreflect the situation nationwide. Second, the size of a county can still permit an ethnographic study (strenuous efforts granted), which is crucial for a contextualized and dynamic understanding of the research questions I pursued, but a prefecture or a province is much too big for ethnographic work. Third, a Chinese county is also the lowest level of administration that has almost all the branches of the functionary departments of the central government, making it ideal for examining the patterns of interactions between state actors and religious groups. I started to develop an interest in River County’s religious activities as early as 1992. But the intensive phase of this research, including participant

13 This article uses pseudonyms for localities and informants.

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observation, interviews, and archival research, was carried out between 2006 and 2009 and followed by brief field trips in 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2015. My larger research project examines the development of all major religions in River County, but this article deals only with Protestantism. To reconstruct the local history of Protestantism, I relied on interviews as well as archival materials. A major source of archival materials comes from the County Gaz- etteer Office, including two recent local gazetteers as well as a periodical. An- other important source is the Cultural and Historical Documents (Wenshi ziliao), a collection of oral histories and historical documents published an- nually since 1984 by the Committee of the Political Consultative Conference of River County. I also consulted publications by Protestant groups, including the Annual Report of the China Inland Mission, the Chinese Recorder, the Baptist Missionary Magazine, and the newsletter Open Door (Changkai de men) published by the so-called Local Church between 1937 and 1939. During my fieldwork, I participated in Sunday worship services, Bible study groups, fellowship organizations, as well as large interchurch revival meetings, youth camps, funerals and weddings, home visitations, holiday celebrations, and inauguration ceremonies in 24 different church groups. I conducted semistructured interviews with 92 people, including 50 leaders and members of Protestant groups, 34 relatives, friends, coworkers, and neighbors of Protestant believers, three government officials in charge of religious affairs in the county, and one ex-official, as well as four cadres working at the township and village levels.14 I conducted two focus group interviews with church members, with five people present in one focus group and six in another. To gain a better understanding of China’s religious policy, I also interviewed three officials who are working or have worked in the United Front Work Department (UFWD) at the provincial and national levels. To situate my study in the context of China, I also visited church groups and spoke with local Protestant leaders and followers as well as local government officials in Beijing, Shanghai, and eight provinces and autonomous regions in different parts of China. I also traveled to Taiwan in 2009 to visit the headquarters of the Bread of Life Church in Taipei, an organization with which a very important evangelist in River County was connected. In almost all the instances, informants readily agreed to be interviewed. In fact, many were eager to talk. However, I did encounter difficulties with two independent churches (a type of church I will detail later). In one case, I was interviewing an independent church leader in his home when his wife, also a core member of the church, came in, sat by his side, and frequently

14 The informants are numbered for a larger research project. I number my informants according to the time when the ﬁrst interview was conducted (for some informants, I have conducted multiple interviews).

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kicked him under the table to signal that she did not want him to talk with me too candidly. At another independent church, two leaders chastised me for wasting time on a meaningless worldly research project; all members whom I interviewed evaded my questions and again and again shifted to evangelistic talk. Realizing that in-depth interviews were not possible, I devoted more time to participant observation and tried to glean information from sermons, prayers, and testimonies, as well as from casual chats with members.

PAST AND PRESENT OF PROTESTANTISM IN RIVER COUNTY The development of Protestantism in River County is congruent with national trends. The earliest Protestant missionary activities in River County date back to 1867. The first church was established in 1901 by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society. China Inland Mission, which built a church four years later, was the most active of all the foreign mission societies in the county. It operated a church school and established seven churches in towns and villages. Beginning in the 1920s, the Local Church, an indigenous Chi- nese Protestant movement led by Ni Tuosheng (also known as Watchman Nee, 1903–72), became very aggressive in missionizing River County.15 Suc- cessfully converting all churches of the China Inland Mission to its camp, it dominated the local Protestant community and left an enduring imprint. By 1949, there were 10 Protestant churches in the county, with 966 members, or 0.27% of the county’s population at the time. The Protestant community faced mounting difficulties under the Maoist state. Shortly after the Communist victory, foreign missionaries in River County were forced to leave. During the Land Reform in 1950–51, small churches had their properties confiscated and were forced to merge into larger churches. During the campaign to purge “hidden counterrevolutionaries” (sufan yundong) in 1956, the Local Church was targeted. One of its prominent leaders in River County was sent to a labor camp. In 1958, the biggest church in River County was converted into a factory. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, all

15 The Local Church, also known as the Christian Assemblies (Jidutu jühuichu), or the Little Flock (xiaoqun jiaohui), was one of the most influential indigenous Chinese Chris- tian movements that emerged in the 1920s, truly “independent of foreign missions, autonomous in operations, and indigenous in ideas and leadership” (Bays 1996, p. 309). Strongly influenced by Watchman Nee’s theology, which has a “millenarian vision of the spiritual victory over the evils and trials of the world through identification with Christ’s death” (Bays 2012, p. 133), the Local Church emphasized spiritual purity and separation from the world. It rejected denominationalism, insisting that there should be only one church in any place, undivided by denominational differences. It disavowed a clergy-laity distinc- tion and placed church leadership in the hands of “coworkers.” On the history of the Local Church and the life of Watchman Nee, see Bays (1996) and Lian (2010).

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the churches were closed down and religious activities disappeared from the public scene. Yet, when the government relaxed its religious policy in the late 1970s, Protestantism resurfaced and began to experience rapid growth. The number of church members in River County reached 4,500 by 1987. By 2009, River County had at least 20,000 Protestants (about 3.6% of the county’s population), 57 large church groups, and hundreds of small meeting points, spread all over the county, including the county seat, towns, and villages. The demographic composition of church members has also become increasingly diverse over the past three decades, revealing the vibrancy as well as the remarkable growth potential of this religious community. In the 1980s and early 1990s church members were predominantly middle-aged and elderly women of low socioeconomic status. Since then, the gender ratio has become more balanced; members now come from a wider age and class spectrum. During my fieldwork, males usually composed up to 15%–25% of the congregants of Protestant communities.16 Urban churches, in particular, have attracted a growing body of young professionals, including physicians, teachers, white-collar workers, and business people. Table 1 illustrates the development trajectory of Protestantism in River County as well as in China as a whole. The robust growth of Protestantism can be shown by tracing the development trajectory of two churches. In 1992, I attended a church meeting in a small ramshackle house. Most of its 30 or so participants were middle-aged or elderly women who could barely read. They were all from lowly social ranks—a significant number were peddlers and street cleaners. This group split into two churches in 1998. In 2009, the worship services of the two churches were attended by approximately 150 and more than 300 individuals, respectively. Over half of the members for both churches were of urban middle-class background. In January 1995 I participated in the worship service of the newly established Rain of Grace Church. Held in a private home, it was attended by some 15 people. By 2009, its worship service was attended by approximately 150 individuals. The Rain of Grace Church has also helped to nurture four other churches, which are loosely affiliated with the church itself. To help explain the quick rise of Protestantism in River County during the post-Mao era, I offer here an account of six institutional features of Chinese Protestantism that I have identified as important to the rapid growth of the religion in post-Mao China. Yet the central argument of this article is not about institutional features but about the role of the state. Only under the

16 As a comparison, at Buddhist ceremonies in River County during the time of my ﬁeld- work, males were generally less than 5% of the lay participants; females older than 60 constituted the overwhelming majority.

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TABLE 1 Growth of Protestantism in River County and China

River County China 1949...... 966 (0.27) 900,000–1 million (0.2) 1982...... Unknown 3 million (0.3) 1987...... 4,500 (0.73) Unknown 2009–10 ...... 20,000 (3.6) 58 million (4.3)

NOTE.—Nos. in parentheses are percentages. For the data source for River County, data for 1949 and 1987 are from Wenshi ziliao of River County, no. 6 (1988), and Gazetteer Periodical of River County, vol. 60, no. 4 (2008); the 2009–10 estimate is from interviews. For China, data for 1949 are taken from Bays (2012, p. 147), for 1982 from Document 19 (http://www.mzb.com .cn/html/folder/290171.htm), and for 2009–10, from the Pew Research Center (see n. 3 above for more information).

structural conditions created by the Maoist and the post-Mao states were the institutional features of Protestantism played out in ways conducive to its growth. Therefore, following the institutional analysis, my focus will shift back to the state.

SIX INSTITUTIONAL FEATURES OF CHINESE PROTESTANTISM There are many differences among Protestant groups in River County, which include but are not limited to differences in church teachings and practices, differences and tensions between churches that have registered with the government and those that have not, and disparities between urban and rural churches. Yet, differences notwithstanding, Protestant groups share great similarities, which are encapsulated in six institutional features. It should be stressed that, although previous studies have mentioned one or more of the institutional features of Chinese Protestantism, this is the ﬁrst time that the six institutional features have been identiﬁed and put together.

Zero-sum evangelism Carrying the evangelical imperative prescribed by the central tenet of the Great Commission, in which Christ commanded his disciples to spread his teachings to the world, Protestantism makes evangelism the duty of not just religious professionals but all members. One of the most recurring themes in the sermons of the Protestant groups in River County is that members should share the Gospel with others. Members use their personal networks to bring relatives, friends, and coworkers to church meetings, and they proselytize strangers as well.17

17 Vala and O’Brien (2007) analyze how Protestant evangelists recruited nonnetworked individuals in public spaces in China.

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The conversion of their families is always of vital importance to church members and is constantly featured in small group prayer meetings. Family members’ resistance and indifference is a lasting source of anguish. In church testimonies, I have heard countless stories in which members have struggled for years with their “obstinate” parents and eventually secured their deathbed conversion. The evangelicalism of Protestantism is zero-sum in the sense that conversion to Protestantism entails abandoning one’s previous faiths and practices. At a sermon that I attended during my fieldwork in River County, a preacher enjoined his congregation, “Once we come to accept Jesus, we must break with our past. We should put a period, not a comma between this new life and the past.” Leaders demand iconoclasm. For instance, another preacher in River County instructed his congregants, “For all those images of dubious character, cutting them out and burning them is the best solution. Lord Jesus will compensate you for all your losses.” Testimonies of converts are replete with stories of how they smashed the statues of the deities on their home al- tar and destroyed anything in their household that featured the image of a dragon—a common symbol with an auspicious meaning in Chinese culture but deemed particularly “demonic” by these Protestant groups (see also Cao 2010, pp. 20–21, 71–72). Converts are told to avoid Buddhist and popular religion temples. Practices of ancestor worship, such as funerary rites held according to local customs and visiting graves to offer sacrifices of food and paper money to the deceased, are strictly prohibited. While some church groups, mostly those that have registered with the government, are more lax in this regard—allowing members to offer a bouquet of flowers at gravesites in lieu of a real sacrifice—the more conservative churches forbid this practice of re- membrance. A church preacher urged members to take an unwavering position by speaking of his own example: “My mother-in-law tempted us. She asked, ‘I understand you won’t burn paper money for me [after I die]. But would you just come and visit my grave on Qingming Day?’ To this, I said no. We cannot give her such illusory solace.”18 The most conservative churches even demand their members give up celebrating traditional Chinese festivals, such as the Spring Festival and the Dragon Boat Festival, altogether. These stances and practices stem from their understanding that only Chris- tianity holds the truth and all other religions are manifestations of Satan. The Protestant faithful often attribute misfortune to lingering contact with other religious traditions. In one instance, when a new convert remained ill after the church leader ravaged all the “idols” in her house, the church leader con- cluded that a god statue that the convert donated to a popular religion temple

18 The Qingming Festival, which falls in early April, is a traditional Chinese holiday to remember and honor ancestors at their gravesites.

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many years earlier was the source of the evil force causing the illness. He, together with his followers, took a trip expressly to demolish the statue.19

Congregational Structure Protestantism is undergirded by a congregational structure. According to Wind and Lewis (1994, pp. 1–2), a “congregation” is a body of people who regularly gather to worship at a particular place. The congregation model helps ensure that Protestant groups retain their members. Forms of corporate worship, such as sermons, communion, prayer meetings, testimony shar- ing, and hymn singing, take place regularly and often, socializing members into the discourses and perspectives, beliefs and practices of the religious community, building and cementing horizontal ties among members, and enhancing a sense of belonging to a collective body with a shared ideology and identity. Before his conversion, Mr. Chen (informant no. 140) had been an avid religious seeker who had experimented with Buddhism, various forms of qigong, and Guanyin Famen (also known as the Quan Yin Method).20 He told me When we were practicing Guanyin Famen, we only watched the recorded tapes of the master. There was no personal guidance, and very little communication among the practitioners. The whole experience in the end didn’t change me much. In the family of Christianity, we have fellowships, lots of them. Several brothers and sisters truly belong to the Spirit. I look up to them as my role models. You know, I need that. In a few months since I joined the church, my understanding of the word of God has deepened, through listening, studying the Bible together, learning how to give testimony, and praying. You know, praying is to have dialogue with God. Bit by bit, I’ve seen myself changing spiritually. Various studies note that many converts in post-Mao China have been attracted to Protestantism by some purported tangible beneﬁts, especially supernatural healing (Hunter and Chan 1993, pp. 145–55; Bays 2003). I would argue that the congregation model of Protestantism sets in motion an inten-

19 These exclusivist religious practices of Protestantism are distinct from the much more inclusive and eclectic practices of other major religions in China (Hansen 1990, pp. 29– 47), which could peacefully coexist in the same locality and even in the same household. It is by no means unusual that Daoist priests, Buddhist monks, and professional wailers perform their respective rituals, and complement each other, at funerals. 20 Guanyin Famen is a syncretic religious movement with a strongly Buddhist leaning founded by Ching Hai, an ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese, in Taiwan in 1988. It instructs followers to discover and awaken “the Divine Presence within” through the practice of veg- etarianism, daily meditation on the Inner Light and the Inner Sound, and the observation of Five Precepts—injunctions against killing, lying, stealing, sexual misconduct, and using intoxicants. Introduced to mainland China in 1989, it was proscribed by the Chinese government in 1995 (Thornton 2008).

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sive resocialization, transforming a great proportion of converts into ardent followers, regardless of their initial motives for joining the church. Moreover, the congregation model turns the church into a community with a board range of social services for its members, including paying home visits, assisting the poor, nursing the sick, and organizing funeral services. The following example is typical. A retiree diagnosed with terminal cancer was converted on her deathbed. Church members came to visit her in the hospital every day, nursing her and praying for her. When she died, her church took care of her funeral, greatly relieving the burden on the be- reaved family. Moreover, the turnout at the funeral, numbering several hundred, invited the envy of neighbors. They commented, “This is just like a funeral of an old cadre [lao ganbu]” (informant no. 142); “Believing in Jesus does have beneﬁts—at the funeral, the church will help your family to achieve xing” (informant no. 143). The word xing, in the local dialect, means humming with activity and life. As the quality of xing is highly valued in local society, a large turnout for a funeral enhances the social status of the be- reaved family.

Insistence on Church Autonomy “Religion and politics are two separate realms” and “Jesus, not the government, is the head of the church” are examples of the kind of rhetoric I have frequently heard in sermons and in my interviews with Protestant leaders— particularly of the churches not registered with the government—in River County. The insistence on autonomy from the state does not derive just from Christian doctrine, but also from how Protestant missions took root in China. Protestant missionaries came to China in the 19th century with the back- ing of Western colonial powers. Until the 1940s, the Protestant community was able, for the most part, to insulate itself from the control and interference of the Chinese state and to develop outside the Chinese legal framework (Brook 1996; Yip 2003; Nedostup 2009, pp. 34–37). This emphasis on church autonomy has become an important legacy even though the Western colonial powers are long gone. This feature distinguishes Protestant groups from the other religious communities, such as Buddhist groups, which have a longer history on Chinese soil and, in the long process of dealing with the powerful state, have developed a state-oriented mentality, or a proclivity to seek state patronage and to yield to state control (Ch’en 1964; Brook 2005, pp. 132–58).

A Polycephalous/Polycentric Structure Compared to the communities of other religions, such as Catholicism, the Protestant community features a salient polycephalous or polycentric structure (Oblau 2005, p. 416). By this, I mean that Protestant groups are not uni-

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fied under one or several centralized authority structures. In the extremely diverse Chinese Protestant community, most churches are independent congregations, subject to no higher ecclesiastical entities.21 The polycephalous structure is attributable to Protestantism’s inherently fissiparous nature. Protestantism’s insistence on the right of private interpretation of the Bible and believers’ direct access to God lend legitimacy to dissenters to set up their own religious groups, leading to a proliferation of heterogeneous congregations and sects. Dunch (2001) notes that the Chinese Protestant community before 1949 was already characterized by institutional diversity and fragmentation due to the multiplicity of mission societies and the proliferation of indigenous movements in the 1920s. The Protestant groups in River County, too, were associated with different denominations of Western or indigenous origin. The polycephaly of Protestantism has become inten- sified due to the religion’sexperiencesunderMao’s regime. Because mission- derived churches were forced to cut their ties to the West, and the original denominational structure of Protestant groups was broken up under Mao,22 Protestant groups that have reemerged in the post-Mao era are more local- ized and independent than they historically had been. Even though the Lo- cal Church groups in River County since the 1980s have renewed contact with groups of the same denominational heritage outside the county, a nationwide ecclesiastic structure with headquarters and commonly recognized leadership has not been restored. Without denominational authority to stave off fissiparous tendencies, Protestantism has been prone to schism in the post-Mao years. In the last three decades, the Protestant community in River County has undergone repeated split-ups, triggered by disputes over such things as doctrinal positions and church practices, alleged “moral failures” of church leaders, and personality clashes.

Gloriﬁcation of Martyrdom The discourse of persecution and martyrdom played a central role in shaping Christian doctrines, institutions, and identity in the history of early Chris-

21 It must be stressed that a polycephalous structure characterizes the interorganization relations in Protestantism. That the leadership of some Protestant churches is authoritarian and that a few groups have developed multiple branches do not contradict my assessment, because these groups have not coalesced into a uniﬁed ecclesiastical organization. 22 Denominations with stronger authority structures were subject to more severe persecution under Mao. Another important step in eliminating denominationalism was the introduction of “united worship” in 1958. Smaller churches were closed and people of different denominational backgrounds were ordered to attend joint worship services held in a greatly reduced number of churches (Keating 2012, pp. 117–24).

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tianity (Castelli 2004) and continued to be an integral part of Christian self- understanding well into modern times (Leemans 2005). The ultimate act of martyrdom is the voluntary offering of one’s life for one’s belief. Lesser forms of martyrdom include perseverance in faith despite public humiliation or incarceration. Suffering persecution for the sake of Christ is considered a special blessing and greatly enhances the status and charisma of the persecuted in the religious community. In River County, too, stories of how believers preserved in their faith in the darkest days of the Maoist era have been retold again and again to become a collective memory of the Protestant community. A few of these stories are about nationally known Protestant leaders, but most are about how ordinary local Protestants during the Cultural Revolution continued the daily ritual of singing hymns and praying, how they attended secret fellowships despite the danger of being discovered, and how they calmly endured public humiliation when being paraded as “a dangerous element who believes in Jesus” or “a lazy woman who relies on God for a livelihood” (informants nos. 148, 170, 178, 179). In the post-Mao era, in confrontations with ofﬁcials, the local Protestant community has been quick to interpret these as religious persecution and evoke the martyrdom discourse. In contrast to Protestant groups, Buddhist, Daoist, and popular religion communities in River County do not have a grand narrative of persecution and martyrdom, even though these religious groups suffered similar suppression and did not lack of cases of individual practitioners secretly observing their religion during the Cul- tural Revolution.

Global Support Network Chinese Protestants are embedded in the global networks of Protestantism and have strong Western connections. China once was a major field for West- ern missionaries (Fairbank 1974). Even though mission work halted after the Communist victory in 1949, Western Protestant groups have maintained a special interest in China (Bays 2012, pp. 203–4).SinceChinareopenedtothe outside world in the late 1970s, evangelical groups in the former mission- sending countries as well as Hong Kong have resumed missionary activities and created organizations to support Protestant groups in China (Bays 2012, p. 204). The strong presence of the global support network means that Prot- estant groups in China have what Tilly (1978) called “influential allies” who can mobilize resources, including the Western media and politicians, to put pressure on the Chinese government to ease the repression of Protestant groups. River County’s connection with the global Protestant community is also manifest: Christian literature from outside China has continued to flow in;

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church leaders of the Local Church tradition are well connected with churches of the same tradition in nearby cities such as Xiaoshan, Ningbo, and Shang- hai, where the churches have much closer foreign ties; the county has been visited by evangelists from other countries and regions; and one of the most active evangelists in River County was from Taiwan. The global network is also re- ﬂected in the self-understanding of leaders and members of the local Protes- tant groups, who have talked about their religion as a true “world religion” and have considered Americans as fellow brothers and sisters.23 This perception has also been shared by local ofﬁcials in charge of religious affairs.

INADEQUACY OF AN INSTITUTIONAL ACCOUNT Each of the six institutional features could have a positive effect on the expansion of Protestantism in China. Zero-sum evangelism and a congregational structure drive and enable a religious community to recruit and retain followers. Insistence on church autonomy impels church groups to battle government-imposed restrictions. The polycephaly of Protestantism allows each independent congregation to tap into local conditions. It not only diver- sifies the niches of Protestant groups, but also makes it difficult for the state to deal with Protestant groups in a coherent and effective way. The enactment of the martyrdom discourse can turn repression into occasions of mobilization and enhance the solidarity of the Protestant community. The global support network facilitates an influx of resources and makes the Chinese state hesi- tant to adopt repressive measures against Protestant communities (table 2). Yet such an institutional argument is far from adequate, because the six institutional features are actually double-edged swords—they can facilitate or impede the growth of Protestant groups depending on the circumstances. For instance, a global support network becomes a liability when xenophobic nationalism rages in a country; the martyrdom frame can cause a religion to be regarded by mainstream society as a dangerous cult. In the following section, I explore in a greater detail how zero-sum evangelism—an institutional feature that religious economists have regarded as crucial to the strong growth of religions—had evoked antagonism in local society in pre-1949 China, so much so that it stalled the spread of Protestantism. I will then analyze how the Maoist state’s social engineering endeavors had dismantled the organizational basis of the social forces that once blocked the expansion of Protestantism, paving the way for the religion’s rapid growth in the post- Mao era.

23 During my ﬁeldwork, when Protestants learned that I was from the United States, they became more welcoming and at ease with my presence. In church sermons, the United States was often referred to as “a nation of Christians.”

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TABLE 2 The Six Institutional Features of Chinese Protestantism

Potential Benefits for the Defining Character Religion’s Growth Zero-sum evangelism ...... Fervent evangelism that Recruiting and retaining condemns all other followers religions as false Congregational structure . . . . . Regular corporate worship Retaining followers Insistence on church Avoidance and/or rejection Fencing out political autonomy ...... of state control interferences A polycephalous structure . . . . Highly decentralized Niche diversification authority structure of the religion Glorification of martyrdom . . . Suffering persecution for Endurance and mobilization one’s faith is honored in in face of repression the religious community Global support network ...... Embedded in the global Inflow of resources; network of Protestantism influential allies and strongly connected to the West

Zero-sum Evangelism as a Liability Because of zero-sum evangelism, Protestant groups demand that converts withdraw from their prior religious networks and attack other religious practices in local society as idolatrous and demonic. Before 1949, in River County and elsewhere in China, these practices backfired, making it hard for Protes- tantism to make inroads in local communities deeply entrenched in the popular religion of communal temples and ancestor worship. Each territorial community, such as a village, town, or neighborhood, usually had one or more temples enshrining gods thought to protect the common welfare of the community and its residents (Yang 1961; Feuchtwang 2001).24 As members of the territorial community, residents were obligated to contribute to the upkeep of the temple and to participate in temple festivals celebrating the gods’ birthdays. For their shirking of ritual and financial obligations for the communal temples, Christian converts were viewed as unreasonable cultural deviants and free riders by other members of the same territorial community (Litzinger 1996; DuBois 2005, pp. 46–47). In River County, as in many other places of China, Protestant converts’ abjuring the practice of ancestor worship was an even more significant cause of animosity (Ying 1997). In traditional China, ancestor worship was “liter- ally the universal religion of China” and embodied “all the general characteristics of the Chinese approach to the supernatural” (Hsu 1953, p. 248). As an expression of filial piety, which was the first principle in Chinese society

24 The local term in River County for these popular religion temples is benbao dian, lit- erally meaning communal temple.

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dominated by and permeated with Confucian social ethics, ancestor worship was the norm, the culture imperative, and the “absolute obligation” for all Chinese (Wolf 1976, pp. 361–62). As Hsu’s (1948) study shows, ancestor worship still shaped almost every aspect of the social life in market towns up to the Communist victory. The most basic ritual requisite of ancestor worship consists of a proper mourning and burial ritual for the parents, as well as regular sacrificial offerings to the deceased, so that he or she would be provided for in the nether world (Freedman 1979, p. 296; Thompson 1988). Accordingly, Chinese Prot- estants’ renouncing of ancestor worship could be perceived as damning their own ancestors to the miserable existence of being hungry ghosts and thus unfilial and abominable (Ying 1997, p. 91; Li 2010).25 In my interviews, I found that the elderly, especially those in their 80s or older, that is, those who had spent a substantial part of their lives before 1949, almost universally found “Jesus-believers” distasteful for this very reason.26 When an informant (no. 134) told his 89-year-old mother that he was ready to accept Jesus, she was overwhelmed with grief and told him mournfully, “If you became a Jesus-believer, our ancestors would wail in their graves.” Another informant (no. 1), an 88-year-old woman, told me, “Jesus-believers are without morals and conscience! They don’t bring food, nor do they burn paper money [for their deceased parents]. Their [dead] parents are left with no food or money, and are starving.” When I asked her opinion about the practice of more liberal Protestants offering flowers at the gravesite, she declared, “This is no use! Can flowers feed the stomach?” When I asked the 90-year- old Mr. Xu (informant no. 36) what he thought of the Jesus-believers in town, my otherwise amicable informant angrily blurted out, “I tell you, Jesus- believers are the most unworthy people! It must be that no one exercises authority in their family [so that they dare to convert].” Before 1949, ancestor worship was reinforced by the lineage organization, the most powerful social organization in local society. Chinese lineage orga- nizes people on the basis of patrilineal descent from a common ancestor. The critical period of its formation was during the Song dynasty (960–1279), when neo-Confucian intellectuals advocated patrilineal descent-line ethics based on the ideas of kinship and Confucian filial piety and took initiatives in developing the organizational form and repertoire of activities that later coalesced to become the enduring features of lineage organization (Twitchett 1959; Ebrey 1986, 1991; Bol 2008). The Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–

25 In the Chinese religious imagination, ancestors who are not provided for will turn into hungry ghosts who roam the world and cause havoc among the living. They thus need to be propitiated. The Ghost Festival, which falls in the seventh lunar month, is a traditional holiday when offerings are made to pacify hungry ghosts. Weller (1987) analyzes the Ghost Festival in Taiwan. Teiser (1996) traces the Buddhist origin of this festival. 26 The local people in River County use the term “Jesus-believers” to refer to Protestants.

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1912) dynasties saw the emergence of a Confucianized “lineage society” (Szonyi 2001, p. 1), as lineage organization became a major form of social organization thanks to the imperial state’s efforts to advance the neo-Confucian agenda (Chow 1994; Chang 2001, 2006). Lineage organizations were allowed to play a major role in local self- governance, partly also because the imperial state, with an insufficient bureaucracy and premodern technologies, had a limited capacity to penetrate into local society (Zheng 2001, pp. 287–308; Faure 2007).27 Lineage organizations were the chief provider of public goods and welfare programs for villagers, maintaining irrigation systems, building bridges and roads, setting up schools for lineage youth, and providing aid to the needy in the lineage (Zheng 2001, p. 23). Lineage organizations wielded a significant amount of judicial and policing power, resolving disputes among lineage members and punishing (sometimes severely) transgressors of lineage mores in the community (Potter and Potter 1990, pp. 9–10; Xiao 2010, pp. 55–56). Lineage organizations also assumed paramilitary functions, organizing both defensive and of- fensive collective action in the “common interests” of the lineage.28 Usually, lineage groups in southern China, more than those in the north, were able to amass substantial corporate wealth and thus could provide more material benefits as well as exert more power over lineage members (Huang 1985, pp. 233–37; Cohen 1990). It is impossible to overlook the religious character of lineage organizations. They took the initiative in constructing and maintaining ancestral halls and graves, orchestrating communal sacrificial rites to lineage ancestors, and overseeing the orthopraxy of death and sacrificial rituals in the community (Watson 1988; Zhou, Lin, and Chen 2001; Zhou 2005). Moreover, lineage organizations often provided the leadership for the construction, renovation, and management of communal temples of popular religion, and the organization of temple festivals (Siu 1990; Zhou 2005, pp. 116–21). In many instances, the interconnectedness between communal temples and lineage organizations was also manifested in the inclusion of the ancestral hall as a major stop for the procession of the tutelary deities during temple festivals, with the lin-

27 At the county level, only the magistrate was ofﬁcially appointed and subject to the administrative regulations of the imperial center. His assistants, including the clerks, run- ners, servants, and private secretaries, were not. This led to limited state penetration in local society (Chu 1962). 28 Most commonly, these collective actions involved feuding with neighboring lineage- based villages. But lineages also provided a basic organizational structure for local militarization in response to large-scale military threats (Kuhn 1970). During the Taiping Rebellion (1851–64), lineage organizations in River County formed local militia and fought both the invading Taiping forces and the pillaging Qing army (Jiang 1991; Zhou et al. 2001, pp. 45–47).

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eages or lineage branches serving as the basic units for staging the ceremony (Szonyi 2001, p. 199; Menegon 2009, pp. 79–80). In short, lineage organizations reinforced the ideology and practices of ancestor worship as well as the communal aspect of popular religion, helping ancestor worship and communal temple religion to achieve a kind of hegemonic status in the local religious ecology of premodern China (Yang 1961). Other religious practices were allowed, but if they contradicted or chal- lenged the norms or obligations of ancestor worship or communal temple religion, they would encounter the censure of lineage organizations. Lineage power was very strong in River County. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the county boasted the greatest number of ancestral halls in central Zhejiang Province (Shao 2011, pp. 66–67). During the Republican era, lineage organizations were somewhat weakened, but they continued to wield significant clout and demonstrated considerable capacity to adapt to the new context (Chen et al. 2003, p. 57; Shao 2011, pp. 68–70).29 The argument of the arresting effect of lineage organizations on the growth of Protestantism can be supported by analyzing the distribution of the Prot- estant population in River County before 1949. Of the 10 Protestant churches in the county, 2 were in the county seat and the remaining 8 were scattered in the countryside. This suggests that missionary activities had penetrated deep into the county. However, as table 3 shows, around 1949 Protestants constituted 1.11% of the population in the county seat, but only 0.19% of the population in the countryside, where the power of lineage organizations was stronger.30 Yet even this 0.19% was a highly inflated figure because a single village had 400 Protestant members. If this village is excluded, then the percentage of Protestants in the countryside drops to 0.07%. Even for this 0.07%, from a few cases on which I have information, it seems that the majority of the converts were residents of market towns where lineage organizations were relatively weak or individuals marginal in the lineage network— such as widows who had married into the village, young adults whose fathers had passed away, or members of a minor lineage. Even the anomalous case of one village where a great number of conversions took place is the exception that proves my point. The villagers were converted into the Local Church in large numbers after a powerful lineage elder joined the church in 1937. The successful “bloc mobilization” following the conversion of an lineage elder in this one village versus the little success of Protestant evangelism elsewhere in

29 A survey of River County shows that lineage organizations still owned 255 ancestral halls, 3,505 buildings, and 2,491.4 acres of land in 1934 (Feng 1935). 30 By 1949, with only 10.6% of its population living in cities, China remained by and large an agrarian society (Chan, Henderson, and Tsui 2008, p. 787). Hence, social/religious norms associated with ancestor worship and other forms of popular religion prevailed in society and constituted a major obstacle to the expansion of Protestantism.

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TABLE 3 Urban and Rural Distribution of Protestant Converts in River County around 1949

No. of % No. of Average no. of Locality Protestants Protestants churches members per church Entire county ...... 966 .27 10 97 Urban (county seat) ...... 350 1.11 2 175 Rural ...... 616 .19 8 77 Rural (excluding one anomalous village) ...... 216 .07 7 31

NOTE.—The data of the number of churches and the number of Protestants are from Wenshi ziliao of River County, no. 6 (1988), as well as Gazetteer Periodical of River County, vol. 60, no. 4 (2008). The data source for the population of River County is River County Gazetteer 1988, 2013, and Gazetteer of the County Seat of River County 1987.

the countryside underscores the argument that lineage organization was a major force influencing the growth of Protestantism before 1949.31 It is worth noting that zero-sum evangelicalism and its ramifications were also behind the fate of Catholicism in China. In the 17th century Dominican and Franciscan friars, who followed the Jesuits to China as missionaries, re- pudiated the Jesuits’ accommodationist strategies toward local customs and condemned ancestral rituals and other Confucian rites as “idolatrous practices.” The ensuing Rites Controversy, which embroiled both the Vatican and the Qing court, led Emperor Kangxi (1661–1722), who had previously showered favors on Jesuit missionaries, to proscribe Catholicism (Mungello 1994; Brockey 2009). At the local level, the practices of zero-sum evangelism of the Dominicans and Franciscans aroused the animus of lineage organizations and the Confucian gentry. They introduced lineage bylaws that for- bade lineage members from converting to Catholicism, petitioned and pressured officials to take punitive action, and instigated riots against Catholic churches and their members (Menegon 2009, pp. 61, 89–90; Fan 2015). As Protestant missionaries demonstrated the same kind of inflexibility and intol- erance toward local normative religious and cultural practices, they, too, had faced the “continuous tension between Christian religious imperative and the social imperative of Chinese daily life” (Menegon 2009, p. 91).

31 Mass conversion of lineage members to Christianity did happen, as when an inﬂuential lineage leader converted for personal reasons and was able to inﬂuence his kinsmen or when locally disadvantaged lineage organizations sought the protection of the church at the time when Christianity enjoyed privileges in China because of its association with the Western colonial powers (Menegon 2009; Zhang 2009; Lee 2014). Nonetheless, such cases constituted a very small percentage of the lineage organizations, which overall staunchly resisted the spread of Christianity.

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The Legacy of the Maoist State The radical actions of the Maoist state had many unintended consequences. For Protestantism, the most important legacy of the Maoist state was its de- struction of both the normative status of ancestor worship and the communal temple religion in Chinese society. During the Republican era, particularly under the Nationalist regime from 1927 to 1937, the Chinese state implemented a policy that condemned popular religion practices as “superstition” and launched campaigns against popular religion (Nedostup 2009; Goossaert and Palmer 2011). However, the effectiveness of this policy was hamstrung by a weak bureaucracy, warlord- ism, civil wars, and the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45). The Maoist state adopted a much more radical religious policy and was able to penetrate much more deeply into local society. Its attack on popular religion, therefore, was far more thoroughgoing and effective (Chan, Madsen and Unger 1984, pp. 87–89). In River County, the majority of the communal temples still preserved their religious functions, and communal celebrations of temple festivals continued during the Republican era. But under Mao, temple festivals were discontinued and temples were repurposed or demolished. Whereas the Nationalist government did not include ancestor worship in the category of superstition, under Mao it was branded as such and subject to eradication. Still more important, the Maoist state dismantled the lineage organizations, which, as we have noted, were otherwise powerful actors that reinforced the normative status and hegemonic power of ancestor worship and communal temple religion in local society. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pursued a policy to break up lineage power even before it came to power in 1949. In his Report of an Inves- tigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan ([1927] 1953), Mao Zedong condemned lineage organizations as one of the four traditional authorities that oppressed the Chinese people, particularly the peasants. Between 1927 and 1934, in areas under Communist control, the CCP launched campaigns to confiscate lineage properties and to redistribute them to peasants, and to persecute lineage elders as “landlords” (Feng 2011, pp. 144–50). After 1949, this policy was implemented nationwide. Economically, the Land Reform of 1950–53 dispossessed lineage organizations of properties, and the ensuing collectivization of rural economy in the form of, first, agricultural production cooperatives and, then, the people’s communes, completely removed the economic foundation of lineage power. Organizationally, the authority structure of lineage organizations was dismantled when lineage elders were persecuted as landlords and antirevolutionaries. Politically, for the first time in China, the state extended its power down to the village level, with the establishment of village CCP branches and village administrative organs, thus displacing self-governing bodies. Ideologically, the lineage system was con-

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demned as a “feudal remnant,” and symbols associated with lineages, such as ancestral halls, tablets of ancestral spirits, and genealogies, suffered massive vandalism during the Campaign to Smash the Four Olds (old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas) in 1966, which preceded the Cultural Rev- olution (Madsen 1986; Xiao 2010, pp. 56–58). Since the late 1970s, in River County as elsewhere in China, activities tra- ditionally associated with lineage organizations have reemerged, including the recompilation of lineage genealogy records, the restoration of ancestral halls, and the resuscitation of ancestor worship (Tan 2006; Szonyi 2015). Kin- ship networks also have been reported to have influenced village elections (Kelliher 1997), boosted entrepreneurship (Peng 2004), made village cadres more accountable (Tsai 2007), and helped villagers resist the state’s draco- nian birth control policy (Peng 2010). However, if examined more closely, it appears that what happened in River County (and other places I visited) does not warrant what some scholars have dubbed a “lineage revival” (Ma 2000; Pan 2006). While many lineage genealogies have been updated, the recompilation in most cases was not initiated by lineage organizations but by a handful of elderly men fond of “traditional culture.” While some ancestral halls repurposed during the Maoist era have been restored, a significant number of reconstruction projects were actually initiated and financed by the county government for the purpose of protecting cultural relics or attract- ing tourism, or by village cadres who turned ancestral halls into activity centers for the village elderly. Moreover, of the 64 ancestral halls that had been utterly destroyed, only three were rebuilt. The most grandiose of the new ancestral halls is that of the Yao lineage, covering almost 28,000 square feet. Yet even this case indicates the irrevocable loss of lineage power today. The construction project was initiated not by lineage leaders, whose authority has never been resurrected, but by 87-year-old Mr. Yao, who left the village as a young man and made a fortune in Beijing. He initially pledged 2 million yuan. But as the construction cost rocketed out of control and no other lineage members came forth with significant donations, he had little choice but put in more and more money. In the end, he contributed a total of 4.5 million yuan. Still, in order to make the ancestral hall a symbol of lineage solidarity, Mr. Yao suggested that every lineage member contribute at least 60 yuan. Revealingly, although this was just a token amount, worth no more than two packs of cigarettes, only 24% of the villagers felt moved to contribute. All in all, it must be stressed that the lineage organizations of the past— that is, the kind of organizations that commanded significant economic resources and certain coercive power and were able to enforce lineage bylaws by disciplining and punishing its members—have not revived in River County. In fact, this kind of lineage organization has not revived anywhere

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in China today, not even in Jiangxi Province, where lineage activities have experienced arguably the strongest resurgence (Xiao 2001).32 Without being buttressed by lineage power, religious activities tradition- ally associated with lineage organizations no longer enjoy normative status. Participation has become largely voluntary in the sense that nonconformity seldom is censured (Sun 2014). In River County, as we have seen, elderly parents still object to their children’s conversion to Protestantism, because the forfeiting of ancestor worship entailed by conversion would deprive them of afterlife provision. However, without the authority of the patrilineal lineage organization, parental objections carry little weight today. In conclusion, by dismantling the power of lineages, the Maoist state unintentionally removed a major obstacle to the expansion of Protestantism. The religious policy of the Maoist state also affected the growth of Protes- tantism in other unexpected ways. The making of the Maoist religious policy was shaped by both ideological and practical concerns. In accordance with the Marxist-Leninist assessment of religion as the opium of the people, a tool of oppressors, and a reflection of a backward and distorted worldview, the Maoist state devised policies to systematically reduce the influence of religion in society. An even more radical line believed that all religions were in effect superstitions and called for the use of all means possible, including administrative decrees and political campaigns, to dump religion into the dustbin of history (MacInnis 1972). On the other hand, the formation of the religious policy in the early 1950s also reflected the need of the state to defend the fledging Communist regime against its perceived enemies within and without (the latter mainly consisted of the Nationalist government, which had retreated to Taiwan, and the United States, the Nationalists’ ally). Out of the concern for regime stability the Maoist state, immediately after its establishment, launched a campaign against “reactionary sects” ( fandong huidao men), that is, new religious movements that had arisen and thrived during the Republican era (Goossaert and Palmer 2011, pp. 146–51).33 Viewed from another angle, the campaign, which effectively erased the new religious movements from the religious ecology, had eliminated what could have been potent rivals for Protestantism in the post-Mao era. The Maoist state in the 1950s followed a united front policy framework on Protestantism, Catholi- cism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam, and recognized the five as legitimate

32 Lineage networks have further disintegrated since the mid-1980s, as a result of the mi- gration of rural laborers to the cities, the much-increased general mobility of rural residents, and urbanization. 33 For a rich account of the vigorous growth of new religious movements during the Re- publican era, see Goossaert and Palmer (2011, pp. 91–122).

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religions.34 Nonetheless, it also imposed rigid control over them. All Prot- estant groups were pressured to cut their foreign ties and join the Three- Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), which was initiated by CCP-inclined Protestant leaders in 1950, under the guidance of the CCP, to promote “self- governance, self-support, and self-propagation” as the principles of church operation, and was developed in 1954 into a national umbrella association for Protestant groups (Bays 2012, pp. 159–66). The Bureau of Religious Af- fairs under the State Council supervised the national committee of TSPM. When the CCP used the carefully chosen TSPM leaders to control the Prot- estant community, it at the same time relentlessly quashed the noncompli- ant by incarcerating them, or sending them to labor camps (Xu 2004). This divide-and-rule policy unleashed internal discord in the Protestant community and would continue to have repercussions in the post-Mao era, including fueling the rise of the independent church movement, an issue dis- cussed below. From time to time, radicalism came to dominate the Maoist state’s religious policy. Amid the Great Leap Forward in 1958–61, when the nation was whipped into a frenzy of activities to reach the production targets of “surpassing the United Kingdom and catching up with the United States” (Teiwes and Sun 1999), Protestant groups were forced to worship in a much- reduced number of churches and to “donate” the remaining churches to the government to “assist socialist construction.” It is against this backdrop that the biggest church in River County was “donated” and converted into a factory. These radical policies culminated in the Cultural Revolution, during which all forms of religions were targeted for eradication (Bush 1970). Across China, religious texts were seized and burned; religious sites were ransacked or converted to secular usage; religious professionals were defrocked or sent to labor camps; all religious activities were suspended; even the supervisory state agencies and the semiofﬁcial umbrella associations of religious organizations were disbanded. This kind of indiscriminate repression, which lasted almost 10 years and razed all religious institutions to the ground, had a leveling effect—it reduced the advantages of religions deeply seated in Chinese society, such as popular religion and Buddhism. Furthermore, in comparison to many other belief systems, such as popular religion, Buddhism, and Daoism, Protestantism was better able to endure the severe suppression. Protestantism’s congregational model requires believers to worship together regularly; the martyrdom discourse encourages believers to preserve their faith in difﬁcult times. Even during the Cultural Revolution, small-group meetings of Protestants contin-

34 The united front policy, based on the principle of uniting the populace to combat the primary enemy, has a tradition in the history of the CCP.

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ued in secrecy in about a dozen places in River County (informants nos. 170, 181). When repression subsided in the late 1970s, Protestant groups were the first to emerge from underground to hold public gatherings and to petition the government for the return of church properties confiscated during the Mao era. In response, local officials convened a meeting attended by Protestant leaders in 1981 for the purpose of restoring the TSPM and returning church properties. In comparison, the reopening of the first three Buddhist temples to the public would wait until 1988; the first wave of rebuilding of popular religion temples did not kick off until the late 1980s. By the early 1980s, while the membership of Protestant groups in River County had already surpassed the 1949 benchmark, other religions were just about to break out of dormancy. In short, the indiscriminate harsh repression of religions by the Maoist state hurt popular religion and Buddhism more than it did Protestantism.

THE POST-MAO PROTESTANT EXPLOSION The Religious Regulatory Regime and Its Contradictions To understand what was behind the rapid growth of Protestantism, we must ﬁrst understand the structure of China’s religious control agencies and the overall religious policy of post-Mao China. The post-Mao state is more willing to tolerate religious activities than was the Maoist state. This change was initiated under Deng Xiaoping, who emerged as China’s paramount leader not long after the death of Mao. Having personally fallen victim to Maoist radicalism, and in an effort to salvage the regime in the face of widespread popular discontent in the wake of Mao’s death, Deng built a reform coalition by repudiating the “leftist errors” committed under Mao (Baum 1994; Vogel 2011). Starting from 1978, the central government relaxed the repressive religious policy of the Maoist era: it reopened a select number of religious sites to the public, exonerated persecuted religious professionals, and returned conﬁscated properties to religious organizations (Leung 2005). In 1982, the CCP Central Committee issued a circular entitled “Basic Viewpoint on the Re- ligious Question during Our Country’s Socialist Period,” which set the tone of the post-Mao state’s religious policy despite some later adjustments (Mor- rison 1984).35 The circular explicitly acknowledged that using force to wipe out religion entirely from society was “completely wrong and extremely harm- ful.” Nonetheless, the post-Mao state remains strongly inclined to exercise political control and has little intention of encouraging religious development. Well aware that religion is a mass phenomenon, has transregional connections, may constitute an alternative center of loyalty, and can be a basis for

35 This circular is also known as Document 19. Its text can be found at http://www.mzb .com.cn/html/folder/290171.htm (accessed October 5, 2015).

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political mobilization, the post-Mao state has been very alert to religious development and vigorous in trying to manage it (Morrison 1984; Potter 2003; Leung 2005). Like the Maoist state in the 1950s, the post-Mao state officially recognizes only five religions, thus delegitimizing a wide array of religious forms. More- over, the five state-sanctioned religions are all subject to the leadership of the Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB), a state agency installed at every administrative level to take charge of implementing and enforcing the state’s religious policies and regulations. The RAB is placed under the direction of the UFWD, a CCP organ responsible for managing relations with non-CCP groups.36 All religious groups are required to register with the RAB in order to obtain legal status. To retain administrative control over religious organizations, the RAB performs a wide range of responsibilities, including conducting inspections, monitoring religious activities, authorizing religious professionals, and appointing religious leaders. Umbrella associations for the five state-recognized religions have also been established at every administrative level with the purpose of channeling in state directives and extending the RAB’s control. All the officially registered Protestant churches are affiliated with the two umbrellas associations of the TSPM and the Chinese Christian Council.37 The state has also promulgated a wide range of regulations that set narrow limits on the activities of sanctioned religious groups. Under the regulations, religious activities are only permitted within registered religious venues, thus public evangelism is outlawed; only RAB-authorized personnel are allowed to preach, and to preach at designated sites, thus itinerant evangelism is illicit; proselytization among people under 18 is explicitly prohibited, thus religious groups are not allowed to hold Sunday schools or evangelistic youth camps. The RAB also has a say on what cannot be preached and prac- ticed. For instance, the RAB in River County discouraged sermons on mille- narianism and practices of exorcism. The post-Mao state sometimes also resorts to force to suppress religion. In 1983, the state condemned a religious group known as the Shouters as

36 In 1981, the River County government established an Ethnic and Religious Affairs De- partment in charge of affairs related to ethnic minorities and religious groups. The department shared the same office and staff with the county UFWD. In 1991, the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Bureau was formally established, and acquired an office and staff separate from the UFWD. Although the bureau also supervises ethnic affairs, for the sake of convenience, it is referred to as an RAB in this article. The UFWD is an organ of the CCP, whereas the RAB is a government agency. As the CCP assumes control over the government, the UFWD directs the work of the RAB. However, there is also a division of labor between the two agencies. The UFWD is responsible for dealing with religious leaders as individuals, and the RAB with religious associations as corporate entities (Goossaert and Palmer 2011, p. 329). 37 For this reason, officially registered churches are also known as TSPM churches or “Three-Self churches.”

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a counterrevolutionary organization, making it the first major religious group to be targeted in a nationwide crackdown in post-Mao China (Dunn 2009).38 In 1995, the Ministry of Public Security labeled the Shouters and several other religious groups “evil cults” (xiejiao). In 1999 and in ensuing years, in order to uproot Falun Gong, the state reinforced the legislative and administrative framework of defining and combating “evil cults” (Edelman and Richardson 2003; Tong 2009).39 To date, 15 religions and their derivative groups have been blacklisted. These religions are not within the jurisdiction of the RAB, but are targets of the Public Security forces and even a larger part of the state machinery. To root out Falun Gong, in 1999 the Chinese government created the 610 Office, a new security agency with numerous branches in local administrative units, to direct and coordinate other state and party organs during the anti–Falun Gong campaign.40 The Chinese government’s all-out campaign to suppress Falun Gong—which involved multifaceted propa- ganda campaigns, the mobilization of work units and neighborhoods, the use of deconversion programs, detention, labor camps, imprisonment, and other coercive means—has demonstrated the highly repressive capacity of the post-Mao state (Tong 2009).

The Limits of the Religious Regulatory Regime Given the presence of a strong religious regulatory regime in post-Mao China, how were Protestant groups able to rapidly expand? The answer lies in going beyond the analysis of religious policy. The following analyzes, ﬁrst, the limited capacity of the local state agencies responsible for implementing religious policy and, second, the state’s non-religion-oriented policies and actions that nonetheless have a signiﬁcant impact on religious groups.

38 “Shouters” is a derogatory nickname for sectarian groups in China that are influenced by the teachings of Li Changshou (Witness Lee), introduced to China in the late 1970s. Followers shout “Lord!”“Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” as part of their service, hence the ep- ithet. The Chinese government and the TSPM accused the Shouters of creating civil dis- turbances, disrupting TSPM church activities, and organizing protests against the government. Mainstream Protestant groups in and outside China largely view the Shouters as heretical. The Shouters has spawned a good number of offshoot groups such as the Es- tablished King and Eastern Lightning. These groups further generated their own offshoot groups. A number of them are on the Chinese government’s list of evil cults (Lian 2010, pp. 216–232; Dunn 2015, pp. 31–32). 39 On October 30, 1999, the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procu- ratorate issued a joint judicial interpretation in which evil cults were defined as “illegal groups that are founded using religion, qigong, or other things as a camouflage, deify their leaders, produce and spread superstitious ideas and heretical teachings to deceive people, recruit and control their members, and pose a danger to society” (Edelman and Richard- son 2003, p. 31). 40 Since 2003, the 610 Office’s mission has been expanded to include suppressing all evil cults.

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FIG.1.—Relationships between the main religious regulating/controlling apparatus in post-Mao China. RAB 5 Religious Affairs Bureau; SARA 5 State Administration for Religious Affairs; UFWD 5 United Front Work Department.

As a state agency responsible for routine management of local religious affairs, the local RAB is supposed to follow directives from the State Admin- istration for Religious Affairs (SARA), a functioning department under the State Council in charge of religious affairs and issues.41 However, since local RAB officials are appointed and paid by the local government, they naturally are more under its sway. Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between the main religious regulating/controlling apparatuses of the state. During the reform era, the promotion of local government officials increasingly has hinged on their contribution to the local economy (Zhou 2007), and religious affairs in most cases are only a minor issue on the agenda of local governments. The RAB occupies a very insignificant position in the local administration, receives few resources, is understaffed, and is often headed by unmotivated officials. This is true for River County as well. Since its establishment in 1981, the River County RAB has never had more than three staff members. A retired RAB chief of River County (informant no. 177) told me, “Bureaus in charge of industry, agriculture, and commerce are valued as core departments, while the UFWD and the RAB are nonessential. UFWD

41 The predecessor of the SARA is the Bureau of Religious Affairs under the State Coun- cil. It was ﬁrst installed in 1954 and then disbanded during the Cultural Revolution. It was reinstated in 1979 and its name was changed to SARA in 1998.

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and RAB cadres have little chance of promotion. Usually those close to the age of retirement would be appointed to head these departments. There is a saying here, ‘Those who enter the UFWD are one step away from retirement’[ren jinle tongzhan bu, li tuixiu jiu cha yibu]. Or, cadres who are seen slack in work or mediocre would be assigned to the posts.” Let us recall that River County has a population of over half a million and a territory of over 1,000 square kilometers, covering both urban and rural, basins and mountainous areas. It is virtually impossible for three unmotivated officials to monitor the activities of all the religious groups in the county, not to mention keeping them within the bounds dictated by the very restrictive religious regulatory regime. Naturally, RAB officials tend not to initiate aggressive action, especially when higher-ups have not specifically ordered that the religious activities involved be eradicated or when the religious groups are not on the list of evil cults—in the latter case, they are the burden of the Public Security forces anyway. In Mao’s time, local officials found surveillance and control much more manageable because, first, people were fixed into work units or communes and their movements were tightly constrained by the rigid household regis- tration system (Walder 1986; Cheng and Selden 1994), and, second, the Mao- ist state enjoyed wide support and could rely on people’s mutual surveillance and voluntary informants (Shaw 1996). In the post-Mao era, with the decline of the state’s ideological legitimacy, however, mutual surveillance among the people no longer works (Zhao 2001, pp. 107–9). I also argue that the post-Mao state’s prioritization of market-oriented economic development has resulted in consequences that have been under- cutting the efficacy of political control, creating room for unauthorized religious activities. First of all, economic reforms of post-Mao China include, among others, decollectivization of agriculture, privatization of state-owned enterprises, and development of private homeownership (Howe, Kueh and Ash 2003; Brandt and Rawski 2008). As China’s market economy has advanced, people have acquired more freedom and become more mobile and resourceful (Davis 1995; Saich 2000). The reform thus has created opportunities and resources, which the religious groups can tap. Moreover, to attract much needed capital, knowledge, and technological know-how to develop China’s economy, the Chinese leadership has launched an open-door policy and encouraged foreign trade and investment. Deng Xiaoping and his successors have pursued better relationships with the major Western countries, in particular the United States (Vogel 2011, pp. 294– 348). In the process, the Chinese government has become more receptive to the normative pressure of the Western discourses of human rights and religious freedom (Leung 2005; C. Wang 2015) and has become especially cau- tious in dealing with religious groups with strong Western ties (Y. Wang 2015).

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In sum, the post-Mao state’s restraint in using coercion and its incapacity to enforce rigorously the religious regulatory regime have created an interstitial social space for unsanctioned religious activities either because they are outside the purview of state agencies or because state actors do not have the will and capacity for immediate and vigorous suppression. In this new political context, religious groups that are positioned or able to tap into the interstitial social space tend to achieve more dynamic growth. The expansion of the interstitial social space is a widespread phenomenon in post-Mao China, and has been used to explain the rise of grassroots NGOs (Spires 2011) and critical news reporting in China (Pan 2000; Lin 2008). The next section shows that Protestantism could achieve explosive growth because its institutional features make Protestant groups uniquely positioned to exploit opportunities in the interstitial social space. I start with the development of the Protestant churches independent of the ofﬁcial TSPM system (independent churches hereafter),42 because they are the driving force behind the rapid growth of Protestantism in River County and elsewhere in post- Mao China.

Development of Independent Churches When River County officials tried to reinstate the TSPM in 1981, the move was widely welcomed by members of the Protestant community, which had suffered severe persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Yet the TSPM quickly earned their mistrust. At the TSPM’s inaugural meeting, local officials, through a manipulated election, made Lu the chair of the TSPM. Through my interviews with leaders of independent churches and core members of TSPM churches (informants no. 170, 173, 178, 180), as well as a former RAB official (informant no. 177), I was able to construct the following profile of Lu. He developed a close relationship with the government in the early 1950s. His absence from the underground fellowships during the Cul- tural Revolution was viewed by fellow Christians as a sign of weak faith. When he was the TSPM chair, Lu made great efforts to confine church activities within the bounds set by official regulations. He did not permit evangelical work by fellow church members, banned the circulation of Christian literature from outside sources in his own church, and duly informed the local authorities of the visits of itinerant evangelists. Lu’s actions forced more devoted members of the Protestant community to break away from the TSPM system to form their own groups in 1987. The independent church movement in River County was thus launched.

42 Independent churches are commonly known as “house churches” ( jiating jiaohui). However, this name has become obsolete because many of these churches in today’s China are not conﬁned to private homes but are of impressive size and operate openly (Hunter and Chan 1993, p. 3; Bays 2012, p. 177).

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The independent church movement in River County was galvanized also by what had happened in nearby Xiaoshan County, which has been a bastion of the Local Church movement since the 1930s. By 2009, Xiaoshan had an estimated 140,000 Protestants (about 10% of Xiaoshan’s population; see Zhang 2010). Between 90% and 95% followed the Local Church tradition (Sun 2009). Memory of the state’s persecution in the 1950s has lived on in Xiaoshan’s Local Church communities. As a result, these communities adopted an uncompromising attitude toward the state’s cooptation, vehemently accusing churches that accepted the government’s supervision of “committing adultery with the world.”43 Since the 1980s, some Protestants in River County have attended revival meetings in Xiaoshan. Accepting the message of the Xiaoshan churches that “TSPM churches cannot be saved” and that “TSPM churches do not belong to the Spirit,” some church members in River County dropped out of the TSPM system and joined the independent church movement.44 While these independent church groups rejected the TSPM system because it contradicts the church autonomy ideal, a smaller number of Prot- estant churches remain in the independent church sector because they are unable to join the TSPM system. These groups in River County are associated mainly with Liang (informant no. 128), a Taiwanese evangelist affiliated with a large Charismatic church based in Taipei. Liang arrived in River County in the early 1990s claiming to have money to invest in the local ce- ment industry. He was cordially treated by county officials who were trying every means to boost the local economy. When Liang sought permission to hold religious gatherings in his own house, the officials acquiesced even though state regulations prohibited Taiwanese from missionizing. Within years, Liang’s home became too small to accommodate the expanding congregation. He then purchased a two-story apartment building as the site of the Rain of Grace Church, and the church’s Sunday worship service soon drew more than a hundred attendees. Liang did once try to register his church with the RAB. However, after the RAB rejected his application on the grounds that the head of the church could not be a Taiwanese, Liang simply dropped the idea. He has also helped to found four other churches and provided financial support to many other church groups. He told me that he alone had baptized more than 3,000 people in the county by 2009. Because of Li- ang’s connections with the charismatic church in Taipei, the Rain of Grace Church has benefited from a continual inflow of preaching materials and frequent visits of evangelists from Taiwan. Offering an exuberant worship

43 For an account of a confrontation between independent churches and the government in Xiaoshan, see Lian (2010, pp. 1–2). 44 The quotes in this paragraph are standard discourse of Xiaoshan Protestant groups, but I was informed in this context by informant no. 180, leader of a major independent church in River County.

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and prayer style, embracing prosperity theology, and emphasizing faith healing and exorcism, the Rain of Grace Church has introduced ideas and practices unlike those of the Local Church tradition and has contributed to the diversity of the independent church movement. Not registered with the RAB, and outside of the TSPM system, independent Protestant groups are by deﬁnition “illegal” under the post-Mao religious regulatory regime. But with only a few exceptions, they have not only escaped systematic suppression, but also enjoyed robust development.45 Why? Despite their different stances toward the state, most independent churches and TSPM churches share the same origins, theology, and religious practices. Indeed, many independent churches started as breakaway groups from TSPM churches. This reduced the possibility of the Chinese government labeling independent churches as evil cults based on their teachings and practices. In the post-Mao context, strong ties with the West have also protected the independent church movement from outright suppression. Evangelical groups in the West, which have maintained a strong interest in Christian- izing China, are particularly enthusiastic about the development of independent Protestant groups. Likewise, Western media and human rights advocacy groups have thrown their support behind independent churches.46 Western politicians also have paid close attention to the Chinese government’s handling of independent churches, out of personal convictions or the necessity to respond to lobbying, to appeal to voters and supporters, or to gain ground in dealing with Beijing.47 Since the mid-1990s a rising political coalition in the United States that includes Reaganite conservatives

45 A major exception is the All Ranges Church (also known as the Born Again Move- ment), founded by Xu Yongze in 1968. Despite some recognition that this group received from a few independent church leaders in China and international advocacy groups, it was still labeled by the Chinese government as an evil cult primarily for two reasons. First, because it has developed into an extensive national network with a tight organizational and hierarchical authority structure, it has been perceived by the Chinese government as politically threatening. Second, the movement has not gained institutional legitimacy because of the liability of newness. And its emphasis on copious weeping as a requirement for a dramatic conversion experience has reinforced the perception of leaders from both the TSPM and independent church sectors that this group is unorthodox. Hence, when the Chinese government suppressed the movement, mainstream Protestant groups in China hardly came to its defense. 46 Since the late 1980s, major U.S. newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times have frequently reported on the Chinese government’s persecution of independent Protestant churches. 47 For instance, during Deng Xiaoping’sofﬁcial visit to the United States in 1979, Presi- dent Carter tried to persuade him to permit the reopening of churches, the printing of the Bible, and the return of foreign missionaries (Wehrfritz and Clemetson 1998). President George W. Bush received representatives of independent Protestant churches in the White House in 2006 to show his support (http://www.christianexaminer.com/article/bush .meets.with.three.chinese.house.church.leaders/43192.htm, accessed October 1, 2015).

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and evangelical Christians has pushed the worldwide promotion of religious freedom to be a top objective of U.S. foreign policy (Smith 2001; Wald and Calhoun-Brown 2011; Wilcox and Robinson 2011). The passing of the Inter- national Religious Freedom Act of 1998 signified their success (Goldberg 1997). By this act, the U.S. Department of State established an agency to monitor religious freedom worldwide and issue an annual report (Sider and Knip- pers 2005, pp. 59–60). Countries receiving low grades in the annual report could face economic sanctions and other punitive measures. With China’s economy tightly entwined with that of the West, the Chinese government has an interest in presenting a positive image to the international community (Kindopp 2004b). Waging a systematic suppression campaign against independent Protestant groups, which would have jeopardized China’s relations with the West, was not a good choice for the Chinese government.48 The independent church movement has also benefited from its polycephalous structure. The post-Mao state has been highly alert to the potential political threat posed by religious groups. In this context, the Chinese government has always been more wary of religions with a highly centralized authority structure because such a structure facilitates quick and unified mobilization. The cases of Falun Gong and Catholicism in China illustrate this point. Falun Gong had a centralized authority structure, with its charismatic leader, Li Hongzhi, demanding allegiance from the national network of practice points (Palmer 2007, pp. 241–46). After Li decided to respond to media criticisms of Falun Gong with militant confrontation, Falun Gong practitioners staged more than 300 demonstrations across China between 1996 and 1999 (Ownby 2008, p. 173). The protests swirled, eventually leading to a dem- onstration of some 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners outside Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the CCP and the central government on April 25, 1999 (Ownby 2008, pp. 171–73; Palmer 2007, pp. 266–68). China’stopleaders, who came to perceive Falun Gong as a serious threat to regime stability after the incident, declared it an evil cult and ordered a crackdown. While Cathol- icism and Protestantism share many institutional features, Catholicism, unlike Protestantism, has a centralized authority structure. Because of this crucial difference, the underground Catholic community, which is the Catholic counterpart of the independent Protestant movement, is perceived by the Chinese government as a more serious threat and thus is subject to a more

48 The Political Prisoner Database of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China shows that arrests of Protestants by the Chinese government evidently dropped after 2000 (Y. Wang 2015). Although I am unable to establish a direct causal linkage here, it is reasonable to speculate that the drop might have been related to increasing pressure from the U.S. government.

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hostile political environment than the independent Protestant groups (Mad- sen 1998).49 The state has not resorted to systematic suppression to eliminate independent Protestant groups as it has done with evil cults. Meanwhile, its institutional apparatus of managing the five legitimate religions has also failed to contain the growth of independent churches. The Rain of Grace Church in River County is a case in point. This church has defied the state’s religious regulations in almost every way. Although state regulations forbid missionizing by foreigners and overseas Chinese, the Rain of Grace Church was founded and managed by a Taiwanese and fre- quented by preachers and faith healers from Taiwan. State regulations ban evangelism in public places, but Liang frequently went to hospitals to evangelize and practice exorcism (informant no. 184). Despite its illegal status, the church announces itself publicly with a big red cross and a name plaque that are too glaring to be missed by passersby. Liang’s “unruly behavior” has long made him “a pain in the neck” for RAB officials (informants no. 174, 175). Yet all of the RAB chiefs in past years did nothing to curb the activities of Liang and his church. According to the incumbent RAB head at the time of my interview (informant no. 174), they were unable to do anything because Liang had overseas connections, and hence they were afraid that “to touch him will cause negative international repercussions.” What my informant did not mention, however, is that if the repressive measures against Li- ang’s church provoked an international outcry, it would have been typical for higher-ups to take local officials to task for causing the uproar. Thus, in- action in cases such as the Rain of Grace Church has become a rational move for local RAB officials. In the memorable words of a former RAB head (informant no. 177), “Who is so foolish as to put a louse on his own head to cause

49 Other institutional features have also shaped the fate of Falun Gong and Catholicism in the context of Chinese politics. As a new religious movement, Falun Gong lacked the legitimacy endowed by tradition. Nor did it enjoy strong support from the international community in 1999. Therefore, Chinese leaders did not hesitate to relentlessly suppress it. As for Catholicism, another crucial difference that sets it apart from Protestantism is that its evangelical work and maintenance of its congregations rely heavily on the clergy (Madsen 2003). Consequently, its resurgence in the post-Mao era has been constrained by a shortage of religious professionals, which was made much more severe by the persecution during the Maoist years. Like the Protestant community, the Catholic community in post-Mao China has been beset by bitter division between the official churches, which accept the supervision of the government, and the underground churches, which reject the government’s authority, as well as other sorts of strife. For Protestant groups, contention aside, each group can just part ways, exploring its own niche and recruiting its own members. By contrast, due to their single source of religious legitimacy, Catholics are not so lucky and are doomed to be entangled together. As a result, the Catholic Church has been much more seriously impeded by incessant infighting and conflicts, and its leaders have been unable to devote much attention and resources to evangelism (Madsen 1998).

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itchiness?” A staff member of the RAB (informant no. 175) described the handling of Liang and his church as typical of “passing the buck”: “The RAB said this case is under the jurisdiction of the [county-level] National Se- curity Brigade of the Public Security Bureau. The [county-level] National Security Brigade said this case should be handled at the prefectural level. The prefectural-level officials said it was up to the provincial-level authorities to make the decision. The provincial officials said this person has not en- dangered national security and they could not bypass all the local levels of government to arrest or deport him. In the end, nobody has touched Liang, and his Rain of Grace Church has been growing bigger and bigger.” Neither targeted by the state as evil cults nor much constrained by the state’s apparatus and regulations, independent churches have gained an interstitial social space for their development. It needs to be emphasized that the emergence and expansion of this interstitial space has also been a result of the boundary-expanding activities of independent church groups propelled by their evangelical imperative and martyrdom complex, or more precisely, the contested negotiation between independent churches and state actors. River County officials did try to contain the independent Protestant groups, especially in the earlier days when the strategy for dealing with them had not yet stabilized. However, these repressive actions tended to be sporadic and mild, taking the form of suspending an activity or reprimanding church leaders. Because of the polycephalous structure of independent churches, suspension of the activities of one group did not affect other groups.50 More important, because of the martyrdom discourse entrenched in Protestantism, sporadic and mild repression by the local authorities only galvanizes the Prot- estant community and produces heroes for them. The following case was reconstructed on the basis of my interviews with several informants, but mainly informants no. 141 and no. 170. In 1996, Cai, the young leader of an independent church in River County, led his church members in distributing gospel flyers on a busy street and attracted a crowd. The police came to break up the gathering and detained Cai for unauthorized religious activities in a public space. During the 15 days of his detention, his church and the Protestant community at large (including members of TSPM churches) demonstrated great solidarity. Numerous Protestants from churches across the county swarmed to the detention house to visit him. Ev- ery morning a group of some 20 sisters in Cai’s church climbed the hillock facing the window of his cell and called out, “Brother Cai, are you safe there?”

50 For instance, in summer 2009, out of concern over a potential SARS epidemic, the Min- istry of Education ordered the suspension of students’ group activities. Accordingly, in River County, the Education Bureau, with the collaboration of the RAB and other state agencies, shut down a summer camp at the site of an independent church. But this did not affect two summer camps concurrently held by other independent churches. The RAB did not even know of their existence.

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Cai’s father, head of another independent church, cheerfully visited the detention house as if his son’s incarceration was something to be celebrated. An- other independent church leader went to the detention house to congratulate Cai and said with great envy, “God surely loves you more! Otherwise, why did He give you the entire blessing? If God let several of us divide up these 15 days, I probably could have my share.” When Cai was released, he refused to visit the barbershop and let his hair continue to grow for a long time. With great admiration, fellow Christians viewed Cai’s long hair as a symbol of persecution and faith. Cai rose to become the undisputed leader of his church. Under his leadership, the congregation continued to seek autonomous development outside the government’s regulatory framework, and in subsequent years it grew to be the largest in the county, with its Sunday worship service regularly attended by more than 300 people in 2009. Accord- ing to my informants, the reaction of the Protestant community to Cai’s detention put the local authorities in a very awkward position and taught them a lesson. Indeed, this seemed to be the case—since this incident, the local government has not detained another Christian for unsanctioned evangelical activities. Public evangelism by independent churches has become com- monplace, and RAB ofﬁcials almost never intervene. One day, the RAB head was riding a bicycle and saw a street gathering of an independent church group. Instead of riding up to confront them, he turned around and rode in another direction to save himself from embarrassment (informant no. 174).

The Potency of the Independent Churches Christians who opted out of the TSPM system were of the zealous type. They were eager to prove that it was they instead of the TSPM churches that were the embodiment of the “true faith.” Thus, they have devoted themselves to fervent evangelical work with little regard for official regulations and restrictions. In open defiance of state regulations, members of independent churches in River County carry out evangelism not only through personal networks, but also in public. They distribute gospel tracts on streets and in parks. They also practice hospital evangelism: using the occasion of visiting hospitalized fellow members, they preach to the patients’ relatives, other patients, doctors, and nurses. Disregarding state restrictions on interchurch exchanges and the authori- zation of preachers, six independent churches in River County have formed ministerial alliances, holding joint events and exchanging preachers. Evan- gelists are also brought in from outside the county. During my fieldwork, I attended revival meetings led by evangelists from nearby cities such as Shang- hai, Ningbo, and Wenzhou, as well as faraway places like Taiwan, the United

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States, and Singapore. Such revival meetings usually last for days and are attended by hundreds of Protestants from churches across River County and even neighboring counties. Independent churches have also made a great effort, in violation of state regulations, to evangelize youth. They organize Sunday schools as well as summer and winter youth camps. These camps are usually emotionally charged events during which many convert. When school is over, some churches hold a special event for students, during which church members parcel out their encouragement, admonition, and instructions and expect the youth to report on their spiritual progress. In addition to devoting themselves to evangelism, independent churches invariably endeavor to establish strong congregations. Their commitment is attributable to several factors. First, the early members of the independent churches were dissenters and faced pressure from the government when they withdrew from the TSPM system. They had a great incentive to stick together. Second, to prove themselves spiritually superior to the TSPM, the independent churches have been trying hard to ensure that members stay “fervent in spirit” (ling li huore). Finally, these groups are embedded in an extensive network of independent churches and are quick to emulate each other. Many independent churches sponsor activities the week around, from Sunday worship, Bible study groups, and prayer meetings, to hymn-singing evenings. They also organize their members into cells according to their residential propinquity. Some churches have early morning prayer meetings throughout the year and organize fast and prayer ( jinshi daogao) events from time to time. Over the years, churches have added more programs and activities, such as brass bands and church gatherings on Chinese New Year’sEve.In the tight-knit communities of independent churches, members play the role of matchmaker for young adults in their community, and women members help each other with household chores. The churches have also provided new services to members and their families. Sunday schools and youth camps during school holidays have been designed not just to pass faith onto the next generation but also to ease the burden of childcare for church members. To help church members deal with the challenge of caretaking for their aging parents, an independent church established an old age home in 2005. This old age home, located in the same compound as the church buildings, had about 60 residents in 2009. In sum, independent churches have been able to conduct evangelism in ways much less constrained by state regulations than the ofﬁcially authorized churches. Furthermore, fashioning themselves as a counterpoint to the TSPM churches, independent churches have put greater emphasis on spreading the Gospel and strengthening their congregations. As a result, the recruiting and retaining mechanisms of Protestantism have been played out most strongly for independent churches.

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Isomorphic Pressure on the TSPM Churches The extraordinary vitality of independent churches has created great pressure on the TSPM churches, whose development has been limited by the government’s restrictive regulations.The RAB tries to keep the TSPM churches in line through conducting site inspections and organizing study sessions and training programs for church personnel. The TSPM churches are required to seek approval from the RAB on many issues pertaining to church operations, such as the organization of religious events, the construction and expansion of church buildings, and the employment and transfer of church personnel. The RAB also manipulates the election of leaders of important churches as well as the TSPM leadership. Control over the TSPM churches is achieved mostly through the compliance and self-censorship of the church leaders. They choose to comply with government regulations not only out of fear of the cost of noncompliance— the loss of legal status and personal security—but also in exchange for officials’ assistance and favors. Church leaders often need the intercession of the RAB when dealing with other social actors and government officials. For instance, the RAB assisted the churches in River County to reclaim church property expropriated during the Mao years; it also helped in the negotia- tions over the compensation and resettlement deal when the old church buildings had to be relocated because of urban development. Church leaders on friendly terms with officials of the RAB and the UFWD were more likely to be picked as TSPM leaders and recommended as delegates in the Political Consultative Conference (PCC) at the county or higher level.51 At the high point of his career, Lu of River County was made not only the head of the TSPM committee, but also a delegate of the PCC both at the county and the prefectural level. These positions brought power and social status. And entrenchment in the networks that these positions entail tends to make the mentality of the TSPM leaders closer to that of the officials. There is no way, however, for TSPM churches to ignore the challenges posed by independent churches. When independent churches accused the TSPM churches of allowing the government instead of Jesus to be the head of the church, or embracing the world instead of the Spirit (shushi bu shul- ing), members of the TSPM churches found it hard to come up with good counterarguments. After all, the discourse of church autonomy from state in-

51 The PCC is a political advisory organ in China. It includes CCP representatives, but also has delegates from a broad range of social categories—from noncommunist parties, mass organizations, ethnic minorities, and different sectors of the society. The PCC delegates can submit proposals on major political and social issues at its annual sessions. Even though it is under the tight control of the CCP, the PCC provides an important institution- alized channel for non-CCP members to participate in state affairs. Since most of its representatives are social dignitaries, being a member of the PCC signiﬁes status.

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terference is ingrained in the Protestant community. Quite a few TSPM church members with whom I have talked actually held leaders of independent churches in higher regard than their own leaders. They commented with envy on the brass brands, large revival meetings, Sunday schools, and other activities organized by the independent churches, and admitted that independent churches enjoyed a livelier spirit than their own churches. It is not un- common for members of TSPM churches to attend events of independent churches, or even to switch camps.52 Some leaders and members of the TSPM churches must have felt the pressure to catch up with the practices of the independent churches in order to stay relevant. In the biggest TSPM church in the county seat, for instance, members tried to introduce new hymns circulating in the independent churches and to organize youth fellowships. However, Lu, head of this church and chair of the TSPM committee, thwarted most of these initiatives, which in turn sparked complaints. On the other hand, TSPM churches less controlled by Lu have become increasingly open-minded. For instance, since they are far- ther away from urban centers and the grip of Lu and the RAB ofﬁcials, TSPM churches in the townships and rural areas tend to be more responsive to the pressure from independent churches. One after another, TSPM churches in the villages and towns set up their own brass bands and added other activities pioneered by the independent churches. Two of them even established Sunday schools. In a nutshell, the entire Protestant community in River County has been invigorated as a result of organizational isomorphism.

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION This article seeks to explain not only the explosive growth of Protestant Christianity in contemporary China, but also why this upsurge took place in the post-Mao era but not before. An inﬂuential approach in the sociology of religion suggests institutional features pertinent to the drive and capacity to recruit and retain followers are key to a religion’s strong growth. This article, however, argues that the effect of institutional features on the growth of a religion is contingent on the sociopolitical context in which the religion is situated and that, in most cases, the most powerful actor in creating and shaping that context is the state. Guided by this theoretical position, this article has analyzed how the Maoist state unintentionally removed the cultural and institutional obstructions to the Protestant expansion in local society and

52 In the revival meetings organized by independent churches, I often spotted members of the TSPM churches sitting among the audience. Informant no. 154, secretary of the TSPM committee in River County, told me, “The TSPM churches in the county seat are too soft and weak. That’s why their most active members are attracted by Liang and his church, and their young people are drawn to Cai and his church.”

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how the post-Mao state’s pursuit of market-oriented economic development has undercut the efficacy of political control, resulting in the rise of an interstitial social space that Protestant groups have exploited. Readers may question if I have selected a case in which the Protestant population happened to enjoy stronger growth or if my findings can speak to the overall situation of the part of China with a predominantly Han Chi- nese population.53 To address this question, let us recall that the Protestant population in River County was 0.27% in 1949, significantly higher than the national average of 0.2%. But, in 2009–10, the Protestant population in River County was 3.6%, significantly below the national average of 4.3%. In other words, if my study has a bias, it is toward underestimating the overall growth capacity of the Chinese Protestant population in the post-Mao era. Also, for the following reasons, I have confidence in the representativeness of my findings. First, the six institutional features of Protestantism apply to almost all Protestant groups in China, regardless of their location, denominational traditions, and other differences. Second, Chinese popular religion, especially in the form of ancestor worship and communal temple religion, was almost universally deeply rooted in local society and was a major obstacle to the development of Protestantism in China before 1949. Popular religion suffered an irrevocable loss from the onslaught of the Maoist state across China. In post-Mao China, popular religion has been differentially revived in different regions—for instance, southeast China has seen more robust revival of popular religion than other parts of the country (Dean 2003; Tan 2006; Fan, Chen and Madsen 2015). Yet even in this part of China, it no longer wields the kind of resources and power or regulates the most important aspects of people’s lives, as it did before.54 Third, although post-Mao China has seen greater variations in the officials’ behaviors than China in the Mao era—for instance, local officials in the southeast coastal regions where River County is located tend to be more lenient toward independent Protestant groups than local officials in the hinterland, such as Henan and Anhui provinces (Aikman 2003; Kindopp 2004a)—it is also true that everywhere in China local RABs are understaffed and incapable of curbing unsanctioned religious activities within their juris- dictions. The RAB of River County had three staff members in 2009. But the national average for a county-level RAB was only 1.07 in 1995 and 1.67

53 The religious ecology of the regions dominated by non-Han Chinese is very different in its nature and composition and requires a separate treatment. 54 Recent research has found that Protestantism tends to have experienced stronger growth in places where forms of Chinese popular religion had a weaker revival (Chen 2009; Duan 2010; Li 2010; H. Yang 2014). This ﬁnding lends support to my argument.

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in 2012.55 Moreover, even in Henan Province, where the local governments’ more heavy-handed handling of independent church groups sometimes resulted in detention and imprisonment of church leaders, such measures lacked a level of severity and consistency to be effective. In the end, this kind of repression has only energized independent churches in Henan, which has become a bastion of the independent church movement in China (Aikman 2003). My study finds that the growth of Protestantism in the post-Mao era has been fueled mainly by homegrown evangelists rather than Western missionaries, in contrast to the 19th and early 20th centuries. Since the early 1980s, although Western evangelists have traveled to China as language teachers, NGO workers, and businesspeople while quietly evangelizing, in most of these activities, their missionary endeavors were not sustained because the high visibility of Westerners in Chinese society made it hard for them to engage in any long-term missionary work.56 Since the reform and opening up of China in 1978, the number of Chinese students studying abroad has rapidly increased. It is observed that some of these students converted to Protestantism when studying in the United States (Wang and Yang 2006). Did the returnees- cum-Protestant converts contribute significantly to the rapid growth of Prot- estantism in the post-Mao era? The massive return of overseas Chinese students started only in the 2000s (Zweig and Chen 1995; Xi 2006, p. 93). This means, during the critical period of the post-Mao Protestant explosion in the 1980s and 1990s, returnees did not play a major role in missionizing China. Thus far, I have not heard of a single active evangelist in River County being a returnee. Nor have I encountered, as I traveled to different parts of China, a case in which a prominent Protestant leader was a returnee. Returnees may have come to play a bigger role in recent years, as their numbers have risen significantly, and in metropolitan cities, where they congregate. In any case, until now, the importance of Western Protestant organizations and overseas Chinese Protestants seems to lie more in the global support networks than in grassroots evangelizing.57

55 According to a report of the State Administration for Religious Affairs, in 1995, 1,551 out of 2,861 counties in China had installed agencies in charge of religious affairs, with a total of 3,053 staff members (http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/research/CHsara.html, accessed October 5, 2015). The 2012 ﬁgure was from a Shanghai UFWD ofﬁcial (informant no. 205). 56 Missionaries from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macau, and other regions, who are ethnically Chinese and native speakers of Chinese, such as Liang in River County, are less visible and fare better in this regard. 57 China Aid, one of the most active advocacy groups in the United States for independent Protestant churches in China, was founded by a Chinese Protestant convert in 2004.

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The rapid growth of Protestantism in contemporary China is only one of the most recent achievements of Christianity in its history of global expansion. No doubt, zero-sum evangelism is a core institutional feature of Chris- tianity that lends the religion an extraordinary power to recruit and retain members. Yet zero-sum evangelism also means that Christianity is bound to encounter opposition from indigenous religions. Since indigenous religions are usually entrenched in society and entwined with social groups or institutions, this means that the expansion of Christianity will also meet resistance from the dominant social institutions and organizations. Furthermore, despite the great potential of Christian organizations to recruit and retain followers, if a state endowed with a great capacity to penetrate the society is determined to crush Christian organizations, their organizational strength would be rendered useless or even countereffective to their growth. Any massive conversion to Christianity requires two preconditions: first, the religion faces no effective resistance from indigenous religious groups and their supporters; second, the state is uninterested in or incapable of har- nessing the evangelistic drive of Christianity, or even has an interest in facilitating the expansion of Christianity. In looking at the major waves of the geographical expansion of Christian- ity throughout history, including the Christianization of Europe after the fall of Rome and the global spread of Christianity in the Age of Discovery and Western colonialism, we see that powerful political actors, sometimes the indigenous rulers, sometimes the foreign conquerors or colonialists, were often favorably disposed toward Christian missionary activities or even took the initiative to suppress or weaken religions of the old gods to support the new Christian god. In turn, missionaries seized the new opportunity to expand the reach of their religion (Neill 1966; Hastings 1994; Fletcher 1999; Walls 1996; Winroth 2012). As this article has shown, the Maoist and post-Mao states have also been crucial in facilitating Protestantism’s phenomenal rise in post-Mao China. What makes the Chinese case exceptional is only that the rapid growth of Protestantism has been anything but intended by both the Maoist and post-Mao states. Despite of the crucial importance of the state, sociologists of religion have not given it the attention it deserves. Analysis of the state has been periph- eral or even absent in the sociology of religion concerning the two core questions that have animated the field, namely, secularization (or religious vitality in a society) and the growth and decline of religious groups. The first question has stimulated drawn-out debates between secularization theorists and religious economists. Recently, Gorski (2005) has proposed a new sociopolitical conflict approach to break the deadlock. This approach harkens back to David Martin’s (1978) A General Theory of Secularization, in which Martin argues for the importance of state-church relations and epoch-making political contestation in shaping the variegated patterns of secularization in

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different societies. The argument presented in this article can be read as a move in the same direction, albeit my focus is on the other core question in the sociology of religion—the growth and decline of different religious organizations. Since the 1970s, the state-centered approach has brought a paradig- matic shift to the study of revolution, social movements, working-class formation, economic development, and more (Skocpol 1979; Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1985; Weiss and Hobson 1995). It is time—however belated it may be—to bring the state back to the center in the sociology of religion. It could be argued that religious economists also include the state in their analysis. Yet the new approach I propose differs from the religious economies theory in three crucial aspects. First, the importance of the role of the state in the analysis is signiﬁcantly different for the two approaches. Religious economies theory’s incorporation of the state can be distilled into two propositions. To account for the religiosity of a society, religious economies theory proposes that the degree of state regulation determines the level of competi- tion in the religious market, which affects the supply of religious goods and consequently the religious vitality of the society (Iannaccone 1991; Finke and Stark 1992; Finke and Iannaccone 1993; Iannaccone et al. 1997). On the question of the growth and decline of religious organizations, religious economies theory proposes that state sponsorship reduces the motivation of religious professionals to produce religious products, leading to a weakening of religious organization (Finke and Stark 1992, pp. 230–31). As we can see, for religious economists, the impact of the state on religion is exercised only through affecting the supply and demand dynamics of the religious market, or the internal strength of religious organizations. In other words, religious economists treat the state only as an exogenous and secondary factor (Gorski 2003, p. 115). By contrast, my approach advanced here places the state squarely in the center of the analysis. Second, while the relevance of the state in religious economies theory is only limited to the state’s actions and regulations directly targeting religions, the approach advocated in this article shows that the impact of the state on the growth and decline of religions is much more pervasive and complicated. It considers not only the state’s policies and actions directed at religions but also its non-religion-oriented actions that result in unintended consequences for religious groups. It sees the state as characterized by internal contradictions and cleavages, and for this reason, disaggregates the state into different actors. Third, whereas in religious economies theory the state and religious organizations are reduced to quantiﬁable variables (e.g., the degree of the state’s regulation of the religious market or the degree of strictness of the religious organization with its members), the approach articulated in this article sees both the state and religious organizations as purposive actors endowed with distinct mentalities, interests, and resources and that the actions of state ac-

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tors are able to generate far more complicated time-varying and nonlinear dynamics than a few static and linear propositions can capture. My approach also differs from other significant work on religion in China, such as Yang’s (2006, 2012) theory of “triple religious markets.”58 Accord- ing to Yang (2012), heavy state regulation will not change religious demand, but will change the structure of religious supply, leading to the rise of three markets of religions: a red market, containing all officially sanctioned religious organizations, activities, and believers; a black market, consisting of all officially banned religious organizations, activities, and believers; and a gray market, encompassing religious organizations, activities, and believers of ambiguous legal status. Because religious organizations in the red market have to comply with restrictions imposed by political authorities, their religious goods tend to be “sanitized” or “watered-down” (Yang 2012, p. 90). In response, a black market emerges to meet the needs of those with religious zeal, who are “willing to pay a higher price for their religion, even to the extent of life sacrifice” (p. 89). Then, “when people cannot find satisfaction in the red market and are unwilling to risk black-market penalties, a gray market fills the gap or the niche” (p. 90). Yang has followed religious economists very closely. My criticisms of how religious economists have treated the state also apply to his work. In other words, Yang’s work also treats the state as an exogenous and secondary factor, relevant only when the state’s religious regulations change the supply and demand dynamics of the religious market; it also limits the analysis of the state to a few static propositions. In the following, I will point out addi- tional differences demarcating our approaches. First, Yang’s writing contains many strong assumptions, including but not limited to a rational choice understanding of religious affiliation, a market analogy of the religious field, and the notion of a stable demand for religious products in a given society. These assumptions have many critics (e.g., Bryant 2000; Jerolmack and Porpora 2004; McKinnon 2013), and my approach accepts none of these assumptions. Second, like religious economists, Yang also habitually uses out-of-context empirical examples in an attempt to prove the working of some linearly stated “propositions.” Theoretical problems aside, this approach often leads to ahistorical conclusions that, in many cases, hinder rather than facilitate understanding the actual historical pro- cesses behind the rise and decline of religions. Third, Yang’s theory can easily lead to the conclusion that a black religious market provides better quality religious goods. This is tantamount to saying that religions that were labeled by the Chinese government as evil cults and forced to operate underground

58 Yang’s theory of “triple religious markets” was ﬁrst published in 2006. An updated version was included in Yang’s (2012) book, from which I quote.

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(e.g, East Lightning and Falun Gong) provide better religious products than the religions that the Chinese government approves of or tolerates (e.g., TSPM churches or independent Protestant churches). My analysis does not rest on any supposition about the quality of religious products. Finally, while this article has used the concept of “interstitial social space,” it should not be confused with Yang’s concept of “gray market.” Interstitial social space does not serve as a theory to explain the rise and decline of religions, but only as a context of the analysis. My interstitial social space does not emerge as a “gray market” out of strong state regulations, but as the out- come of the state’s incapacity to regulate unsanctioned religious activities as well as the complicated contestations between state and religious actors in the post-Mao reform environment. In closing, it warrants repeating that even though the approach advanced in this article emphasizes the role of the state, it does not intend to exclude the institutional features of religious organizations. Instead, investigating institutional features is still an integral part of the analysis. But this approach maintains that how institutional features affect religion and how important those features are to the growth dynamics of religion are contingent on the conditions that arise from the structure and patterned behavior of the state. The applicability of this approach is clear in places where the state wields tremendous power and actually regulates and intervenes in religious activities. Would this approach still be relevant to countries such as the United States, where the state not only proclaims its separation from religion but also refrains from actively supervising religion? I would argue that the role of the state remains highly relevant in the United States as well. First, the U.S. government regulates the civic organizations of which religions organizations are part, and has the capacity to deeply penetrate into American society. Hence, even though the U.S. government refrains from directly acting upon religions, it still greatly affects their growth dynamics through its indirect actions, such as immigration and taxation policies. Moreover, by separating church and state and promoting religious freedom, the U.S. government has prevented religions from using coercive measures to gain followers and to oppose rival religions and has greatly reduced social discrimination based on religious grounds. As such, it has created unprecedented opportunities for new religious movements and minority religions to survive and expand, leading to the rise of a more pluralistic religious ecology and creating an environment in which institutional features directly related to the capacity of a religious organization to recruit and retain members have become all the more important in determining its rise and fall. In this sense, institutional analysis currently prevailing in the United States can be seen as “local knowledge” arising from a time- and space-bounded political context.

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