China Perspectives 2009/4 | 2009 Religious Reconfigurations in the People’s Republic of China China’s Religious Danwei Institutionalising Religion in the People’s Republic David A. Palmer Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/4918 DOI: 10.4000/chinaperspectives.4918 ISSN: 1996-4617 Publisher Centre d'étude français sur la Chine contemporaine Printed version Date of publication: 31 December 2009 ISSN: 2070-3449 Electronic reference David A. Palmer, « China’s Religious Danwei », China Perspectives [Online], 2009/4 | 2009, Online since 01 December 2012, connection on 28 October 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ chinaperspectives/4918 ; DOI : 10.4000/chinaperspectives.4918 © All rights reserved Special Feature s e China’s Religious Danwei v i a t c Institutionalising Religion in the People’s Republic n i e h p s c DAVID A. PALMER r e p This article is a study of the continuities and changes in the state-led institutionalisation of religion in the PRC from 1979 to 2009 and their effects on the structuring of China’s religious field. A normative discourse on religion is constituted by a network of Party leaders, officials, academics, and religious leaders. Official religious institutions have become hybrids of religious culture with the institutional habitus of work units ( danwei ) in the socialist market economy. A wide range of religious practices have found legitimacy under secular labels such as health, science, culture, tourism, or heritage. Religious affairs authorities have begun to acknowledge the existence of this expanding realm of religious life, and to accord discursive legitimacy to the previously stigmatised or ignored categories of popular religion and new religions, but hesitate to propose an explicit change in policy. ver the past 30 years, China has witnessed the which, while the state is neutral and free from the political flourishing and transformation of multiple forms of influence of religious institutions, it does not interfere in the Oreligiosity, covering a vast range of practices includ - affairs of religious institutions and communities. (3) ing family rites of passage, temple festivals, modern spiritual This paradigm is a result of the historical trajectory of Eu - networks, ethnic religions, and transnational communities. (1) rope, in which the nation-state broke out of the shadow of Most of these developments have occurred from the bottom the Church of Rome – a trajectory fundamentally different up, outside the institutional sphere assigned to “religion” by from the Chinese experience. After the proscription of Bud - the state, and often escaping its direct control. Much of the dhism in 842 left the Buddhist sangha permanently weak - literature on the state’s religious policy during these years ened, for one thousand years until the nineteenth century no has built on a paradigm of church-state relations in which the trans-local religious institution ever managed to secure its in - focus has been on monitoring the repression and control of dependence from the imperial state, which positioned itself religion by the state, identifying the limits to religious free - as the supreme religious authority in a society steeped in re - dom in China, and noting that, since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, if the overall trend has been one of a 1. The primary sources used for this article are the documents referenced in the text gradual loosening of restrictions on religious life, the state as well as interviews and conversations held between 2005 and 2009 with offi - cials of the United Front and Religious Affairs Bureaus at the national level as well has continued to assert its ultimate authority over the reli - as of Shanghai, Shaanxi, and Gansu; several Chinese scholars active in the dis - gious sphere. (2) course on religion; officials of the Cultural Affairs Bureau of Yingde County, Guangdong; office holders of the Huashan Daoist Association, Huayin, Shaanxi; as While such an observation is broadly valid, the evolution of well as members of most of the religious communities mentioned in the article. I China’s religious policy cannot be described as a simple would like to thank the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient and the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China for its support in making the field research and process of the state stepping out (or back in) to give more or collection of documentary materials possible. I am also grateful to Vincent less freedom to religious groups and communities. On the Goossaert and Sébastien Billioud for their editorial suggestions. contrary, the state has continued to play a key role in consti - 2. See for example Beatrice Leung, “Religious Freedom and the Constitution in the Peoples’ Republic of China: Interpretation and Implementation,” Diskus , vol. 3, no. tuting and structuring the religious field, alongside religious 1, 1995, pp. 1-18; Tony Lambert, “The Present Religious Policy of the Chinese groups and leaders themselves. To describe this dynamic, Communist Party,” Religion, State & Society , vol. 29, no. 2, 2001, pp. 121-129; Pitman Potter, “Belief in Control: Regulation of Religion in China,” China Quarterly , however, we need to avoid uncritically applying a paradigm no. 174, 2003, pp. 317-337; Jason Kindopp et. al. (eds.), God and Caesar in China: of church-state relations derived from the Western experi - Policy Implications of Church-State Tensions , Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2004; Beatrice Leung, “China’s Religious Policy: The Art of Managing ence, which assumes the prior mutual autonomy of church Religious Activity,” China Quarterly , no. 184, 2005, pp. 894-913. and state, describes the tensions and power relations be - 3. See Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank, “Making Religion, Making the State in tween the two, and posits that the normal and desirable state China: an Introductory Essay”, in Ashiwa and Wank (eds), Making Religion, Making the State: The politics of Religion in Modern China , Stanford, University of Stanford of affairs, in a condition of secularised modernity, is one in Press, 2009, pp.1-21. 17 N o 2009/4 Special Feature s e v i a t ligiosity without a clear distinction between the religious and gion,” and organised into state-sponsored national patriotic c n i e the secular. For a century from the Opium War (1843) until associations under the supervision of the State Council’s h p Liberation (1949), the Christian churches asserted their in - Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB), while cooperative reli - s c r dependence from the Chinese state, but since this was a re - gious leaders as individuals were dealt with by the United e p ligion introduced from abroad, whose independence was Front Department of the CCP. forced on China by the guns of the Western powers, the This article focuses on the state-led institutionalisation of re - churches could not readily stand as examples of a religious ligion from the post-Mao era until today, and its effect on the institution fully autonomous from the political sphere. Chris - structuring of China’s religious field. This institutionalisation tianity did have a profound impact on the entire religious has been limited to those recognised religions, and has ex - field during this period, becoming a normative model for all cluded not only the other forms of religiosity mentioned other religious traditions and of the very notion of religion as above – which did and still do represent a far greater portion a distinct and autonomous category. (4) When it found its of China’s religious field – but also newer forms of indige - place in the Marxist ideology of the Chinese Communist nous and global forms of religiosity that have appeared in Party, however, the state-religion distinction came to desig - China since the 1980s. For lack of space, this article focuses nate not two autonomous spheres, but an opposition be - on the religious institutions of the Han majority, and among tween two types of political forces, the dictatorship of the them, more attention will be paid to Buddhism and Daoism proletariat on the one hand and the instruments of feudalism – for which the impact of institutionalisation has been the and imperialism on the other. most profound, since there is no historical experience of na - tional religious institutions, creating an unprecedented level The state-led institutionalisa- of national integration of these two religions’ clerical net - tion of religion in the PRC works and liturgies. (8) This is not a study of the grassroots re - ligious life of these communities, but of the institutional When the CCP took power in 1949, it thus considered processes that aim to structure the grassroots – and whose the religious question solely from the angle of political struggle, both in terms of long-term vision and short-term 4. See David A. Palmer and Vincent Goossaert, The Religious Question in Modern China , pragmatic considerations. The purpose of religious policy Chicago, University of Chicago Press, forthcoming, chap. 3. 5. Anna Xiao Dong Sun, “The Fate of Confucianism as a Religion in Socialist China: was to eviscerate religious communities of their connec - Controversies and Paradoxes,” in Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney (eds.), State, tions with political enemies and turn them into instru - Market, and Religions in Chinese Societies , Leiden, Brill, 2005, pp. 229-254. ments of the Communist Party’s United Front, all the 6. The “redemptive societies” were a wave of salvational movements that appeared in the first decades of the twentieth century, which typically combined the union of the Three while making efforts to avoid alienating religious believers, Teachings (Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, to which Christianity and Islam were and, while respecting their freedom of belief, leave them often added) with spirit-writing, philanthropy, and a milleniarian eschatology, and often adopted modern forms of organisation and teaching. See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty to naturally wither away as the class basis of religion dis - and Authenticity .