China's Religious Danwei

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.)Over the past 30 years, China has witnessed the flourishing and transformation of multiple forms of religiosity, covering a vast range of practices including family rites of passage, temple festivals, modern spiritual networks, ethnic religions, and transnational communities.(l) Most of these developments have occurred from the bottom up, outside the institutional sphere assigned to by the state, and often escaping its direct control. Much of the literature on the state's religious policy during these years has built on a paradigm of church-state relations in which the focus has been on monitoring the repression and control of religion by the state, identifying the limits to religious freedom in China, and noting that, since the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, if the overall trend has been one of a gradual loosening of restrictions on religious life, the state has continued to assert its ultimate authority over the religious sphere.(2)While such an observation is broadly valid, the evolution of China's religious policy cannot be described as a simple process of the state stepping out (or back in) to give more or less freedom to religious groups and communities. On the contrary, the state has continued to play a key role in constituting and structuring the religious field, alongside religious groups and leaders themselves. To describe this dynamic, however, we need to avoid uncritically applying a paradigm of church-state relations derived from the Western experience, which assumes the prior mutual autonomy of church and state, describes the tensions and power relations between the two, and posits that the normal and desirable state of affairs, in a condition of secularised modernity, is one in which, while the state is neutral and free from the political influence of religious institutions, it does not interfere in the affairs of religious institutions and communities.This paradigm is a result of the historical trajectory of Europe, in which the nation-state broke out of the shadow of the Church of Rome - a trajectory fundamentally different from the Chinese experience. After the proscription of Buddhism in 842 left the Buddhist sangha permanently weakened, for one thousand years until the nineteenth century no trans-local religious institution ever managed to secure its independence from the imperial state, which positioned itself as the supreme religious authority in a society steeped in re- ligiosity without a clear distinction between the religious and the secular. For a century from the Opium War (1843) until Liberation (1949), the Christian churches asserted their independence from the Chinese state, but since this was a religion introduced from abroad, whose independence was forced on China by the guns of the Western powers, the churches could not readily stand as examples of a religious institution fully autonomous from the political sphere. Christianity did have a profound impact on the entire religious field during this period, becoming a normative model for all other religious traditions and of the very notion of religion as a distinct and autonomous category.(4) When it found its place in the Marxist ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, however, the state-religion distinction came to designate not two autonomous spheres, but an opposition between two types of political forces, the dictatorship of the proletariat on the one hand and the instruments of feudalism and imperialism on the other.The state-led Institutionalisation of religion ln tke PRCWhen the CCP took power in 1949, it thus considered the religious question solely from the angle of political struggle, both in terms of long-term vision and short-term pragmatic considerations. The purpose of religious policy was to eviscerate religious communities of their connections with political enemies and turn them into instruments of the Communist Party's United Front, all the while making efforts to avoid alienating religious believers, and, while respecting their freedom of belief, leave them to naturally wither away as the class basis of religion disappeared. …