Chinese Christianity: indigenization and conflict

Abstract

An unforeseen consequence of the policies and social changes of the Reform Era has been an enormous growth in religious belief. After being severely restricted in the first decade and a half of the Maoist era, virtually all forms of public religious practice were suppressed during the Cultural Revolution, and replaced by a quasi-religious cult of Mao, complete with sacred texts (the Little Red Book), rituals (loyalty dances), and claims of miracles. But amid the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the Mao cult imploded. After the death of Mao and the overthrow of his close associates, the Deng Xiaoping regime relaxed restrictions on religious practice-and the mobility and freedoms of an expanding market economy made many remaining restrictions easy to subvert. In this environment, hundreds of religious flowers began to bloom, some of them replications of pre-revolutionary religious forms, many others new mutations of the old. According to government official figures, there are over 100 million religious believers in China today. A recent study in an authoritative journal by a team of researchers at Shanghai University, however, put the number at 300 million. But even this is probably under-estimated. If we consider “religion” to include any form of evocation of supernatural powers-and therefore traditional folk practices like burning incense to gods or ancestors at life cycle rituals or at seasonal festivals-then, according to Peter Ng, a religious studies scholar at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, as much as 95 percent of the Chinese population might be considered religious to some degree.1