The Religious Question in Modern China

"This book has an academic bent to it, but I chose authors who are right for a general audience. Many of these books are also ones that I teach and I find that students really like them – they’re clearly written and make compelling arguments. Goossaert and Palmer are key because they represent a new consensus in how people in China and abroad understand the past century and a half of Chinese history. Most standard histories focus on politics and perhaps some economics, but mostly miss the fact that religion has been at the centre of China’s struggle for modernity since the 19th century. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Early reformers saw either suppressing or reforming religion as central to their efforts to save China from foreign occupation. In the late 19th century, for example, one of China’s great reformers, Kang Youwei, advocated converting temples to schools – the idea was that China needed more education and less tradition. Another example is Sun Yat-sen, who is often credited with overthrowing China’s last dynasty, the Qing, in 1911. His first act of revolution as a young man was to take a giant stick, go to the temple in his hometown, and smash the statue of a Daoist deity – a symbolic act to get rid of all of the old traditions that he felt were holding China back. In the Republican era – from 1911 until the Communist takeover in 1949 – there were many movements attacking traditional religion. Rebecca Nedostup’s book Superstitious Regimes shows how the KMT saw traditional Chinese religion as a social ill analogous to opium, foot-binding or illiteracy. One of their edicts in the 1920s decided which temples should be destroyed and which should be preserved. In a precursor to the Cultural Revolution, KMT activists went around the countryside destroying old temples and criticising them as superstitious. So it wasn’t just the atheistic Communists attacking religion, it goes back much earlier. In the Mao era the Party pursued similar policies, but with its customary brutality. The new government allowed some religions to coalesce out of the old system in the 1950s, and the system which gave rise today to the five official religions in China was formed then. It was quickly jettisoned by Mao as he lurched more and more to the left with radical policies such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until only Mao was left as a godhead figure. “Rebecca Nedostup’s book Superstitious Regimes shows how the KMT saw traditional Chinese religion as a social ill analogous to opium, foot-binding or illiteracy.” By the end of the Cultural Revolution , more or less all places of worship in China had been either destroyed, closed or repurposed, so that there was no functioning temple, church or mosque in all of China. Just as a rough number to give you an idea, a census showed roughly a million temples in late 19th century China. By the middle of the 20th century, before the Communists took over, about half of them had been destroyed, and the Communists wrecked the rest over the next 26 years. Religion used to be embedded in Chinese society. Just as in many traditional religions around the world, it was part of the fabric of daily life. People worshipped communally in temples, for example, or had patron saints for most professions. You don’t see that in China today. Religion is no longer the lifeblood of society. Now it is something that people do in their own time, their private sphere, which is essentially how modernity has dealt with religion in many other countries throughout the world. In that respect this trauma that China went through in the past century and a half ran parallel to other parts of the world. A good country to compare this with is Turkey. The Ottoman Empire, when it collapsed at the end of World War I, was replaced by a radical secularising regime under Atatürk, which did very similar things to religion. They closed mosques, they viewed Islam as holding Turkey back, and they tried to create a European-style state that would allow some religious life as private practice on a certain day of week at a certain place of worship under government supervision, but not as anything that would challenge the state. They turned some mosques into museums, men weren’t allowed to wear full beards, just a neat little moustache, and women weren’t allowed to wear the hijab."