[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 109 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
UNOFFICIAL RELIGION IN CHINA:
BEYOND THE PARTY'S RULES
=======================================================================
ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MAY 23, 2005
__________
Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
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CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
Senate House
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska, Chairman JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa, Co-Chairman
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas DAVID DREIER, California
GORDON SMITH, Oregon FRANK R. WOLF, Virginia
JIM DeMINT, South Carolina JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania
MEL MARTINEZ, Florida ROBERT B. ADERHOLT, Alabama
MAX BAUCUS, Montana
CARL LEVIN, Michigan
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California
BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
STEPHEN J. LAW, Department of Labor
PAULA DOBRIANSKY, Department of State
David Dorman, Staff Director (Chairman)
John Foarde, Staff Director (Co-Chairman)
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
STATEMENTS
Ownby, David, Director, the Center of East Asian Studies,
University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada DC.................... 2
Thornton, Patricia M., Associate Professor of Political Science,
Trinity College, Hartford, CT.................................. 5
Weller, Robert P., Professor of Anthropology and Research
Assistant, Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs,
Boston University, Boston, MA.................................. 8
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Ownby, David..................................................... 28
Thornton, Patricia M............................................. 31
Weller, Robert P................................................. 35
UNOFFICIAL RELIGION IN CHINA: BEYOND THE PARTY'S RULES
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MONDAY, MAY 23, 2005
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The Roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 2 p.m.,
in room 2255, Rayburn House Office Building, John Foarde (staff
director) presiding.
Also present: Susan Roosevelt Weld, general counsel; Mark
Milosch, special advisor; Katherine Palmer Kaup, special
advisor; Steve Marshall, special advisor; William A. Farris,
senior specialist on Internet and commercial rule of law; and
Laura Mitchell,
research associate.
Mr. Foarde. Ladies and gentlemen, let us begin this
afternoon.
Welcome to this Issues Roundtable of the Congressional-
Executive Commission on China. On behalf of our chairman,
Senator Chuck Hagel, and our co-chairman, Congressman Jim
Leach, and the members of the CECC, welcome to our panelists
and to all who have come to listen to their testimony this
afternoon.
One of the issues that our Commission members most care
about is freedom of religion. Of all the questions that we get
from the 23 members of our Commission on a regular basis,
freedom of religion questions predominate.
Over the past three and a half years, we have looked at a
number of aspects of religious freedom in China and the
restrictions on religious practice, but we have not looked at
what might be termed ``unofficial'' religions in China.
After the reform and opening up period began in the late
1970s, the Chinese Communist Party changed its previous policy
toward religion from complete repression of religious belief
and practice to a rigid system that permitted believers a
narrow range of Party-controlled religious practices. The
growing number of believers and their flourishing new creeds,
however, frequently has not fit within the government and
Party-approved structure. So this roundtable seeks to examine
the beliefs of these believers and how they have grown rapidly
outside the official system, and also to assess the Chinese
Government's efforts to control them. To help us with this
inquiry this afternoon we have three distinguished panelists,
and I will introduce each at some length. We have Patricia
Thornton, David Ownby, and Robert Weller.
As we have in the past, we will ask each of our panelists
to speak for about 10 minutes. When they have all spoken, we
will go to a question and answer session that the staff panel
up here will participate in, asking our panelists questions for
about five minutes each. We will do as many rounds as we have
time for before 3:30 arrives, or we exhaust the topic,
whichever comes first.
So let me now first recognize David Ownby. David is
director of the Center of East Asian Studies at the University
of Montreal in Canada, and has come fairly far afield for
panelists at these roundtables. Professor Ownby earned his B.A.
in History from Vanderbilt University and his Master's degree
in East Asian Studies and a Ph.D. in History and East Asian
Languages from Harvard University. His research and
publications include ``Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in
Early and Mid-Qing China: The Formation of a Tradition,''
``Scriptures of the Way of the Temple of the Heavenly
Immortals,'' ``Imperial Fantasies: Chinese Communists and
Peasant Rebellions,'' ``Comparative Studies in Society and
History,'' ``Sous presse,'' and ``Is There a Chinese
Millenarian Tradition? An Analysis of Recent Western Studies of
the Taiping Rebellion.''
Welcome, David Ownby. Thank you for being here. Over to you
for 10 minutes or so.
STATEMENT OF DAVID OWNBY, DIRECTOR, THE CENTER OF EAST ASIAN
STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF MONTREAL, MONTREAL, CANADA
Mr. Ownby. Thank you very much.
I think probably the most important thing that any of us
can do today, for the panel and for the broader issue, the
broader understanding of what religion is in China, is to come
to terms with what ``religion'' means in China and what
``unofficial'' religion might be.
In traditional China, there was no word that meant
``religion.'' The word came in during the late 19th/early 20th
century from the Japanese, who had translated it from European
languages. It is not that the Chinese were not religious, it is
just that they did not divide the world up into what was
religion and what was not religion. So in the early 20th
century, Chinese intellectuals and the Chinese state adopted a
definition of Chinese religion which was modeled after
definitions that they found in the West. This definition has
been incorporated into Chinese Constitutions since 1912.
Religion, then, in the Chinese context, the word zongjiao,
which maintains still a very foreign sort of flavor to it in
the Chinese context, means a world historical religion with
clergy, with a textual corpus, a textual body surrounding the
faith, and a set of institutions. The Chinese adopted this
definition as a part of a modernizing enterprise. They were
building a state. They looked around the world and found that
most modern states had some sort of posture vis-a-vis religion,
and they just took this one. Although we can find some
continuities between what these modernizers did in the early
20th century and what Confucian administrators did over the
centuries, this was not a Chinese thing. This was new. This was
Western.
They borrowed it because they wanted to look like the rest
of the world as they wrote their first Constitutions. They were
not attempting to find a definition that accorded in any sense
with Chinese religious reality, as it was experienced on the
ground. Indeed, when we look in the Constitutions from 1912
forward, we find not only the definition, but they go on to
specify what these religions are in China. There are five:
Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism.
Now, what is interesting for us as we contemplate the
phenomenon of unofficial religion and its explosion in the
post-Mao period is that almost everything that was religious in
China at that point, and prior to that point, and since that
point, everything that is authentically Chinese and religious,
remained outside of those categories. There were Buddhist and
Daoist churches, but these had not been flourishing for some
centuries. Islam had a presence for some centuries, but there
was a minority presence. Neither Protestantism nor Catholicism,
despite the efforts of missionaries since the Jesuits in the
16th century, had managed to convert large numbers of Chinese,
so these were at the margins of what the Chinese religious
experience was.
The major point I want to make here is that unofficial
religion equals Chinese religion, to a very large degree. In
other words, the Chinese state and Chinese intellectuals who
think about religion in this tradition have not accorded a
space to what most Chinese would have considered to be their
spiritual practices. People who go to the local temple do not
think of themselves as practicing religion, and it would not
make sense to them if you asked them, ``Do you want your
religion to be protected? '' They would just simply look at you
blankly.
Now, when we look at this in a historical perspective, this
definition has largely stood from the early 20th century until
now. So for these 100 years, from the point at which the
Chinese state decided to give a definition to what religion was
in China until now, that has been pretty much it. That is the
way the state has defined things. The state has chosen to
enforce that definition to varying degrees over time. The
Communist state did it much better, or much more thoroughly,
than its predecessor. The Nationalist state was rather weak and
had other things to do. The Communist state was very strong and
unified China, and was able to enforce this vision.
What happened with the death of Mao Zedong and the eclipse
of the revolutionary impulse is that the Chinese state,
beginning roughly 1978 to 1980, backed off. They stopped trying
to micro-manage every aspect of popular life and consciousness.
This created a space for religion of all sorts to blossom. We
know that, since 1980, there has been an enormous expansion,
both in the practice of officially recognized religions, and in
the practice of unofficial
religions.
The changes since this reform era began have been largely
in the state's decision to look the other way and to allow much
more latitude. This was rarely a formal recognition of any
particular right to people who were outside the formally
approved churches. It was just that the state had other things
to do and decided not to invest the enormous amounts of money
it takes to tell people what to
believe and what not to believe.
So what has changed, then, in addition to the state looking
the other way, is that technology has enabled religions to take
a variety of different forms. But when we think about
unofficial religions, I think the important thing to bear in
mind that they are not necessarily new. The volume is new, but
this is a return to the latitude that a weaker state had
accorded in a previous period. Unofficial religions that have
appeared, we can categorize in a number of ways. I would call
qigong and Falun Gong unofficial religions, of a sort. In the
question and answer period, I can address how they emerged and
how this fits in with the general argument I am presenting.
The ``home church'' Christianity movement is an unofficial
religion which has gained many followers in China. In addition,
there are more traditional forms of unofficial religions, such
as local cults, local village cults, pietistic cults, secret
societies.
Again, what is new in all of this is the degree to which
the state looks the other way, and also, when we look at Falun
Gong or qigong, or even home church Christianity, technology
has enabled, via cybertools, via Web sites, via cell phones,
people can build networks much more easily than they did in the
past, and they have done this in China. So, technology has
changed the basic rules of the game, to some degree.
Another basic difference that I will just mention very
briefly, is that the Chinese community outside of China has
changed, the Chinese diaspora has changed enormously in such a
manner as to have an impact in important ways on the practice
of unofficial religion in China. The first place that this is
important would be Taiwan. Rob Weller will talk about this in
more detail. But the fact of Taiwan's democratization and
Taiwan's relative openness to a variety of what heretofore had
been considered unofficial religions in both China and Taiwan
has invigorated similar things in China. People from Taiwan can
go back to China. This is true as well for Christianity. Lots
of missionaries come. It is a weird sort of map, when you think
of it. A Mormon missionary leaves Utah and goes to Taiwan,
converts Taiwanese to Mormonism, the Taiwanese goes back to
China and converts Chinese. But this is the way that it works.
The other difference in terms of the Chinese diaspora is
that ever since the early 1980s, there has been a new Chinese
diaspora forming in North America and the rest of the West.
This is a different sort of group than has been present
heretofore. In North America, we are used to thinking of these
sort of bachelor restauranteurs and laundry workers in San
Francisco who came over in the early part of the 20th century.
But ever since the early 1980s, with China's openness to the
world, waves of immigration have been coming out of China and
the filter of immigration in the West has tended to select
Chinese who are well-educated, well-off, able to integrate,
able to speak English.
As a result, then, we see this very much in the context of
Falun Gong, for instance, following the campaign of suppression
launched by the Chinese state from the summer of 1999 forward,
Falun Gong practitioners in the West have been extremely
effective and active in bringing pressure to bear, both on
Western governments and on the Chinese state, to stop the
campaign. Not only do they bring pressure using the various
technological tools that I mentioned a while ago, but also they
bring together discourses of freedom of religion and freedom of
belief which were not there in China previously.
So to sum up, the latitude of the Chinese state, which has
had other things to do than to tell believers at every moment
what they should believe and how they should practice, allied
with the growth of a Chinese diaspora in Greater China and in
the West in general, have reinvigorated this return to
religiosity which we have seen in China for some 20, 25 years.
It is likely to continue, in my view, and an ongoing cycle of
openness and repression, unless there is some breakthrough in
the state of mind of the Chinese Government. But I will stop
there and leave that for the question and
answer period.
Mr. Foarde. You are remarkably disciplined, because you
ended just as the time was running out. I appreciate it,
because I know normally you are used to speaking for a little
longer during class periods.
Mr. Ownby. It is a pleasure not to have to speak longer.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Ownby appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Foarde. I am sure. And thank you for getting us started
with such a rich set of issues that we can come back to during
the question and answer session.
I would now like to recognize Patricia Thornton, Associate
Professor of Political Science at Trinity College in Hartford,
CT. Patricia earned her Bachelors degree from Swarthmore
College and a Master's degree in Political Science from the
University of Washington. After earning her Ph.D. in Political
Science from the University of California at Berkeley, she
spent one year as an An Wang Post-doctoral Research Fellow at
Harvard University's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research.
Her research centers on social organizations and syncretic
sectarian groups in contemporary China. In 2003, she was
awarded a grant from the J. William Fulbright Foundation's New
Century Scholars program, allowing her to spend several months
abroad researching syncretic cybersects and other Internet-
based groups in Greater China and elsewhere. Her current
research focuses on how syncretic sects in contemporary China
have made use of high-tech resources such as the World Wide
Web, Internet, and e-mail. Professor Thornton, thank you very
much for being here. Please.
STATEMENT OF PATRICIA M. THORNTON, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF
POLITICAL SCIENCE, TRINITY COLLEGE, HARTFORD, CT
Ms. Thornton. Thank you.
Beginning in 1978, the opening of Chinese markets to
international exchanges, the dismantling of Mao-era
institutions, and the general relaxation of central political
controls all helped to set the stage for widespread religious
revival in the PRC. Syncretic sects of various types have
emerged in large numbers in recent years, many with ties to
traditional religious groups that were largely suppressed
during the early years of Communist Party rule. At the same
time, the development and availability of high-technology
resources, including fax machines, cell phones, text messaging
systems, and of course the Internet, has facilitated both
communication and social mobilization, culminating in a new
type of threat to the current regime. In the eyes of many
Chinese
authorities, the confluence of these three trends, the
relaxation of political controls, the resurgence of popular
interest in spiritual and religious practices, and the
development of new information technologies has created a
virtual ``perfect storm'' for Internet-based dissent against
the current regime. Highly sophisticated transnational networks
of committed political and religious dissidents have emerged to
challenge the leadership of the Party and the state on several
fronts.
One result of this confluence of trends has been the
emergence of what I call cybersectarianism in transnational
China. The most successful of the new Chinese cybersects
combine Web-based strategies of text distribution, recruitment,
and information-sharing strategies with multi-faceted
international media campaigns and periodic, but high profile,
episodes of protest both in and outside the PRC. Funded at
least in part by overseas Chinese communities, some of these
cybersects have begun pooling their resources, both with other
like-minded religious or spiritual groups, as well as with
other dissident organizations based abroad. Like the Internet
itself upon which they have relied so heavily in their recent
development and expansion, the new cybersects have morphed into
far-flung transnational networks in which the political and
religious dissidents speak and secure the support of
international authorities and non-governmental organizations to
frame issues and to pursue various political agendas.
In my written statement, I refer to several such groups.
But for the sake of brevity here today, I will focus in my
opening remarks on the group commonly referred to as Falun Gong
because it is both the best-known and best-elaborated example
of this phenomenon.
Li Hongzhi, the group's founder and leader, created his
unique system of meditation involving particular postures and
bodily movement and began teaching it to the broader public in
the PRC in 1992. Despite the movement's popularity in China,
Falun Gong, also known as and commonly referred to as Falun
Dafa, was little known outside the PRC until April 25, 1999,
when 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners staged a mass sit-in in
front of the walled leadership compound in Beijing. Weeks
later, when Li was asked how the group managed to pull of such
a large-scale event, he confirmed that they had relied on the
Internet in order to organize the protest. The earliest history
of Falun Gong's use of the Internet was most likely the result
of an uncoordinated effort of a few Web-savvy practitioners.
Web sites devoted to Falun Gong first began appearing on the
Internet in 1993 or 1994, and were generally created and
maintained by Chinese college students, academics, or other
practitioners residing here in the United States. These first
pages comprised little more than a series of links to
downloadable copies of Master Li's published works, along with
a brief introduction to the group's beliefs and practices. Most
provided news of U.S.-based Falun Gong chapters, which were
often centered on American college campuses and which also held
regular sessions open to the public. There was a fair amount of
latitude among the local chapters' Web sites during the early
phase of the movement, and the information available from them
frequently varied in content.
The initial efforts at centralization of these sites came
in 1995, when the Foreign Liaison group of the Falun Dafa
Research Society established a protocol for monitoring the
group's presence on the Web. In 1997 and 1998, a series of
notices appeared on Falun Gong sites that attempted to reign in
the virtual movement by redirecting viewers to a few main sites
with more carefully controlled content, monitored bulletin
boards, and updated information from the organization's central
leadership. These central Web sites continue to serve as a
vital source of information for practitioners across the globe,
helping to organize collective actions of various kinds, as
well as to provide venues for sharing religious experiences
within the community of the faithful. Despite the attempts of
mainland authorities to block access to these Web sites,
practitioners in the PRC continued to evade controls by using
untraceable Web-based e-mail accounts accessed in Internet
cafes, proxy servers, and new anonymizing software. Many sites
provide instruction on how to evade official surveillance by
using proxy servers to log on in order to view or download
banned information.
The banning of Falun Gong and other heterodox sects in 1999
shifted the struggle in large part to virtual reality, with the
banned cybersects adopting what some have called ``repertoires
of electronic contention,'' including the use of Web sites and
e-mail to mobilize participants for conventional
demonstrations, as well as ``hacktivism,'' which includes
tactics of disruptive electronic contention, and even
cyberterrorism, by which I mean physical harm done to groups
and individuals by the disruption of power grids, traffic
control, and other systems of resources delivery and public
safety. With the help of supporters based abroad, underground
Falun Gong cells in Greater China have managed to highjack the
satellite uplink feed to Central Chinese television on numerous
occasions, and to broadcast pro-Falun Gong videotaped messages
to many locations across the PRC. More recently, Chinese
authorities have also accused Falun Gong members of sabotaging
or defacing public transportation systems, and even of
obstructing the government's attempts to control the spread of
SARS.
Falun Gong followers and other dissidents have in turn
accused Chinese officials of performing surveillance on and
penetrating online sites where dissenters tend to congregate in
order to engage in various forms of cyber-espionage and
entrapment schemes.
In summing up, it is important to note that, as
sophisticated as official surveillance and repression of such
groups has become in the PRC, such measures have not only not
eliminated the new cybersects, but have in fact intensified
their reliance upon Web-based high-tech strategies of
contention. As necessity is indeed the mother of invention,
these efforts have arguably made them more capable of planning
and carrying out difficult, ambiguous, and complex tasks. At
the same time, the move to virtual reality has not been without
its costs to the groups in question. The decentralization of
Web-based movements has already contributed to some splintering
and fragmentation of the membership of these groups. While such
power struggles are by no means unheard of in more traditional
religious orders, such issues seem destined to revisit the
banned cybersects in the future. Nonetheless, as the case of
Falun Gong amply demonstrates, access to the Internet has
proved to be a real lifeline for groups driven underground by
the brutal crackdown.
Thank you for your time. I would be happy to answer any
questions in the upcoming session.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Thornton appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Foarde. Thank you very much. We look forward to asking
you some questions about all of those interesting issues that
you raised.
Let us go right on then and recognize Professor Robert
Weller, Professor of Anthropology and Research Associate in the
Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston
University. Professor Weller earned his doctorate in
anthropology from Johns Hopkins in 1980 for work on the role of
religious variation in Taiwan's changing economy and society.
He taught at Duke University
before going to Boston University, where he is a Professor of
Anthropology, as well as a member of the university's Institute
on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs. His most recent book
is ``Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and
Taiwan.'' Other books include ``Unities and Diversities in
Chinese Religion and Resistance, Chaos and Control in China:
Taiping Rebels, Taiwanese Ghosts, and Tiananmen.'' I am happy
to say that two new books will appear this year: ``Civil Life,
Globalization, and Political Change in Asia: Organizing Between
Family and State,'' and the second, ``Discovering Nature:
Globalization and Environmental Culture in China and Taiwan.''
Professor Weller, welcome. Thank you very much for sharing
your expertise with us this afternoon.
STATEMENT OF ROBERT P. WELLER, PROFESSOR OF ANTHROPOLOGY AND
RESEARCH ASSOCIATE, INSTITUTE ON CULTURE, RELIGION, AND WORLD
AFFAIRS, BOSTON UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MA
Mr. Weller. Thank you very much for having me. Forgive me
also for reading.
Most Chinese religious activity has never been part of any
broader organized church and it has never had much
institutional existence beyond the local community. This is
still true today, where people across China burn incense to
gods and ancestors, but they have no affiliation with any of
China's religious organizations. This sort of popular worship,
for lack of a better name, is by far the largest part of
China's current religious resurgence. It is also the most
neglected.
But let me just go to the 20th century, where religions of
all kinds have struggled in China throughout the entire
century. The Nationalist government, the KMT that took over
from the last imperial dynasty in 1911, saw most religion as a
remnant from pre-modern times, embarrassing to their hopes of
modernity, draining valuable resources from the people that
should be invested in more economically productive ways. They
looked with particular disfavor on popular worship and
instituted massive campaigns to convert temples to secular use.
As I am sure you all know, it only got worse after 1949 with
the Cultural Revolution essentially ending all external forms
of religious activity.
Since the 1980s, though, there has been a significant
relaxation in attitudes. Although there are still periodic
crackdowns--the most significant recent one, of course, was
after the Falun Gong demonstrations in 1999 and for a few years
thereafter--there is still a general feeling of distrust of
religion from many local cadres and a continuing lack of any
legal status for popular worship. That is, not only are there
not even the nominal guarantees of freedom of religion in the
Constitution, because this does not count as religion, but
local temples are technically illegal because they are social
organizations that have no registration with the state.
In spite of all this, the last two decades have seen an
enormous increase in religious activities of every type in
China. I will stick to what we are calling informal religions,
whatever exactly that is supposed to indicate. Of those, I
would guess that the kinds of pietistic sects that David
referred to very briefly, or secret societies, are quite
widespread, but they are thoroughly underground. They are quite
illegal and really do not dare stick their heads above ground.
That is especially true since the repression of Falun Gong. We
have no reliable research on them because it is so thoroughly
underground. I could only speculate about them, and I will not.
Popular religion, though, popular worship, is a quite
different state of affairs. It is coming back powerfully,
especially in rural areas, not equally across the country, but
certainly in some areas. In northern Fujian, for instance, we
have the most thorough study of the revival of popular worship.
In a survey of 600 villages, every village has rebuilt temples.
The average village has 2.4 or so--I did not bring the exact
number--temples. In 600 villages, something like 6,000 god
images were documented in this survey, and that represents the
current situation.
This kind of thing is not typical of China. This is
probably the extreme. I expect it rivals what religion had ever
been like in that area. It is rarer in north China, say.
Nevertheless, we have reports of active local popular worship
across the entire country. As a wild guess--and I will not be
held to the figure and will not take responsibility for it--
something like half the rural population, maybe. That would
mean we are talking about 300 or 400 million people, far larger
than any other religious activity in China. If it were a world
religion, it would be one of the largest religions in the
world.
Legally, China has created space for religions that are
officially recognized, the sort of thing David talked about,
and institutionalized within a state-dominated corporatist
framework. Two kinds of religious activity clearly fall outside
of even that limited framework. First, there are those
religions that, since 1999 or 2000, have been condemned as
``evil cults'' xiejiao. It is the resurrection of an old
Imperial term. That includes essentially all of the secret
societies and pietistic sects, Falun Gong, of course, and
really any institutional religious activity that falls outside
of state control. The second is activity that has very low
levels of institution, does not have texts, does not have
priests, does not meet the kind of modernist definition of
religion that China has adopted, and is not religion by their
definition. This is all popular worship of local gods. The
government condemns this as feudal superstition, so it has not
even those nominal protections of freedom of religion.
Nevertheless, outside of purely economic relationships like the
market, religion and kinship remain the two most important
sources of social ties in a village. That social role has been
critical, I think, first in Taiwan, and maybe now also in
China.
Let me turn to Taiwan for a few minutes. The Nationalists
who took over Taiwan after the Japanese occupation in 1945
tolerated popular worship, but just barely. They campaigned
against it consistently in a continuation of their policy from
before World War II on the mainland. They never repressed it to
anything like the extent to which it was repressed by the
Communist regime. The Nationalists did campaign against it as
wasteful, as superstitious, and just plain unsanitary.
By the 1960s, the academic literature thought this sort of
religion was dying out in Taiwan, as of course we thought it
was dying out in China in the 1970s. Nevertheless, as the
island grew wealthier around this period, people began to
rebuild popular temples on ever more lavish scales, ritual
events became larger and more elaborate, and a few temples
really became important at the level of the entire island.
With the democratization of Taiwan in the late 1980s, those
campaigns against popular religion ended. In fact, the tides
reversed completely. Politicians now regularly visit local
temples in attempts to appeal to the electorate. The religious
boom that I think has been going on for three decades now in
Taiwan continues, and temples remain really closely entwined
with daily life, both in the countryside and in the city now.
At roughly the same time popular religion began to boom
again, that is, the 1970s, various forms of more organized
religion also drew a lot of attention. The most striking, was
growth among these pietistic sects, the inheritors of the old
White Lotus kind of tradition. These had also been illegal in
Taiwan and were repressed. They operated underground in Taiwan,
although, in fact, they are very conservative. I read spirit
possession texts from these groups: when the god comes down and
says, here is what you must do, be filial to your parents and
obey the Constitution, that kind of thing. Nevertheless, the
rebellious potential that had been realized in the past was
enough to keep these illegal. Unlike temple religion, these
sects were built more of voluntary members who got together
secretly for regular meetings as congregations, often featuring
texts revealed by spirit possession.
By the 1980s when they were finally legalized, they claimed
millions of members, including some of Taiwan's wealthiest
entrepreneurs. The man behind Eva Airlines, for instance, or
Evergreen Shipping, is a very prominent member of one of these
groups.
But democratization in 1987 ended political campaigns
against temple worship, opened up space for new Buddhist-based
social philanthropic groups with millions of followers--these
are not formal religion; I will not talk about them, but would
be happy to take questions--and legalized the pietistic sects.
Just as important, we can see how local religion could help
consolidate the civil society that quickly developed in Taiwan.
It was one of the few areas where local social ties were there
and could develop outside the powerful authoritarian control of
the KMT before 1987. Temple religion provided an important
resource to put democracy on a strong social base. In contrast,
in countries where authoritarian rule was more successful in
destroying alternate social ties that has tended to be replaced
by ``gangsterism.'' Look at Albania, for example.
While temple religion did not directly cause Taiwan to
democratize, it has been crucial in consolidating an effective
democracy there. We see the role especially where temples help
organize local people to protect their welfare, for instance,
by protesting against polluting factories.
Now, if we turn back to China, what are the possibilities
there? The growth of informal religion in China beginning in
the 1980s is reminiscent of Taiwan a decade or two earlier, and
it is possible because local officials, in practice, are
willing to turn a blind eye toward what is going on, or in fact
cooperate with local people in finding ways to legitimize newly
rebuilt temples and revive festivals, even though beneath that
they always retain the power to repress them, and that power is
sometimes realized. In some ways, this has encouraged local
temples to mobilize social capital even more in order to
negotiate with the state. One successful temple in Shaanxi, for
example, achieved legitimacy by building an arboretum attached
to the temple, and eventually attracted the attention of
national and international NGOs, completely delighting the
local government, of course. Others build schools or call
themselves museums of local cultural history, and so forth.
Now, maybe these activities are undertaken cynically just to
keep the state off their backs, but in a sense it does not
matter. Once undertaken, they are real activities that have
real effects on Chinese society. There was a recent
dissertation on the delivery of public goods in China that
found that villages with strong temple committees also tended
to have better roads, newer schools, and other, better social
goods than villages without those committees.
In the current political climate where China is trying to
encourage local society to take over many welfare functions
that it can no longer even claim to provide, we can expect to
see religion of all kinds, both formal and informal, to
increase its role. Temples in China also sometimes help
organize popular protests, mobilizing social capital on behalf
of the rights of a village. In one case in Gansu, for instance,
local fertility goddess cults organized an environmental
protest movement, the argument being that the pollution
threatened the health of their children, and that is why they
turned to fertility goddesses. This hardly qualifies as civil
society, but I think it does show the potential of religion to
develop means for direct expression of popular needs. None of
this means that informal religion is going to push China toward
democracy. I do not think it will. Such religion does have some
democratic features in its internal organization; leadership is
chosen by lot, for instance, by divination. It is a core
reservoir of social capital. It is also limited by a
fundamental localism and great difficulties in scaling up.
Nevertheless, the Taiwan experience shows that informal
religion can be very helpful in consolidating democratic
openings. The current direction in China shows the way religion
can improve the quality of life, not just spiritual life, but
material life, and even under the current regime.
I think it must be time for me to stop.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Weller appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Foarde. Thank you very much for your discipline as
well.
Let me let the panelists rest their voices for a minute and
just say that I see a great many familiar faces attending this
afternoon. But if you are not familiar with the CECC Web site,
I would invite you to visit it at www.cecc.gov, where you will
see the written statements of today's panelists, and in due
course, the full transcript of today's roundtable.
Let us move on deliberately, then, to the question and
answer session. Again, I will give each of the members of the
staff panel about five minutes to ask a question and hear the
answer, and we will keep going around. If a question is not
directed specifically at a panelist but you have a comment, we
would definitely like to hear it. So, sometimes I will invite
you, but do not wait to be invited if you have something to
say.
Let me exercise the prerogative of the chair then and pose
a question to both Patricia Thornton and David Ownby about
qigong and Falun Gong. One of the problems that we had in
trying to figure out how to frame this particular roundtable
was what to call the phenomenon that we were trying to examine.
So after much debate and an unsatisfactory set of exchanges of
ideas, we ended up with ``unofficial religions,'' a term that
everyone understands is not a particularly good formulation.
But I was struck by David picking that up and saying that
qigong and Falun Gong could be considered unofficial religions
of a sort. Patricia also raised in her discussion of Falun Gong
a number of things that got me to wonder: is qigong, is Falun
Gong, a religion, in your view?
Mr. Ownby. Well, I will go first and confuse issues
completely. The best way to look at this is through the history
of where these things came from. It is little known, but qigong
was actually created by the Chinese state or by the Chinese
medical establishment in the 1950s.
The context was that of rapid Westernization, which at that
time meant Sovietization, of the medical establishment in
China, which troubled some otherwise right-thinking Communist
doctors who felt that much of what was valuable about the
Chinese medical tradition was being lost. Specifically in this
context, what was being lost was a whole host of techniques,
practices, visualizations, therapies, of a variety of holistic
sorts that were not recognized then, or now, very much by
Western science-based medicine.
So a handful of people in 1950 decided to go out and get
these techniques and practices, these therapies, back, to clean
them up. In other words, if they were attached to ``feudal''
beliefs or things that would otherwise not be accepted within
Communist discourse, to get rid of these attachments but to
just keep what worked. In other words, to take Daoist
visualization and turn it into biofeedback. That would be some
kind of parallel.
This was qigong, which was created during that period. It
was a very small part of the Chinese medical establishment.
They trained clinical personnel and some of the leading cadres
in the government and Party circles had their aches and pains
taken care of by qigong clinicians in sanitoria set up to this
effect. So this was a very obedient sort of non-problematic,
non-religious--I mean, it was religious in the sense that they
went out and got this stuff out of the baskets of medicine men.
I mean, they asked people who knew how to cast spells and
otherwise cure illnesses how they did it, and then they
transformed them into something that looked mildly scientific
and they gave it a new name.
What happened was that the Cultural Revolution intervened.
During the Cultural Revolution, qigong was disparaged as being
feudal superstition, as were many other things. At the end of
the Cultural Revolution, when qigong came out of hiding, it
came out in a different form.
Qigong masters who felt themselves to be possessed of some
sort of spiritual discipline were teaching healing techniques
in public parks, and they called it qigong instead of something
more religious because it was a much safer thing to call
yourself. Qigong had a perfectly respectable pre-Cultural
Revolution lineage and heritage, so you could say, ``this is
qigong, it is all right.'' It probably would not have been all
right, because it really was religion or religious spiritual
techniques that they were teaching. But some scientists
``discovered'' the material existence of qi supposedly in the
late 1970s, and this gave a thoroughly scientific dialectical
materialist imprimatur to the entire enterprise.
So from about 1980 onward, this qigongjie, the qigong
world, came together where journalists sang the praises of
qigong and masters came out of the woodwork all over the place,
and it just got completely--they did not know it at the time--
out of control.
Now, part of this would not be religious. It would have
been sort of like calisthenics, in that there are forms of
qigong where you do the exercises and you feel better, and that
is it. But one study found almost 500 qigong masters, which
means that there were a large numbers of schools of qigong.
Most of these masters brought together traditional morality
with these gestures and practices, be it visualization or
meditation, and they explained the workings of it by reference
to traditional spirit discourse, even if it was not religious.
Even if it did not identify specifically where this came from,
much of qigong quite clearly bore the mark of traditional
religious and spiritual practices. So that is why, in my mind,
there were religious overtones to it, even if no one in the
entire tens or hundreds of millions of the qigong practitioners
would have said, ``we are doing religion.'' It was a willful
blindness on the part of the state in some ways to allow the
fact that qi supposedly had a scientific existence to lead them
away from the fact that people were going into trance and
having what otherwise would be considered religious
experiences. Falun Gong grew out of this as well.
I do not know what you want to add to that, but that is the
history of where qigong came from.
Ms. Thornton. I think that is a fairly exhaustive history,
so I do not know how much I could add. But I would say that,
with reference to Falun Gong, there are many documents and
there is a long, ongoing struggle between Falun Gong and the
Chinese Government over this very question. Of course, the
Chinese Government sees it as a cult and Falun Gong argues that
it is adamantly not a cult, and not even a religion.
I suspect that the truth probably lies somewhere in between
those two poles. It is not a cult insofar as the leader is not
revered in the way that a messiah might be, or a messiah-like
figure would be regarded from within a true cultic-type
organization, and it is not as hierarchical and formally
organized as a cult might be. But on the other hand, it is not
simply an exercise or a very loose set of spiritual practices,
because there are distinct religious overtones in the texts
that are associated with the movement.
Mr. Foarde. Very useful. Thank you very much.
Organizing these issues roundtables, of which we have done
about 45 now since the beginning of 2002, takes a lot of work
and a lot of coordination. But there is always somebody at the
top of the pyramid, and I am happy to recognize that person,
our general counsel, Susan Roosevelt Weld. Susan, for your
questions.
Ms. Weld. Thanks, John.
This topic is a fascinating one to me because of the
decision that was made to select five categories of beliefs as
the five religions, and observance and practice outside of
those five as unofficial and not legitimate. It is very
strange. It requires seeing the world in a particular way. A
large portion of Chinese spirituality and religion is therefore
left out. I have recently heard, at a conference organized by
Professor Weller, that it is conceivable that in China they
might decide to create another category of permitted religious
behavior and belief, and it would be called minjian zongjiao,
which I suppose is popular religion. That is a rather vague
term. It is hard to make that one rigid. I wonder what the
impact of that additional category might be in your view. Would
that create a much larger space for religious practices like
those you are studying?
Mr. Weller. Everybody is pointing at me, so I will comment
on that. This was kind of an ending comment after a conference
on the category of religion, where we spent a lot of time
talking about things like, ``can you call Falun Gong a
religion, and what is a religion, anyway? '' Several people
mentioned that they thought there would be a sixth category
added to the current list of five official religions. Some
people had heard it, but it may all be pretty unreliable. Some
people thought that certain provinces had already
experimented with registering at this more local level, using a
category called minjian zongjiao. That would be interesting. In
English, we usually say folk religion or popular religion, and
minjian zongjiao is a direct translation of that. In Taiwan or
Hong Kong, it is also used exactly in that way in Chinese.
In China, the term usually did not refer to that, but was
used all the time for secret societies. That is, for things
that fit this definition of religion that they did not like.
Recently, a number of academics have been using minjian
zongjiao in this more international kind of way. I have taken
that as a sign that there is a certain loosening up in the
category and a willingness to consider these kinds of things as
religion. Now, will it end up as a sixth category? None of us
really knows. This is a rumor. But I would not be surprised to
see some experimentation in China to see what happens. I do
think it is possible. If it happens--I would rather like to see
it happen--but it carries some dangers along with some
opportunities. It means these people can come up from
underground. It means that it is not illegal to have these
temples that they already have. It protects them in some senses
from sorts of repression.
On the other hand, it opens them up to a kind of
supervision that they currently do not have to put up with. I
feel sure it is going to involve pressure on them to conform to
a more ``religious'' idea of what a religion is, like they need
a sacred text or something like that which may get invented. So
if it happens, I think it may lead to some real creativity.
Ms. Weld. Thank you very much. Anybody else?
Mr. Foarde. Does anybody else have a comment?
[No response].
Mr. Foarde. All right.
Then let me recognize Kate Kaup, who joins us for the year
as our special advisor on minority nationalities.
Some questions, please?
Ms. Kaup. Government religious policy and controls over
those who adhere to the five state-sanctioned religions have
been quite different in minority and non-minority areas. The
enforcement of religious regulations also varies greatly by
region and by ethnic group. We held a roundtable here in April
on differing practices of Islam among the Uighurs and the Hui,
for example. Does government tolerance for unofficial religious
practices also differ in minority areas and non-minority
regions? Have you noticed different levels of government
control in the minority areas and Han areas?
Mr. Weller. This automatically goes to the anthropologist,
although you should know that none of us actually works on
minority areas. I have spent a little bit of time there, but
doing poverty relief kinds of things for the World Bank, and
not something related to religion.
The situation varies widely. The first thing probably to
say is that in the initial kind of Stalinist attempt to
classify the minorities, as they ultimately did, religion is a
core piece of what you have to have to be a minority. Only the
Han are not supposed to have any religion. For minorities, you
have to have a culture, and that really was read as a religion.
So they are supposed to have something, and they have been
encouraged to have folkloric, cute, harmless religion, a big
festival day where tourists will come and pay money. That you
see especially in the Southwest, where they tend to be more
colorful and not so Islamic. You see an awful lot of that down
there. So, at that level, it is encouraged. Is that formal or
informal religion? There is a huge amount of variation in what
we have in China and the way it is structured, but at least it
exists. You can have a priest, you can be literate in Yi
language, or instance, which usually was just a priestly skill
among the Yi. The Islamic situation--again, if you want to be a
Hui you have to be Islamic, whatever exactly that means. There,
if you talk to the Religious Affairs officials in local areas,
they are often fairly knowledgeable.
Let me give one case from a poverty relief project that I
worked on. We were resettling people, including Muslims, the
Hui people, and I said, ``When you are putting aside money for
public buildings, you need to put aside money for a mosque,
too.'' They said, ``No, no, no, we could not possibly do that.
That would be government support for religion.'' I said, ``All
right, but you are asking for trouble.'' They said, ``But we
can do this: we can put aside money for public construction
where the community itself decides what to do with. They knew
well the community would build a mosque with it. So, I think
there is room. That would not have happened if they were
resettling a Han village. It did not happen when they were
resettling Han villages. So, I think there is a certain amount
of flexibility there that the Han have not been able to enjoy.
Nevertheless, it obviously has strict limits. I think they are
related to those ``evil cult'' strict limits. If you show you
can organize institutionally on a large scale, they are going
to worry about it.
Mr. Foarde. Do either of the others have a comment? Please.
Mr. Ownby. I would just say, and this goes back to the
question that Susan asked, it seems to me that if the category
of popular religion is created as a sixth category, the danger
is exactly that danger, that it will become the equivalent of
the relationship between the state and minority nationalities,
which is that they need to be cute and bring in tourist
dollars. I think we should be very careful, when we talk about
the creation of a category, not to ignore the possibility that
it is not necessarily a liberalizing impulse. It is far more a
managerial impulse. If they create a category, as Rob said,
popular religions will have to sign up. If they sign up, they
have to conform to whatever the regulations may be, or they
have to choose not to do that, in which case they are making
another very difficult choice. I doubt very seriously that they
have studied the history of the Puritans' move to New England
and decided that this is a good thing.
Mr. Foarde. Patricia Thornton's presentation dealt with
some issues that our next questioner is quite interested in,
and that is the Internet and technology. William Farris is our
expert on freedom of expression, and particularly on the
Internet, and also handles the media relations for us. William.
Mr. Farris. Thank you. Yes. In fact, my question was going
to be directed to Ms. Thornton. It is actually a couple of
questions, or maybe one question that just requires some
clarification. In your statement just now, and in your written
statement as well, you used words to describe the Falun Gong
movement, like ``covert,'' and ``underground,'' and you
mentioned ``cyberterrorism.'' My understanding is that Falun
Gong is completely open in areas where it is not forbidden,
i.e., mainland China. I did not have an understanding that
Falun Gong is covert or underground in the United States or
Hong Kong or Taiwan. So, I just wanted to clarify, when you say
it is covert and underground, I assume you mean by virtue of
the fact that it is oppressed and illegal to practice Falun
Gong in mainland China, and therefore they are unable to freely
practice this spiritual movement. Is that correct?
Ms. Thornton. Yes. That is exactly what I mean. When I
refer to the underground part of the movement, I am referring
only to those Falun Gong cells that might still be in existence
in mainland China.
Mr. Farris. All right. And in terms of the aspect of
cyberterrorism, the incidents that might fit into the types of
activities that you describe in your written statement, what
little I have seen of that has been in the Chinese Government's
state-controlled media. I am wondering, other than these
accusations which the Chinese Government obviously has an
ulterior motive for putting forward in attempting to suppress
Falun Gong, are you aware of any other accusations regarding
these types of behaviors from sources not controlled by the
Chinese Government?
Ms. Thornton. No, I am not. The only references that I have
seen to the disruption of any kind of transportation or public
services comes from the state-controlled Chinese media itself.
I have not seen or heard of any other acts that might be
considered cyberterrorism from sources that are not associated
with the Chinese Government, so I cannot confirm that.
Mr. Farris. Maybe just one more. I am wondering if it is
possible for you to distinguish between a cybersect and a
religion or spiritual organization that merely makes use of the
Internet. When you describe Falun Gong or other groups as
``cybersects,'' what makes them different from, say, the
Catholic church, which has its own Web site, and other
religions that may run forums or bulletin board systems on the
Internet and make extensive use of e-mail newsletter
distributions, and things like that?
Ms. Thornton. When I began looking at these groups as an
example of a distinct phenomenon, my interest was piqued by the
fact that they were all banned, overtly banned, in 1999 as
xiejiao, the heretical sects. So, therefore, the known
practitioners were of course rounded up and sent off to thought
reform or labor reform, or detained, or in other ways harassed.
Those who continued to practice, by all reports, did so
secretly. Their only chance of linking to the larger community
of believers would be through the use of such communications
resources as were afforded to them by Internet access. Over a
period of time, what was of most interest to me was the way in
which, at a certain level, the medium became the message. These
groups, barring any other types of open opportunities for
social communication or social organization, were forced to
organize themselves in virtual reality.
So, actually, the topic of my research, and one of my
continuing interests, is how forcing a group to rely on the Web
might change that group's organization. There is some
suggestion that, by forcing these groups to make the move into
virtual reality, the groups themselves have splintered and
fragmented somewhat. So, it has had some kind of an impact. I
am trying to trace out what the ramifications of that have been
among not only Falun Gong practitioners, but other groups as
well.
Mr. Foarde. Our staff expert who has this year been
concentrating on Catholicism and Protestantism in China, is
Mark Milosch. Mark.
Mr. Milosch. Thank you, John. I have a question for anybody
who might care to answer it, but perhaps in the first place for
Patricia. I am interested in two religions that we have not
mentioned, Orthodoxy and Judaism. Both are unofficial, both
have very few believers. I believe Orthodoxy claims, at the
most, 15,000 believers; Judaism, probably only a few hundred
believers. But they are both relatively non-threatening to the
government and find diplomatic support abroad. I would be
curious to hear from you whether you think that there are any
developments in which these religions are setting a precedent
that would be helpful to other, larger unofficial religions.
Orthodoxy, at least, seems to be moving toward a kind of quasi-
official status.
Mr. Weller. We are clueless. [Laughter.] There are 1.3
billion people, and Orthodox and Jews are not very many of
them. It may be they are granted national status of this sort.
I think the point you made in passing there about international
support is absolutely crucial, though. The reason Islam, for
instance, survived as well as it survived is because there was
a diplomatic side to what China was doing with Islam, and there
is a diplomatic side certainly with Judaism right now and
changing relations with Israel, and I would assume with
Orthodoxy, there being such a large Orthodox world outside of
China. So, I think those are very special cases. Beyond that, I
think I know nothing.
Mr. Milosch. Maybe I will get a second chance later.
Mr. Foarde. You have got time. Go ahead, if you have
another question.
Mr. Milosch. My next question was how far do you think
policy toward Falun Gong drives policy toward other religions?
I am wondering if we might have a situation something like
this: Falun Gong, as the dominant concern, drives policy toward
underground Protestant and Catholic churches because the
Chinese Government is afraid, when dealing with the underground
Protestants, to set precedents that would then haunt the state
in its dealings with Falun Gong. Have you seen any examples of
this or anything that would lead you to think this?
Mr. Ownby. I think it is probably hard to overestimate the
extent to which that is driving the policy. We were talking
about popular religion as a category before the entire
discourse on that. Discussion had begun in the early 1990s, if
not the late 1980s. There were books published. I have a huge
book on the history of popular religion in China in which the
introduction, for instance, was a fairly subtle defense of that
as a category.
When Falun Gong broke out my colleagues in China could no
longer say such things. The Chinese state very clearly called
on other scholars in the community who had very different
views.
What Rob said a little while ago, that in China the term
used is equal to secret societies and other dangerous
activities, that wing of the scholarly debate in China took
over. So, it is very clear that Falun Gong has been the counter
example which has inspired large amounts of thinking within the
scholarly community and within the government about how you
want to define religion, how you want to make religion work on
the ground. This goes into a whole variety of different ways.
For instance, strangely enough, I guess, as I read through the
mountains of material generated by the campaign against Falun
Gong having to do with the definition of
religion, how religion should function, there was a large body
of commentary--again, this is scholarly commentary--having to
do with how wonderful ``real'' religions are, how they brought
social stability to China. There was one sentence I recall that
said, ``even those new religions in the West seem to be largely
positive phenomena,'' which was an amazing thing to say. In
China, the category of ``new religious movement'' does not
exist for the reasons that we just enumerated a little while
ago. And yet, here is a scholar from, I think it was the World
Religions Institute in Beijing, saying, ``Look at Scientology.
Those are good guys. We are stuck with Falun Gong.'' Basically,
that is what he was saying. I was stunned to run across that.
On the other hand, as you said, within the recognized
Christian community--I wrote in the written version of what I
presented here today--I recalled an instance when I was in
Beijing at an anti-Falun Gong conference where a gentleman from
the Nanjing Theological Seminary was there, an elderly Chinese
Christian, a man with great dignity, but he had little choice
but to jump with both feet very hard on Falun Gong, the fear
being that if you are not very careful, all these intellectual
constructions about, what is religion, what is feudal
superstition, what is popular religion, it is all much of a
sameness at a certain point. You can all get grouped into that
category. Once you are grouped in that category, the bulldozers
come and knock down your church.
So, yes, Falun Gong has been immensely destructive to what
was under way prior to that, which was a more subtle
negotiation of what religion might mean, how you might work
with it within China. They have not been able to say anything
intelligent from a scholarly point of view. I could have an
interesting discussion with my colleagues in China about
religion, popular religion. We can have them now, but we cannot
have them on paper. We cannot have them in public.
Mr. Weller. I just wanted to add one word. There is no
doubt that there was a huge impact immediately after 1999 on
Christians, on Catholics, on these kinds of popular festivals
that I have talked about, just across the board on everything.
On the other hand, when David, in his earlier presentation,
talked about the kind of expansion and retraction process, that
is how I see this. The law on cults, which does not specify
Falun Gong but was clearly written in response to Falun Gong,
applies to everybody.
On the other hand, the discussion about religion is very
much back again to a pre-1999 stage. Those canceled popular
festivals are back. House Christians are active. Again, we say
it is underground, but a lot of it is not exactly hidden, it is
just not official. Informal is a good word, I think, for
something like that.
Mr. Foarde. Also a member of our religion team is Laura
Mitchell, who is our research associate. Laura, your turn.
Ms. Mitchell. Thank you. Some observers have said that in
China there are regional differences in the extent to which
local officials allow the practice and organization of
unofficial and/or popular religious practices. Professor
Weller, you mentioned Fujian, in particular. Could you discuss
these regional differences further and explain why the
differences exist?
Mr. Weller. Yes, I will try. I think, if the Congress gave
huge amounts of research money, one of the things I would like
to find out is the actual regional variation, because we do not
know. We just know there is a lot of regional variation, so
even just mapping it in the first place is a bit beyond what we
can manage.
Once we have it, there are a number of ways of trying to
explain it. One is that it might represent a pre-20th century
pattern. It could just be that the wealthier South always had a
lot more religious activity than the poorer North, for
instance. That is another gigantic research project, to try to
figure that one out. We do not even know enough to answer that.
I can start to speculate. For instance, Fujian has a huge
amount, through the whole province. Guangdong, right next door,
also has a significant amount. It is much harder to get a
temple constructed in Guangdong than it is in Fujian, even
though they are right next to each other, and even though they
are both really far from Beijing. I think the places where
religion has been most active relate to two things. One, is
overseas connections. Those clearly help you reestablish this
kind of popular religion because it is a way of attracting
overseas people and their money back to China. So, that has had
a huge effect, but that does not distinguish Fujian and
Guangdong from each other. They both have that advantage. In
Gansu or Shaanxi or something, that is a different story.
So what is the difference between Fujian or Wenzhou--which
also has very active popular religion--and Guangdong? I think
it has to do with their relation to the central state. Some
places have been relatively cut off. Geographically, Fujian is
surrounded by big mountains. Wenzhou, a city in the next
province to the north, is also in a kind of basin,
traditionally rather isolated from the rest of China. Both
areas directly face Taiwan. That is what has been for a long
time a strategically important area, and therefore one in which
China is not going to invest a lot of money in industry.
Now, in retrospect, that was a good thing for people
because they do not have all of this highly centralized,
Cultural Revolution remnant economy to deal with. But it also
meant they were kind of freer and reacted faster to the
opportunities of the reforms, and I speculate that that has
been true for religion, as it has been for economy.
If you look at the rate of economic change in Fuzhou or
Xiamen compared to even places in Guangdong, it is a quite
different kind of reaction. Or Wenzhou, with the real extreme
of that family economy kind of pattern rather than a state
economy kind of pattern.
Mr. Foarde. Steve Marshall handles a number of things for
us, but we probably think of him first as our expert on Tibet
and on Tibetan Buddhism.
Steve, questions?
Mr. Marshall. This will not be a question about Tibetan
Buddhism. With respect to the so-called ``unofficial''
religions that we are talking about here today and the idea of
centralization, can any of you give us any thoughts about
comparing similar types of religious practices that are more
centralized in one particular area, less centralized in another
particular area, and where that difference in centralization
leads to a difference in the success of the practice? And
particularly if it leads to less persecution for the practice?
And following on from that, have you see any example of a
practice of religion that has, as a defensive strategy, moved
from being more centralized to being less centralized and
deflected a certain amount of trouble by doing that?
Mr. Weller. That is a very good question, and we are
clearly struggling with it. Does anybody want to struggle
first?
[No response].
Let me talk about Taiwan as an example, although I cannot
think of any decentralization strategy. I feel like there must
be, and I will probably think of it at 3:31, or something.
In Taiwan, several things happened that we can see before
and after democratization. Those really big Buddhist movements,
for instance, that have millions of members and branches all
over the world, including here in Washington, I am certain,
those existed before 1987, but in a rather small way. Instead,
what we had was the proper corporatist Buddhist Association of
the Republic of China, which controlled things like
ordinations, and therefore really controlled what was going on
and nobody could depart from it too much. After 1987, these
groups are suddenly freed up so there is a decrease of central
control, but such a major political change that you cannot
really talk about it as a strategy. But it really allowed those
groups to open up.
Taiwan also had officially recognized religions, more or
less the same ones as China, and that is not popular religion.
But you could have a temple and you could register a temple
with the government just as a local temple. Many did, but many
did not. So, what would happen in China if we had a minjian
zongjiao category? My guess is this: some would register,
others would not.
The government had a terrible time, at least in Taiwan,
tearing temples down. Even when they wanted to repress, they
could not get workers. I had complaints from national parks
that could not get the temples out, that workers would not tear
them down because they did not want to die by the hand of the
god. Once people believe in this stuff, it has a power of its
own. So, I think something like that would happen.
The diffuseness of it is important. The diffuseness of it
is the defense of it. It is also what makes it very flexible.
We used to think, with modernity, religion went away, right? So
here is this stuff absolutely thriving, not just in Taiwan, but
in Hong Kong and overseas Chinese communities, and everywhere.
One reason is the lack of a big institutional structure,
the lack of all those educated priests who know what is proper.
It makes it really flexible in adapting to new kinds of
situations. Should that get lost by centralizing it, I think it
is potentially a problem for the group. Daoists, for instance.
There are probably more Orthodox than Daoists, if we mean
ordained Daoists who can do the rituals, actually.
Did that give either of you time to think of something more
sensible to say? [Laughter.]
Mr. Ownby. Sensible will not characterize what I have to
say, I do not think.
If you think about this question of centralization and
decentralization in the context of qigong schools and Falun
Gong, it is a different sort of thing because some of the
qigong schools were extremely centralized on a very corporate
sort of scale. They were businesses, some of these. Falun Gong
was far less centralized, though. It is hard to know whether it
contributed to their success or not. A number of things
happened all at the same time, which makes it very hard to
analyze cause and effect. But Li Hongzhi, although he tried to
be, I think, a good corporate leader for a little while, either
found that it really was not his thing, or he had to leave the
country. These two things happened at the same time. But what
that wound up creating in the case of Falun Gong was a group
that was not particularly centralized. What is interesting
about it when you think about the effects of things like this
on the character of the movement, is that one of the
differences between Falun Gong and virtually every other qigong
school is the emphasis Li Hongzhi and his followers place on
his scriptures. There are books in other qigong schools that
demonstrate the exercises, they tell you why they work, but
they are not really scriptures. They do not have that
character. Whereas, in Li Hongzhi's case, or Falun Gong's case,
they do.
My suspicion for the origin of this--because it was not
always like that. This came about in late 1994, early 1995--at
the moment when Li Hongzhi left China and started his worldwide
mission, I suspect that in his head he said to himself, ``How
am I going to keep my relationship with my followers while I am
away? I am going to lose my followers to the practitioners that
are going to stay in the other parts of the organization that I
have built up. What I am going to do is say that we are going
to have a one-to-one relationship, me and my practitioners, via
my scriptures made available through the Web site.'' It makes
for a strange sort of thing. On the one hand, it is very much
focused on the master and what he says. On the other hand, it
is extremely diffuse. So, obviously it did not save him or his
organization, being more diffuse and less centralized than
other schools, but it played out somehow in the evolution of
the group.
Ms. Thornton. I would just add, in support of that point,
that in 1994 and 1995, prior to the ban on all heretical sects,
I think a lot of the qigong masters saw where this was going,
and Li Hongzhi in particular, I think, briefly considered
trying to have the government formally recognize his group in
some sort of way, but then for various reasons decided not to
do that. As we got closer to the period of the ban, Li Hongzhi
and his close leadership, now operating in the United States,
sent out notices basically instructing what had been a fairly
structured web of what they called practice points and other
schools that would teach his method that they needed to disband
and basically decentralize.
So, they did deliberately adopt that as a strategy, in part
because the strategy of the Chinese Government in banning Falun
Gong, at least in the early phases of the crackdown, was to pin
them as an illegal social organization. By dismantling the very
formal and more hierarchical structure, it did provide some
sort of legal protection, at least nominally, for the group.
But then the Chinese
Government caught up by creating new laws and a host of new
regulations by which they could demonstrate retroactively that
Falun Gong was, in fact, operating illegally. So there is some
sense in which decentralization was adopted as a strategy. But
again, I think, as David pointed out, there was also a way in
which the one-on-one relationship worked through the Web, and
through shared texts, and continued to tie those followers in
mainland China back to the leader.
Mr. Foarde. Thank you very much.
Let me now pick up the questioning and try to do a couple
of things for clarification. All of us who study these things
are aware of the lexicon of describing groups like this, but
since this is for the record, I wondered if each of you would
clarify your understanding of the meaning of two terms,
``syncretic'' and ``pietistic,'' so that the readers of the
record will be able to pick up those ideas.
Does anybody want to start?
Mr. Weller. ``Pietistic'' is used in the literature, and
that is the only reason I use it. David is trying to claim that
my using it is the only reason he used it. The scholar of
religion who really started us looking at these things, Daniel
Overmeyer, used the term in an initial description of these
groups. He was explicitly thinking of early Protestantism and
trying to make a comparison there, and there are some
interesting comparisons to be made. But I think the term is
useful in certain senses. So if we are looking at popular
worship, I even hesitate to use ``religion'' for that, because
belief has very little to do with what people are doing. They
are offering incense and they call this, in Chinese, usually
bai or jing, both of which mean to pay respects, and they are
used in secular senses just as much as in religious senses.
But then come these groups that, yes, still burn incense
and things, but what really matters is what you believe. It is
a new set of beliefs. So it is the sort of thing that you might
talk about converting to, but it does not make sense to say,
``I will convert to popular religion.'' It is a mismatch of
categories, somehow. So, I think that is all we mean by
pietistic. We, at least at this table, I guess, do not want to
read a lot more into it.
Syncretic was the other one. Again, the literature on
Chinese religions simply usually refers to groups that are
quite self-consciously claiming to combine various religious
traditions. We see these well before the 20th century. In fact,
we get the groups called the ``Three Religions in One,'' being
Buddhism, Daoism, and Islam at that point, and then it becomes
in the 20th century, usually, the ``Three Plus Two,'' or just,
``The Five Religions are One.'' So that term refers to a
specific historical phenomenon in China.
Mr. Foarde. Really useful. I will not make either of you
pick that up unless you want to. I just wanted to ask another
question to you, Rob, about the relationship between what has
been going on in Taiwan for some time and what may now be going
on in China. Is there any evidence that there has been some
retransplant of popular religion from practice in Taiwan back
into Fujian, Guangdong, other places where people in Taiwan
hail from originally?
Mr. Weller. Yes. The very first thing that happened when
people from Taiwan could go back to the mainland legally, and
actually to a small extent before it was legal, is they went
back to the mother temples of all the temples in Taiwan, the
ones they had branched off of. That is big business. So a place
like Meizhou, an island off Fujian, which is where the most
important deity in Taiwan came from, just lives off this at
this point. The temple is taking over the whole island.
Then people have really interesting stories of going back
and forth to the mother temple. They will bring texts, say,
from Taiwan back to the mainland, and then they are published
in the mainland, but now are claimed to be the ``authentic''
and original text. There is a huge amount of going back and
forth there.
And people debate unification or independence in Taiwan,
but in a sense, on the ground, there is a kind of unification,
but it is not a Taiwan-PRC unification, it is a pan-Southern
Min civilization unification, Southern Fujian and Taiwan, which
is the single linguistic and cultural area. That is where it is
having a really powerful effect.
Beyond that, I do not think there is much of a direct
effect. I will tell you where I would guess it would have an
effect, is these pietistic sects that I feel fairly sure are
being spread underground, partly with help of these Taiwanese
businessmen in places like Shanghai. But again, I speculate. I
would be shocked if it were not true, but I do not really know.
Ms. Thornton. I would like to add, in response to that
question, that some of the cybersects that I have been looking
at appear to have originated in Taiwan, or at least are openly
operating in Taiwan, and then from there expanding their
contacts in mainland China, although in an underground sort of
way.
One of the groups that I have been looking at goes by the
name of Quanyin, or is more commonly called in mainland China,
Guangyin Famen. That group was founded by a woman named Suma
Qinghai, who is a Vietnamese woman of Han Chinese descent who
married a German doctor, and then left him to go back to India
to study with certain gurus in the Santmat tradition. She then
went on to Taiwan, and studied there. I am not sure in exactly
what context, but she then had a revelation and, I believe it
was in 1992, created her own school for teaching the Santmat
tradition. Suma Qinghai is now in the United States, but
continues to operate from a base in Taipei and has expanded
throughout mainland China from Taiwan.
Mr. Foarde. Useful. Thank you. Susan, another round of
questions? Please.
Ms. Weld. Thank you very much. I am interested in the way
in which social services and social organizations overlap with
religious organizations. In Taiwan, the best examples are
Buddhist organizations, which seem less focused on religion
than on social service.
Mr. Weller. I would call them religious.
Ms. Weld. From what I remember you just said, those
flourished after the lifting of the ban on religious
organizations. Can you help us understand how that worked? In
the new religious regulations in China there is a little window
for establishing religious social service groups in a rather
limited way. Will that enable China to replicate the success of
Taiwan in this area? Many official texts in China now talk
about how to get private groups to help with social service,
which is a real problem now in many parts of China.
Mr. Weller. Yes. That is a good question. I do think it is
a window of opportunity. So the largest of these groups, and I
think the earliest, the Ciji Gongdehui, the Compassion Merit
Association, is run by a nun, but is mostly a lay organization.
They have stopped releasing membership numbers, but the last
they did was something like 4 million people.
And remember, Taiwan's population is only 23 million, or
something like that. That is a huge number of people, with
branches in, I do not know, 100 countries, and at least a dozen
American cities, based on philanthropy. The idea is initially
medical, and then other kinds of philanthropy. They run, I
think, the largest Asian bone marrow transplant database, for
instance. That, in the world of filial piety, is a tough thing
to do. That is not an easy thing to get going. So, they really
do a lot of great work. So they started in 1966, well before
democratization, but they start in Hualian, a minor, poor city
on the poor side of Taiwan, the east coast, but they do this
welfare stuff.
The government realizes there is a lot of good PR in this,
so foreign groups, by the early 1980s, anyway, when I was in a
delegation that traipsed out there--in fact, that is how I
first started doing research on them --were showing them off to
people. They built hospitals. I mean, they did all kinds of
stuff. So, the government really liked this. That exact window
is, in fact, opening in China because China wants to privatize
these kinds of functions, and they would love NGOs to pick that
up. In fact, Ciji is incorporated as an NGO within Taiwan's
legal framework for such things, and in fact they are active in
China. The deal was they would not try to recruit or start any
branches, but they were certainly welcome to come and give aid.
I have even had Chinese say, oh, Zhengyan, who is the nun who
runs it, she is like Taiwan's Lei Feng, who you must know is a
do-gooder mainland Chinese culture hero. So, there is an
opportunity there.
A few Buddhist organizations in China are trying to pick up
on it, although none nearly as effectively as these Taiwan
groups. The Nanpotuoshan, a very important Buddhist temple in
Xiamen, for instance, is doing some work like this. Sociologist
David Wang has written or done some research on that. So, there
are a few. I think that is a real window of opportunity and
that may be an important growth area. It is certainly something
to watch for religion.
Mr. Foarde. Do any of the other panelists have questions?
All right, let me recognize Kate Kaup for the last set of
questions for this afternoon. Kate.
Ms. Kaup. We have talked some about regional variations in
enforcing policy. I found in my own work on ethnic affairs that
in some areas the Ethnic Affairs Commission is seen as an
advocate for the minority groups, while in other areas it is
seen more as a tool of the state for imposing policy. I would
expect similar variations in popular perceptions of the
Religious Affairs Bureau [RAB]. Who staffs the Religious
Affairs Bureaus? Have you found that the general population
tends to view the RAB as advocates for religious believers or
more as state representatives sent to impose government
controls?
Mr. Ownby. I can speak briefly and partially about that. My
information is dated, but when I was in Henan doing limited
research on unofficial Christian communities, we often went
through the local cadres of the Religious Affairs Department.
They shared one thing in common, all of those cadres: they
eagerly wanted to be doing something else. It was not that they
had been punished, but they had not had the ambition to get
elsewhere. This was just all over them. Some of them developed
a minor interest in religion. Most of them did not, though they
were in no way at that point, in Henan, defenders of religion,
although some of them did recognize that Christian communities
were easier to deal with than communities with no structure
whatsoever. This did not make them, however, fans of religion,
it just made them fans of that particular village.
Mr. Weller. That is a question about variation, too. I have
found a huge amount of variation. But I should preface this by
reminding you that I am an anthropologist and have a real
worm's eye view. High for me is a county, and for a Religious
Affairs Bureau, that is low. There is huge variation there.
In a largely Han place where religion is seen as a
secondary or tertiary kind of phenomenon, at the county level,
there has to be a Religious Affairs representative, but it is
usually somebody whose real job is something else and he just
has an extra sign on his door, and is not particularly
knowledgeable, is not particularly enthusiastic, but does his
job as a good cadre. If you go out in the Hui areas or
something like that, you do get sometimes the Ethnic Affairs
and the Religious Affairs that are combined in a single person,
sometimes they are separate, but they work closely with each
other. There, it is an important job. My sample was random and
accidental, but I have been fairly impressed at how
knowledgeable those people were.
In fact, in areas where religion is not minority religion
and not so much of an issue, the people that actually know
anything about religion are not the Religious Affairs people,
they tend to be the Cultural Affairs, kind of folklore
collection, those kinds of people. With the work that is being
done now, there is a lot of kind of folkloric work happening on
popular religion. It is those sorts of people and never the
Religious Affairs people.
Mr. Foarde. Does anyone else have a comment?
[No response].
I see that the shadows are getting long. As we have
experienced in this room many times in the past, I think the
mean temperature has gone down about 12 degrees since we
started. So I admire our three panelists and all of you who
have stayed here and started to freeze. So, all this suggests
that it is probably time to wrap up for this afternoon.
So, on behalf of Senator Chuck Hagel, our chairman, and
Congressman Jim Leach, our co-chairman, and the Members of the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China, thanks to our
three panelists, David Ownby, Rob Weller, and Patricia
Thornton, and to all who came to attend this afternoon. Please
watch the Web site and sign up for our Web-based Internet news
list to learn about the next roundtables and hearings that we
will be doing through the rest of the spring and summer.
Thanks very much. Good afternoon.
[Whereupon, at 3:29 p.m. the roundtable was concluded.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------
Prepared Statement of David Ownby
May 23, 2005
If it were possible to measure such things, I would wager that the
growth rate in popular participation in both official and unofficial
religions in China has been equal to if not greater than the growth
rate of the Chinese economy over the past twenty-five years. Both a
flourishing economy and a lively religious scene have resulted first
and foremost from an important redefinition of the state in the period
which followed the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. While the Chinese state
remains decidedly authoritarian, it has largely withdrawn from daily
micromanagement of many economic and social affairs, thus allowing a
greater latitude in almost any sphere except the strictly political
than at any time since 1949. This latitude, which has translated into
the virtual absence of Party control in many parts of village China,
has done much more to foster the expansion of religious activity--and
in particular unofficial religious activity--than any formal policy
statement, although the latitude can of course be reduced or revoked at
will by authorities.
The religiosity of contemporary China is often explained by
reference to the failure of the Maoist revolutionary impulse: according
to this view, religion has filled the ``spiritual vacuum'' created by
the failure of communist ideology. This explanation is dangerously
misleading. Not only does it perpetuate the positivist error of
imagining that a ``normal'' society will have no need for religion, it
also seriously underestimates the profoundly religious character of
traditional Chinese society (not to mention the religious overtones of
the cult of Mao Zedong and other aspects of the Chinese revolutionary
experience). In other words, while the level of religious activity
observed in China since 1980 may be new to the People's Republic of
China, it is by now means new in the broader context of Chinese
history. The Chinese are not ``newly religious.'' Rather the Chinese
have been permitted once again to practice religions which have been
suppressed since 1949, and even to create new religions, such as the
Falun Gong, although this latter story is somewhat more complicated.
One of the reasons that it is hard to come to terms with religion
in China is that the Chinese themselves have a hard time understanding
and explaining their own religious heritage and contemporary landscape.
There was no Chinese word for ``religion'' until the late nineteenth
century when it was imported from the West (via Japanese translations)
together with a host of other modernist concepts through which the
Chinese attempted to understand their past, present, and future. As
part of an effort to build a modern state, Chinese reformers sought to
define what a ``modern'' religion might be, and chose to limit the
designation ``religion'' to world-historical faiths having well-
developed institutions, clergy, and textual traditions. Every Chinese
constitution since that of 1912 has adopted this definition, and has
even listed the five creeds worthy of the label ``religion'' in China:
Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism. With one
stroke of the pen, the modern Chinese state thus relegated ancestor
worship, local cults, pietistic sects--in short, the religious
activities of the vast majority of the Chinese people--to the status of
``feudal superstitions'' to be at best tolerated and at worst violently
suppressed. It would never have occurred to a victim of this
discrimination to demand that his ``freedom of religion'' be respected,
because ``religion'' had been defined in such as way as to exclude his
spiritual practice. Even now, if you approach worshipers at a popular
shrine in China and ask them if they are happy to be able to practice
their ``religion,'' they will stare at you blankly, because the word
itself continues to have no meaning other than that imposed by the
state.
The history of Falun Gong, and of the larger qigong movement from
which Falun Gong emerged, illustrates that the importance of this point
is more than simply academic. The qigong boom was a mass movement
involving tens if not hundreds of millions of Chinese from the early
1980s through the early 2000s. Led by charismatic masters, the movement
promised miracle cures and supernormal powers, to be obtained through
physical exercises, meditation, visualisation, trance, and/or speaking
in tongues. Parallel phenomena in the West would be called new
religious movements or new age movements. The Falun Gong emerged in
1992, toward the end of the boom, and was in fact one of the least
flamboyant of the schools of qigong. The qigong boom and the Falun Gong
were not only tolerated but actively supported by the Chinese state and
the Chinese Communist Party, many members of which were enthusiastic
practitioners of qigong and Falun Gong. Why, it is worth asking, would
Chinese authorities endorse a mass movement with spiritual and
supernatural overtones?
The answer is that the Chinese authorities were blinded by their
own definition of ``religion.'' Qigong was first created in the 1950s
by part of the Chinese medical establishment concerned with the
Westernization of medical practice in China. Chinese medicine has a
long and rich tradition, and is closely linked to religious and
spiritual disciplines in the way that ``holistic'' medicine is in the
modern West. Champions of traditional Chinese medicine in the 1950s
borrowed healing techniques from what we might call ``medicine men,''
modernized and ``sterilized'' these techniques by removing the
superstitions which surrounded them, and created a new therapeutic
tradition which became part of the traditional Chinese medical
curriculum. These efforts were encouraged by Chinese authorities;
indeed, /qigong/ in the 1950s and 1960s was chiefly practiced in
sanatoria where China's leaders took refuge to have their aches and
pains treated by trained personnel well-versed in these neo-traditional
techniques.
After the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), however, qigong left the
sanitarium and reemerged in public parks in Beijing and other Chinese
cities, where charismatic masters taught traditional, ``magical''
healing techniques to anyone desiring such treatment. Such activities
were frowned upon by authorities until scientists working in respected
universities and research centers purportedly discovered, in the late
1970s, that qi possessed a material existence which could be measured
by scientific instruments. If qi had scientific status, then qigong did
as well; it could not be considered superstitious (science having
``proved'' its existence) and no one thought to characterize qigong as
``religious'', since religion by definition meant churches, priests,
and scriptures. As a result, the Chinese state gave its blessing to
qigong, believing that it was witnessing the birth of a uniquely
Chinese science, and the massive qigong boom followed as a matter of
course.
Few of the millions of those participating in the /qigong/ boom
were aware of the ``religious'' dimensions of what they were doing,
although many /qigong/ masters explained the workings of /qigong/ by
reference to traditional spiritual and religious discourses, and a very
common element of /qigong/ practice was an emphasis on traditional
moral behavior as a necessary complement to the more esoteric
techniques. Many people were drawn to /qigong/ by its promise to heal
their illness or assuage their pain. Others were drawn by a fascination
with supernormal powers. I would also argue that many practitioners
drew comfort from being able to reconnect with traditional popular
cultural and spiritual practices which had been banned for many years.
The /qigong/ movement as a whole demonstrates the readiness of an
important part of the Chinese population to embrace ideas and practices
which we would label as spiritual or religious, particularly when such
ideas and practices are related to concerns of the human body. I would
emphasize as well that /qigong/ practitioners included many members of
the educated urban elite; this was not primarily a movement of the
rural illiterate. I would also note that /qigong/--and Falun Gong--
readily found an audience on Taiwan, which should illustrate that we
should not see them solely as a reaction to Communism, the failure of
Mao's revolution, or the particular challenges of life in today's fast-
paced and increasingly unequal Chinese economy.
Falun Gong emerged at a moment when the /qigong/ boom had begun to
attract criticism for its overemphasis on supernatural powers and other
``parlor tricks.'' This is one reason that Falun Gong founder Li
Hongzhi emphasized that he was teaching /qigong/ at a higher level than
that of miracle cures and magic tricks. Another difference between
Falun Gong and other schools of /qigong/ evolved as a result of Li's
decision to leave China in early 1995: instead of emphasizing master-
disciple contact through lectures delivered by the master (Li gave many
such lectures in China between 1992 and 1994) or stressing the
relationship of a practitioner to the Falun Gong organization, Li came
to underscore the importance of his writings. Even if the master was
not there, practitioners were to establish a personal relationship with
him via the study of his scriptures, and to achieve corporal and moral
transformation through the lessons learned therein and through the
personal interventions of the master (which occurred on a spiritual
plane unobservable by the individual practitioner). In hindsight Falun
Gong may appear more ``religious'' than some other schools of /qigong/,
but in my view this explains neither the popularity of Falun Gong (it
was not the largest of /qigong/ schools) nor its eventual conflict with
the Chinese state. Practitioners were drawn to Falun Gong for the same
reason that they had been drawn to other /qigong/ schools; in fact many
Falun Gong practitioners had tried other forms of /qigong/ before
discovering Falun Gong. As for the conflict with the Chinese state,
this was the result of the erosion of support for /qigong/ among
Chinese authorities and the spectacular miscalculation of Li Hongzhi in
authorizing the demonstration at Zhongnanhai on 25 April 1999. The
consequences of this misjudgment have been disastrous not only for
Falun Gong but for all forms of official and particularly unofficial
religions in China.
It is difficult to generalize about these unofficial religions. /
Qigong/ and Falun Gong were the only forms of unofficial religion to
establish nationwide organizations and to enjoy the support of Chinese
authorities. All other forms of unofficial religion achieve at best a
localized presence (although some larger networks may exist) and a
marginalized, liminal status. In rural areas, particularly, the
diminution of state presence in the face of persistent poverty and
under development (more pronounced in some regions than in others) has
encouraged the revival of local cults, pietistic sects, and secret
societies. The revival of local cults and ancestral temples in South
and Southeast China has been investigated and documented to some degree
by Western (and some Chinese) scholars. We know much less about
conditions in other parts of China, as information is largely
anecdotal. These organizations appear to have resumed the roles they
played in traditional China, providing a framework for social
cooperation, offering miracle cures in the absence of adequate medical
care, spiritual solace in the absence of hope for a better tomorrow.
We know somewhat more about the unofficial Christian movement than
about local cults, pietistic sects, and secret societies, because
Western missionaries attempt--with some success--to follow the fortunes
of this movement. Often referred to as the ``home church movement'',
because services are held in believers' homes rather than in a church,
unofficial Christianity has become important particularly in certain
regions (Fujian, Zhejiang, Henan), and exists in an uneasy relationship
both with the state-approved Christian churches and with the state. I
did a limited amount of fieldwork among such groups in rural Henan in
the mid-1990s. My impressions were that many such groups traced their
origins to pre-1949 communities; often the revival of the Christian
community was the work of a charismatic elderly man or woman whose
faith had survived the intervening years. In addition, the movement is
nourished by external and internal missionaries. Overseas Chinese from
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and North America take advantage of the greater
openness of today's China to smuggle in bibles and to spread the
gospel. Itinerant native evangelists travel from congregation to
congregation within China, creating ``revival-like'' conditions in some
areas.
During the worship services that I attended, I noted the same
emphasis on the healing power of faith which also motivated many /
qigong/ practitioners. Christianity, like other Chinese religions, must
demonstrate its practical power and efficacy if it is to win followers,
and many worship services in rural Henan included ``witness
statements'' from members of the congregation whose aches and pains had
been assuaged through the power of prayer or through other divine
interventions. The church also clearly provided a sense of community,
particularly in villages not otherwise bound together through family or
other ties. Much of rural China is dangerously poor, under-organized
and under-serviced. Christians were clearly grateful to their local
church for the limited protection it afforded them in an otherwise
bleak world.
The mid-1990s, when I did my fieldwork in Christian villages in
Henan, coincided with a period of general latitude in state attitudes
toward religion; indeed, I would not have been able to do such
fieldwork during a less open period. Although most local cadres with
whom I spoke were scornful of religion, some openly admitted that
Christian villages were much easier to ``manage'' than non-Christian
villages: such villages possessed a clear leadership structure which
was respected by most villagers, and this village leadership was
predisposed to cooperate with state authorities, if only because their
marginal status meant that they had little choice. As a result, many
Christian villages were more cooperative in the implementation of state
policies on birth control, for example, than were non-Christian
villages. I recall being impressed by this odd marriage of convenience,
and believing at the time that I was perhaps witnessing the birth of a
new ``civil society'' in rural China.
The anti-Falun Gong campaign has surely aborted such possibilities,
at least for the foreseeable future. The latitude which had marked
state practice on matters of religion disappeared immediately with the
onset of the campaign, and the state reiterated with a vengeance its
discourse on the proper definition and role of religion in modern
China--the same discourse defended by the Chinese state since the
beginning of the twentieth century. On paper, this discourse ironically
defends ``real religions'' as conservative bastions of social
stability, but in practice, all religions have been on the defensive
since the summer of 1999, when the campaign against the Falun Gong
began. In the fall of 2000, I attended, as a ``foreign expert'' on
Chinese secret societies and popular religion, an international anti-
Falun Gong conference hosted by the Chinese state in Beijing. Among the
many sad aspects of this occasion, perhaps the saddest for me was the
intervention by a leading member of the Nanjing Theological Seminary,
an elderly, well-educated, dignified, decent Chinese Christian who had
devoted his life to defending his faith and his flock, but who felt
compelled not only to denounce Falun Gong, but also to denounce the
Christian home-church movement. His motivation was to attempt to draw a
clear line between the state's definition of religion--to which his
seminary obviously belonged--for fear of being tarred with the same
brush that had blackened the image of Falun Gong, then other schools of
/qigong/, and finally anything that smacked of ``feudal superstition.''
Long term trends concerning the fate of unofficial religion in
China are contradictory. On the one hand, the Chinese state seems
unlikely to modify its stance on religion in favor of a greater
openness to popular or unofficial religion, and can easily identify
other modern states with similar postures--France comes to mind, for
example--as an additional justification for this rigidity. On the other
hand, the Chinese state has neither the resources nor the political
will to turn back the clock and to reimpose Maoist-like controls on
daily activities and popular consciousness. From this perspective we
can expect cycles of greater and lesser latitude, perhaps a slow,
secular movement toward openness, but perhaps not--much will depend on
particular unofficial religious movements, on particular Chinese
leaders, and on China's relationship with the outside world. Indeed,
among of the most important changes on this front since the end of the
Maoist era are China's engagement with the world economy, China's
emergence as a geopolitical power in East Asia, and the growth of a
vocal, educated, and materially well-off Chinese Diaspora in North
America, Australia and Europe. All of these factors influence China's
policy toward religion--both official and unofficial.
The impact of the new Chinese Diaspora is clearly illustrated by
the response of Falun Gong practitioners outside of China to the
Chinese campaign of suppression. To the chagrin of the Chinese state,
these practitioners--particularly but not exclusively in North
America--have proven extremely adept at using the cybertools provided
by advances in communication technology to challenge the campaign of
suppression within China and to supplant the negative image of Falun
Gong as depicted by the media in China. These initiatives include web
sites, web-based newspapers, and hacking into cable and even satellite
television transmission within China. On the Chinese-language version
of Clear Understanding/Minghui, the main Falun Gong web site for
veteran practitioners, one finds an abundance of technical information
on the use of proxies and on other ways to circumvent the attempts by
the Chinese state to control the Internet within China, as well as
videoclips that can be downloaded onto VCDs for ``guerrilla
distribution'' within China. Falun Gong practitioners outside of China
have also been adept at adopting the Western discourse on freedom of
thought and freedom of religious belief (although neither is a basic
Falun Gong ``value'' per se) and using these discourses to influence
public opinion and political decisions in the West. Although such
efforts may not suffice to resurrect Falun Gong in China, they remain
nonetheless immensely impressive (when compared, for instance, with the
efforts of expatriot Chinese democracy activists), and illustrate that
the Chinese community outside of China will almost certainly play an
important role in the evolution of such issues in China proper. This is
doubly important because a significant number of Chinese immigrants to
the West have joined Christian churches, which has undoubtedly
sensitized them to the fate of their Christian brethren in China.
______
Prepared Statement of Patricia M. Thornton
May 23, 2005
The dramatic resurgence of popular interest in religious traditions
and spiritual practices during the post-Mao reform era has been a
continuing source of concern for both central and local authorities in
the PRC. The opening of Chinese markets to foreign goods and Chinese
borders to international exchanges, the dismantling of Mao-era
institutions and general relaxation of central political controls, all
helped to set the stage for widespread religious revival. Syncretic
sects of various types have emerged in large numbers in recent years,
many with ties to traditional religious groups that were largely
suppressed during the early years of Communist Party rule. At the same
time, the development and availability of high technology resources--
including fax machines, cell phones, text messaging systems as well as
the internet--has created new resources that facilitate both
communication and social mobilization, culminating in a new type of
threat to the current regime. Pre-revolutionary spiritual traditions,
resurrected, remixed and retransmitted to a larger audience via new
information technologies, have resulted in unique hybrid form of social
mobilization that I refer to as cyber-sectarianism.\1\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ ``The New Cybersects: Resistance and Repression in the Reform
Era,'' in Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden, eds., Chinese Society:
Change, Conflict and Resistance (second edition) (London and New York:
Routledge, 2004), pp. 247-270.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the eyes of many Chinese authorities, the confluence of these
three trends during the post-Mao reform era--the simultaneous
relaxation of political controls on a number of fronts, the resurgence
of popular interest in spiritual and religious practices, and the
development of new information technologies--has created a virtual
``perfect storm'' for internet-based dissent against the current
regime: highly sophisticated transnational networks of committed
political and religious dissidents that continue to expand and
diversify as they challenge the leadership of the Party and the state
on several fronts. The most successful of the new Chinese cybersects
combine web-based strategies of text distribution, recruitment and
information-sharing strategies with multi-faceted international media
campaigns and periodic but high-profile episodes of protest both in-
and outside the PRC. Funded at least in part by overseas Chinese
communities based in other Asian and Western nations in which they
operate more openly, some of these sects are pooling their resources,
both with other like-minded religious or spiritual groups as well as
with other dissident organizations based abroad. Like the internet
itself, upon which they have relied upon so heavily in their recent
development and expansion, the new cybersects have morphed into far-
flung transnational networks in which political and religious
dissidents seek and secure the support of international authorities and
non-governmental organizations to frame issues and pursue various
political agendas. Elements of their organizational structure and modes
of operation are also in evidence in other marginalized or illegal
organizations across the globe, including underground criminal gangs,
terrorist networks and religious fundamentalist sects of all stripes.
Yet what is unique about these new Chinese cybersects is their reliance
upon the internet and related high-tech communication strategies to
blend spiritual or religious concerns with anti-regime messages and
activities.
The ability of these new cybersects to pursue their goals rests in
large part upon the existence of highly dispersed small groups of
practitioners that remain anonymous within the larger social context
and operate in relative secrecy, while still linked remotely to a
larger network believers who share a set of beliefs, practices and/or
texts, and often a common devotion to a particular leader. Overseas
supporters provide funding and support; domestic practitioners
distribute tracts, participate in acts of resistance, and share
information on the internal situation with outsiders. Collectively,
members and practitioners construct viable virtual communities of
faith, exchanging personal testimonies and engaging in collective study
via email, on-line chat rooms and web-based message boards.
Perhaps the best-known Chinese cybersect is the group commonly
referred to as the Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, which at its
height claimed an estimated 70 million adherents in mainland China. Li
Hongzhi, the enigmatic founder of the movement, created his unique
system of qigong--a traditional form of meditation involving particular
postures and bodily movement--by incorporating lessons from both Daoist
and Buddhist teachers. By his own account, Li retired from his position
at the Changchun Cereals and Oil Company in 1991 and began teaching his
method to the broader public the following year, at the peak of what
was widely acknowledged to be a qigong craze in mainland China. The
main principles of the movement include the cultivation of the virtues
of zhen, shan, ren--sincerity, compassion and tolerance--combined with
daily qigong practice sessions in order to eliminate bad karma from the
body.
Despite the fact that Li moved the United States in 1996, the
movement was virtually unknown outside of mainland China until April
25, 1999, when ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners staged a mass sit-
in in front of the walled leadership compound in Beijing. The massive
but peaceful demonstration appeared to take the police by surprise, who
appeared to be at a loss as to how to handle such a large group. The
protest lasted for more than 14 hours before the practitioners
voluntarily vacated the site. Weeks later, when Li was asked how the
group managed to pull off such a large-scale event, he confirmed that
the group had relied on the internet to organize the protest.\2\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Transcript of Li Hongzhi's meeting members of the press in
Sydney, Australia on May 2, 1999, at http://www.falundafa.org/fldfbb/
news990502.htm.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not surprisingly, central leaders officially banned Falun Gong less
than two months later, launching a major campaign to wipe out all
``heretical sects'' (xiejiao). Two of the less well-known sects also
targeted during the crackdown, which continues in full force to this
day, are the qigong sect Zhonghua Yansheng Yizhi Gong [hereafter Zhong
Gong], and the Surat Shabd Yoga- or Sant Mat-inspired Quan Yin Method,
better known in China as Guanyin Famen. Prior to the 1999 ban, all
three of these groups had established formal corporate offices in
mainland China, either under the guise of privately owned companies or
research societies. Some of these corporations produced and sold goods
associated with the spiritual practices of the group in question;
Chinese government officials have accused these enterprises of turning
excessive profits at the expense of believers. During the crackdown
that officially began in July 1999, the offices, schools and other
facilities of all three groups were forced to close down, their assets
confiscated and their key personnel detained or arrested.
Two of the groups in question quickly turned to high-tech methods
to protest the ban. Zhang Hongbao, the Zhong Gong founder, responded
with the so-called ``Action 99-8'' campaign, encouraging his supporters
to fax, post and distribute two letters of protest against the ban
apparently penned by Zhong Gong members who were also public security
personnel. In a move reminiscent of the mobilization strategies used by
pro-democracy supporters during the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, in
August 1999 the two documents were distributed to a hundred thousand
local police substations, two thousand county police offices, three
hundred municipal public security bureaus, 31 provincial public
security departments and ten thousand departments in the judiciary as
well.\3\ Shortly thereafter, Zhang Hongbao and an associate fled to
Thailand and then to Guam, where both applied for political asylum in
the United States. Likewise, Falun Gong practitioners continued to
stage public protests, increasingly around state-planned celebrations
of major holidays and/or other high-profile political events.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ Guan Kaicheng, ``Zhong Gong `99.8' quanguo xingdong neimu
baoguang'' [Exposing Zhong Gong's behind-the-scenes national `99.8'
action] (February 2, 2000), http://www.zgzg.net; see also Wei Zhen,
``Zhong Gong 199.8' quanguo xingdong zhuandi de xin zhi yi,'' [The
first letter transmitted by followers to the whole country during
Action 1999.8'] and Li Kejiang, ``Zhong Gong 1999.8' quanguo xingdong
zhuandi de xin zhi er'' [The second letter transmitted by followers to
the whole country during Action `99.8'], and other relevant documents
at http://www.zgzg.nets.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
As the repression of so-called ``heretical sects'' intensified on
the Chinese mainland, all three groups shifted the brunt of their
organizational work in the PRC to virtual reality. The Foreign Liaison
Group of the Falun Dafa Research Society had established a protocol for
monitoring Falun Gong's presence on the web as early as 1995, and
relied increasingly on the internet in the aftermath of the ban;\4\ the
main /Zhong Gong/ group site was established some five years later, in
April 2000, and carried information on the situation of its followers
during the crackdown. The group known as /Quan Yin/ also established a
ring of websites that publish and archive newsletters on-line, all of
which carry regular updates of their activities both in- and outside of
mainland China.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ The Foreign Liaison Group of the Falun Dafa Research Society,
``Falun Dafa's Transmission of Internet Notice'' (June 15, 1997),
http://www.falundafa.org/fldfbb/gonggao970615.htm.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over the past several years, all three groups have developed
elaborate virtual locations where they house downloadable texts of
lectures and speeches, often in multiple languages by their leaders,
photographic images of both leaders and practitioners, and information
about the situation of their practitioners in mainland China. Some
maintain electronic bulletin boards and email distribution lists that
provide interested parties with newsletters and updated news
information. These continue to serve as the central source of
information for practitioners across the globe, helping to organize
collective actions of various kinds, as well as to provide venues for
sharing religious experiences within the community of the faithful.
Despite the attempts of mainland authorities to block access to the
websites, practitioners continue to evade controls by using untraceable
web-based email accounts accessed in internet cafes, proxy servers and
new anonymizing software. Most of the websites in question provide
instructions on how to evade official surveillance by using proxy
servers to log on in order to view or download banned information.
Several of these sites link on-line to networks of members of other
suppressed religious or ethnic minorities, and political dissidents.
For example, when Zhong Gong leader Zhang Hongbao began a hunger strike
to press for his release from detention in Guam while awaiting transfer
to the United States, several overseas Chinese dissident
organizations--including the Free China Movement, the Chinese Democracy
Party and the Joint Conference of Chinese Overseas Democracy Movement--
rallied to his cause, organizing a press conference to draw attention
to his plight.\5\ After winning his bid for political asylum in the US,
Zhang returned the favor by joining forces with the banned Chinese
Democracy Freedom Party, and by establishing an organization designed
to push for the release of political dissidents from mainland Chinese
jails.\6\ The virtual links between Zhong Gong and other overseas
organizations, most notably Liu Siqing's Hong Kong-based Information
Centre for Democracy and Human Rights, were quite close in the past.\7\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\5\ U.S. Newswire, `` `Campaign to Free Master Zhang Hongbao' to
Hold Press Conference Dec. 20,'' (December 19, 2000).
\6\ The group established by Zhang Hongbao and Yan Qingxin, the
colleague who secretly fled the mainland with him, is ``The Chinese
Anti-Political Persecution Alliance'' [Zhongguo fanzhengzhi yapo
tongmenghui]; for information on Zhong Gong's involvement with the
Chinese Democracy Freedom Party, see http://www.zgzg.net.
\7\ The Information Centre was established by former Tiananmen
Square student activist Liu Siping after he fled mainland China in
1989.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the struggle between Chinese authorities and these syncretic
organizations moved at least in part to virtual reality, the banned
cybersects have adopted what some have called ``repertoires of
electronic contention'' \8\--including the use of websites and email to
mobilize participants for conventional demonstrations, as well as
``hactivism'' (tactics of disruptive electronic contention) and even
cyber-terrorism (which may involve physical harm done to groups and
individuals by the disruption of power grids, traffic control and other
systems of resource delivery and public safety). With the help of
supporters based abroad, underground Falun Gong cells in greater China
have managed hack into and hijack the satellite uplink feed to Central
China Television [CCTV] on numerous occasions and broadcast pro-Falun
Gong video messages television stations across the PRC. In recent
years, Chinese authorities have accused members of various undergrounds
sects of sabotaging or defacing public transportation systems, and even
of obstructing the government's attempts to control the spread of SARS.
Chinese public security officials have also responded in kind: for
example, within days of the July 1999 decision to ban the movement,
several Falun Gong website operators abroad complained that they were
being targeted by a ``denial of service'' attack that was shown to have
originated from the Beijing offices of the Public Security Ministry's
Internet Monitoring Bureau.\9\ Falun Gong followers and other
dissidents have also accused Chinese officials surveilling and
penetrating on-line sites where dissenters tend to congregate in order
to engage in various forms of cyberespionage and entrapment schemes.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\8\ Sasha Costanza-Chock in ``Mapping the Repertoire of Electronic
Contention,'' in Andrew Opel and Donnalyn Pompper, eds., Representing
Resistance: Media, Civil Disobedience and the Global Justice Movement
(Praeger, 2003).
\9\ Peter Svensson, ``China Sect Claims Sites Under Attack,''
Associated Press online report, July 31, 1999.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
This increased level of surveillance and repression has not only
not eliminated the new Chinese cybersects, but has in fact intensified
their reliance upon web-based high-tech strategies of contention, which
has arguably made them more capable of carrying out difficult,
ambiguous and complex tasks. Research on similar covert networks has
found that they are far more effective than the secret societies of
decades ago precisely because of the advent of computer-based
communications tools: whereas in the past, communication and
coordination within covert networks required the use of buffers to
maintain secrecy at the cost of lowering communicative effectiveness,
the information-processing capabilities of current technologies,
combined with the anonymity of virtual reality, has eliminated this
obstacle.
Yet the move to virtual reality has not been without cost to the
Chinese cybersects in question. The high-speed efficiency and
decentralized organizational capacity of web-based communications has
created some institutional casualties, even within the enormously
popular Falun Gong network: the decentralization of the web-based
movement has likely contributed to splintering and fragmentation of its
membership. Some underground Falun Gong cells in mainland China have
purportedly been overtaken by charismatic ``tutors'' or
``facilitators'' to whom practitioners can more readily relate, or now
follow scriptures neither written nor approved by Li.\10\ Some 30-odd
members of Falun Gong's Hong Kong chapter experienced a collective
revelation on Buddha's birthday that a 37-year old activist in their
midst was in fact the ``Lord of Buddhas.'' A former owner of a trading
company, Belinda Pang announced that all of Li Hongzhi's most recent
revelations must be false because he had already clearly left to
``quietly watch the practitioners and people in world'' perched atop a
cliff somewhere in the United States, presumably leaving her in
control.\11\ Since he was granted asylum in the United States, Zhong
Gong leader Zhang Hongbao has been engaged in an on-going string of
lawsuits against a variety of his former associates, claiming that they
have attempted to wrest control over the movement's membership and
assets. While such power struggles are by no means unheard of in more
traditional religious orders, such issues seem destined to revisit the
banned cybersects in the future, particularly as adherents across the
globe are encouraged to post and share their personal revelations,
visions and experiences on movement websites alongside those of their
leaders.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\10\ Craig S. Smith, ``A Movement in Hiding.''
\11\ Craig S. Smith, ``Split Develops on Leadership of Sect,'' The
New York Times, August 3, 2000, p. 10; Linda Yeung, ``A Buddha Called
Belinda,'' South China Morning Post (July 27, 2000), p. 13.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
In conclusion, the internet may indeed invite broad-based
participation by dissolving formidable boundaries, but it erects others
that are no less imposing. The unequal distribution of technological
expertise allows alternative hierarchies to emerge, creating a
condition some have referred to as crypto-anarchy.\12\ Within newly
emerging cybersects, technical and media wizards play a much greater
role in defining the movement, sometimes rivaling that of the spiritual
leadership. One astute observer noted that having been driven
underground and on-line, Falun Gong had undergone ``a dark evolution''
that involved the emergence of ``a hard core of radicalized followers''
who were no longer dependent upon Li's guidance for the movement to
grow.\13\ The high level of technological and public relations
expertise required to keep such a group in working order requires
considerable organizational skill that may well be in short supply
among charismatic mystics, and the marriage between technological
expertise and spiritual vision may not always be a harmonious one.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\12\ For examples, see several of the essays in Peter Ludlow, ed.,
Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates and Pirate Utopias (Cambridge,
Massachusetts The MIT Press, 2001).
\13\ Susan V. Lawrence, ``Faith and Fear,'' Far Eastern Economic
Review, April 20, 2000, p. 16.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
______
Prepared Statement of Robert P. Weller
May 23, 2005
The great majority of Chinese religious activity has never been
part of any broader organized church, and has never had much
institutional existence above the local community. This continues to be
true today, where people across China burn incense to gods and
ancestors but have no affiliation with any of China's religious
organizations. This kind of popular worship is by far the largest part
of China's current religious resurgence, and also the most neglected.
Officially, the government considers this the practice of ``feudal
superstition,'' and such worship does not even receive the nominal
guarantees of freedom to practice ``normal'' religion in the Chinese
Constitution.
In this statement I will very briefly consider the history of this
and other important forms of informal religion in China today. I will
compare it to the situation in Taiwan, especially in the 1970s, when an
authoritarian government made a similar attempt to create corporatist
control of all organized religion, and to discourage practice of
popular worship. Finally, I will consider the role of informal religion
in Taiwan's democratization and construction of a civil society, and
suggest possible implications for the People's Republic of China.
A BRIEF HISTORY
Most popular religious practice in China focused around worship of
ancestors and spirits of various sorts at community altars. The basic
organization of this worship is well known by now, especially from
numerous studies in Taiwan.\1\ Important features included community
ownership of temples, widely variant deities sometimes known only
locally, worship generally by individuals rather than congregations, a
strong emphasis on votive requests, widespread use of spirit mediums,
and involvement of Daoist or Buddhist priests usually only for major
events. There were no sacred texts comparable to the Bible or the
Buddhist and Daoist canons.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ For a general overview of the development of this field, see
Meir Shahar and Robert P. Weller, ``Introduction: Gods and Society in
China,'' in Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China, ed. Meir Shahar
and Robert P. Weller (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1996), 1-
36. For a very useful review of the literature on Taiwan, see Hsun
Chang, ``Guangfu Hou Taiwan Renleixue Hanren Zongjiao Yanjiu Zhi Huigu
[A Review of Anthropological Studies of Han Chinese Religion in Taiwan,
1945-1995],'' Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica
81 (Spring 1996): 163-215.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
At the same time, China developed other traditions that were widely
available. Buddhism and Daoism are the best known, and their priests
were hired for nearly all large-scale popular ceremonies. By the Ming
Dynasty (1368-1644), China had also developed a strong tradition of
what Overmyer calls ``pietistic sects,'' which did not require the
priestly virtuosity of the Buddhist or Daoist clergy, but did have a
much stronger voluntaristic and congregational structure and a stronger
textual emphasis than popular worship.\2\ The Chinese government from
imperial times to the present has been highly suspicious of these
groups, because a few fomented rebellions, most notably the White
Lotus. The vast majority, however, remained peaceful.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\2\ Daniel L. Overmyer , Folk Buddhist Religion: Dissenting Sects
in Late Traditional China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976);
David K. Jordan and Daniel L. Overmyer, The Flying Phoenix: Aspects of
Chinese Sectarianism in Taiwan (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986).
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The most important twentieth-century developments in China were
political. Most religion of all kinds has struggled there throughout
the century. The Republican government that took over from the final
imperial dynasty in 1911 was dedicated to modernity. Some of the
leaders were Christian, but the general attitude to religion was
unfavorable. They saw it as a remnant from premodern times,
embarrassing to their aspirations and draining valuable resources from
the people. They looked with particular disfavor on popular worship,
and instituted massive campaigns to convert temples to secular use.\3\
As is well known, attitudes in the People's Republic after 1949 were
even harsher, and included periods of powerful religious repression.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\3\ Prasenjit Duara, ``Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of
Modernity: The Campaigns Against Popular Religion in Early Twentieth-
Century China,'' Journal of Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (1991): 67-83.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE CURRENT SITUATION
There has been a significant relaxation of attitudes toward
religion in China since the 1980s, but even that is marked by periodic
crackdowns (as after the Falungong demonstrations), a general feeling
of distrust from many cadres, and a continuing lack of legal status for
popular worship. In spite of the problems, the last two decades have
seen a huge increase in religious activities of every type in China.\4\
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\4\ Popular worship in China remains badly understudied, but
important recent works include Jun Jing, The Temple of Memories:
History, Power, and Morality in a Chinese Village (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1996); Kenneth Dean, Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults
of Southeast China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Lizhu
Fan, ``Popular Religion in Contemporary China,'' Social Compass 50, no.
4 (2003): 449-57; Chau, Adam Yuet. Miraculous Response: Doing Popular
Religion in Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press,
i.p.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Christians have received the most attention; recent growth has been
rapid by all accounts, although estimates of numbers vary widely. Even
with the rapid growth, Christians remain a small minority of perhaps 5-
7 percent of the population. Organized Buddhism and Daoism were never
large, but their clergy provided crucial services to the rest of the
population. Both have been revived since the Cultural Revolution, and
are again training a new generation. Pietistic sects also appear to be
widespread, but they are thoroughly underground (especially since the
repression of Falungong) and we have no reliable research on their
current state. Popular worship is coming back more in rural than urban
areas, and not equally across the country. In some areas, like Fujian,
every village has rebuilt one or more temples. This is rarer in north
China. Still, we have reports of active local worship across the entire
country, and can guess that perhaps half the rural population is
involved--that would be something like 300-400 million people, and far
larger than any other religion.
Legally, China has created space for religions that are officially
recognized and institutionalized within a state-dominated corporatist
framework. Two kinds of religious activity clearly fall outside of even
that limited framework, however. First, some religions are condemned as
``evil cults'' (xiejiao), a piece of imperial language that was brought
back with the repression of Falungong. This includes essentially all of
the pietistic sects, Falungong, and any institutionalized religious
activity that falls outside of state control. The second is activity
that has very low levels of institutionalization, and thus does not
count as ``religion'' at all--this is primarily all popular worship of
gods. In many cases such activities are in practice permitted as local
officials choose to turn a blind eye. Nevertheless, they are legally
precarious, and subject to repression at any time.
Religion has long been one of the most important reservoirs of
social capital in Chinese villages. Outside of purely economic ties
like land tenancy or trade, religion and lineage were the two kinds of
ties that most linked together villagers. Most temples were controlled
directly by community members, often through a committee whose leaders
were chosen by lot. In many areas, temples had the ability to tax local
households to support their rituals, and they frequently provided
rallying points in times of need. In some ways, their difficult legal
position has actually reinforced this role over the last decade or two.
A recent dissertation on the delivery of public goods in China, for
example, concludes that villages with strong temple committees tend to
have better roads, newer schools, and other social goods.\5\ I will
return to this point below.
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\5\ Lily Lee Tsai , ``The Informal State: Governance and Public
Goods Provision in Rural China'' (Ph. D. diss., Harvard University,
2004). On the recent growth of Christianity, see David Aikman, Jesus in
Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global
Balance of Power (Lanham, MD: Regnery, 2003).
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LESSONS FROM TAIWAN
Frontier conditions in Taiwan through the nineteenth century may
have encouraged some uniquely local developments in the broad patterns
of Chinese religion, but probably no greater than what characterized
any part of China. The Japanese occupation of 1895-1945, however,
repressed many forms of popular religion, pushed Buddhism to affiliate
with Japanese sects, and began to promote Shinto toward the end of the
period. The motivations were a combination--in part yet another version
of the modernist attack on popular religion, and in part at attempt to
draw Taiwan into Japanese religious culture.
The Nationalists who came in 1945 undid much of what the Japanese
attempted.\6\ Shinto disappeared, and a new Buddhist power structure
that came over from the mainland ended any move in the direction of
Japanese Buddhism. They tolerated popular religion, never repressing it
in ways comparable to the mainland, but campaigning against it for
decades as wasteful, superstitious, and unsanitary. As the island grew
wealthier, however, people began to rebuild popular temples on ever
more lavish scales, and ritual events at a few temples, especially the
important temples to Mazu in the south, became important across the
entire island. With democratization in the late 1980s, campaigns
against popular religion ended, and politicians have often visited
local temples in attempts to appeal to the electorate. The religious
boom of the last three decades continues, and temples remain closely
entwined with daily life.
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\6\ On the history of Buddhism through this period, see Charles
Brewer Jones, Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660-1990
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999).
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At roughly the same time as popular religion began to boom in the
1970s, various forms of more organized religion also drew significant
attention. The most striking initial growth occurred among the
pietistic sects, including the Yiguan Dao and similar organizations.
These groups had long been illegal under the KMT government, although
their politics in Taiwan were in fact very conservative. Unlike temple
religion, these sects were built of voluntary members who got together
secretly for regular meetings, often featuring texts revealed by spirit
possession. By the 1980s, when they were finally legalized, they
claimed millions of members, including some of Taiwan's wealthiest
entrepreneurs.
Taiwan's new Buddhist groups--dedicated to the humanitarian aims of
building a ``Pure Land on Earth''--also began around this time, and
achieved huge followings by the 1980s and 1990s.\7\ Three of these
groups now have massive global followings, accounting for millions of
people. Much more than either temple worship or the pietistic sects,
these groups have an explicit social mission, building hospitals,
founding universities, bringing aid to the poor, and providing
emergency relief around the world. They have not yet established
independent branches in China, due to the political sensitivities, but
they are active in delivering aid there.
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\7\ Hwei-syin Lu, ``Taiwan Fuojiao `Ciji Gongdehui' de Daode Yiyi
[The Moral Significance of Taiwan Buddhist `Ciji Merit Association'],''
paper presented at the International Conference on Chinese Buddhist
Thought and Culture (Shanxi University, July 12-18, 1992); Lin,
``Zongjiao Yundong de Shehui Jichu--Yi Ciji Gongdehui Wei Lie [The
Social Base of a Religious Movement--the Example of the Compassion
Merit Society].''; Chien-yu Julia Huang, ``Recapturing Charisma:
Emotion and Rationalization in a Globalizing Buddhist Movement from
Taiwan'' (Ph. D. diss., Boston University, 2001).
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Taiwan's democratization in 1987 ended political campaigns against
temple worship, opened up space for a new Buddhist-based social
philanthropy, and legitimized pietistic groups. Just as importantly, it
let us see how local religion could help consolidate the civil society
that quickly developed there. As one of the few areas where local
social ties could develop away from the powerful authoritarian control
of the KMT before democratization in 1987, temple religion provided an
important resource to put democracy on a strong social base. In
contrast, authoritarian rule that more thoroughly destroyed all social
ties has tended to be replaced by gangsterism, as in Albania, for
instance. While temple religion did not directly cause Taiwan to
democratize, it has been crucial in consolidating an effective
democracy.\8\ We can see its role especially where temples help
organize local people to protect their welfare, for example by
protesting against polluting factories.
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\8\ Weller, Robert P. Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture
in China and Taiwan. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999.
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POSSIBILITIES IN CHINA
The growth of informal religion in China beginning in the 1980s is
reminiscent of Taiwan a decade or two earlier. It is worth noting that
while China continues to repress signs of religion that it feels might
challenge its political monopoly, it has also allowed its people far
more personal space than they had earlier. This has directly encouraged
the current religious resurgence. Temple religion has no legal
legitimacy in China, but local officials nevertheless often either turn
a blind eye or cooperate in finding ways to legitimize newly rebuilt
temples and revived festivals.
In some ways this encourages local temples to mobilize social
capital to negotiate with the state. One successful temple in Shaanxi,
for example, achieved legitimacy with the local government by building
an arboretum attached to the temple grounds, eventually attracting the
attention of national and international NGOs.\9\ Others build schools,
or call themselves museums to enhance local culture. Such activities
may be undertaken cynically, just to keep the state from forbidding
them. Once undertaken, though, the activities are real and have an
effect on Chinese society. In the current political climate where China
is trying to encourage local society to take over many welfare
functions that it cannot provide, we can expect to see religion of all
kinds, both formal and informal, to increase its social role.
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\9\ Chau, Adam Yuet. Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in
Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, i.p.
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Temples also sometimes help organize popular protest, mobilizing
social capital on behalf of the rights of a village. In one case in
Gansu, for instance, local fertility goddess cults organized an
environmental protest movement.\10\ The argument that pollution
threatened the health of their children provided the connection to the
fertility goddesses. Such arguments are particularly powerful in rural
China now because of the one child policy. While this hardly qualifies
as civil society, it does show the potential of religion to develop
means for the direct expression of popular needs.
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\10\ Jing, Jun. ``Environmental Protests in Rural China.'' In
Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, edited by Mark Selden
and Elizabeth J. Perry. New York: Routledge, 2000.
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None of this means that informal religion is likely to push China
toward democracy. While such religion has some democratic features in
its internal organization and is a core reservoir of social capital, it
is also limited by a fundamental localism and difficulties in scaling
up.
It has also survived for centuries under undemocratic regimes of
every kind. Nevertheless, the Taiwan experience shows that informal
religion can be very helpful in consolidating democratic openings. In
addition, its current direction in China shows the way it can improve
the quality of life--material life as much as spiritual--even under the
current regime.
Hundreds of millions of people are involved in temple-based local
religion in China. While current Chinese policy has made room for this
remarkable resurgence, it has also left local religion in a precarious
legal position where it can be repressed at any moment and at the whim
of any local official. China's government has a century-long modernist
prejudice against local religion. Comparative evidence from Taiwan and
Hong Kong, though, shows the important social and personal functions of
these practices. They show clearly how these practices that the
government dismisses as ``feudal superstition'' are perfectly
compatible with modernity, and indeed how they can contribute to the
successful construction of a modern and successful people. Simply
broadening the political and legal understanding of religion in China
to include these practices would be an important first step in
improving the lives of many millions of people.