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Constructing China's Jerusalem

Stanford University Press

Contents

List of Maps, Illustrations, and Tables...............................................................................ixAcknowledgments.......................................................................................................xi1. Introduction: Putting Christianity and Capitalism in Their Place...................................................12. The Rise of "Boss Christians" and Their Engagement with State Power................................................243. Of Manners, Morals, and Modernity: Cosmopolitan Desires and the Remaking of Christian Identity.....................424. The Business of Religion in the "Wenzhou Model" of Christian Revival...............................................745. Gendered Agency, Gender Hierarchy, and Religious Identity Making...................................................976. Conversion to Urban Citizenship: Rural Migrant Workers' Participation in Wenzhou Christianity......................1267. Conclusion: Religious Revivalism as a Moral Discourse of Modernity.................................................163Character List........................................................................................................173Notes.................................................................................................................181References............................................................................................................197Index.................................................................................................................209

Chapter One

On December 22, 2006, the traffic police department of the Public Security Bureau of Wenzhou issued a public notice, "On enforcing traffic control in the downtown area during Christmas." It read, "In order to ensure traffic safety and smoothness in the downtown area during Christmas 2006, a decision has been made to enforce traffic control according to the Law of the People's Republic of China on Road Traffic Safety." The decision was to ban all vehicles except public buses, taxis, and two-wheeled motorcycles in the entire city center from 5:00 p.m. December 24 to 3:00 a.m. December 25. The word "Christmas" (shengdanjie) appeared three times in this short magisterial statement. Christmas is not an official holiday in China, but mass participation in the annual Christmas celebration left little room for the local state to maneuver. With memories of hectic traffic jams in previous years, the local police chose to intervene. The naming of this local festival period "Christmas" in the law and the state-controlled media, however, unwittingly granted legitimacy to Christianity. State "recognition" of Christmas is part of the story of the massive resurgence of Christianity in contemporary Wenzhou detailed in this book.

In the last quarter century, the southeast coastal city of Wenzhou has become the largest urban Christian center in China, popularly known as "China's Jerusalem" (Zhongguo de Yelusaleng). Wenzhou is home, by some estimates, to as many as one million Christians (Protestant) and more than two thousand churches. However, the state officially designated Wenzhou as an experimental site for an "atheistic zone" (wu zongjiao qu) in 1958. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), church buildings were either closed or converted for other uses, and all Christians were driven underground. The great expansion of Christianity in Wenzhou took place over the past two decades. More than five hundred churches were built in the 1980s (Wenzhou zongjiao 1994: 27). Although Catholicism, Buddhism, and Chinese folk religion are also on the increase, Christianity's growth has been the most significant in Wenzhou, especially in the urbanized area.

The rise of Wenzhou Christianity is part of a larger revival of popular religious practices during the post-Mao period of political and economic liberalization (Chau 2006; Dean 1998; Jing 1996; Kipnis 2001b; Madsen 1998; Palmer 2007). This book seeks to understand the local significance of Wenzhou's Christian effervescence rather than studying it as an instance of a general religious upsurge. Because of its remoteness from the economic and political center, Wenzhou has been a relatively unique site since ancient times. During the post-Mao era, the development of Wenzhou Christianity has accompanied Wenzhou's evolution from an impoverished rural town to a dynamic regional center of global capitalism, the rapid growth of many small and medium-sized family-owned manufacturing enterprises, the city emerging as a world outsourcing hub, and the rise of an entrepreneurial class in the same region. It is in the context of this changing regional political economy that I interpret Wenzhou Christianity and its relationship to larger discourses of modernity.

Universal Celebration: Christianity as a Popular Participatory Domain

China's Christian population in rural inland areas tends to be homogeneously elderly, female, and illiterate (Li et al. 1999; Leung 1999). In contrast, Wenzhou Christianity constitutes a popular participatory domain in which a great diversity of people articulate subjectivities and interests and interact with one another through belief. This diversity is reflected in the rapid expansion of local religious space and the communal style of Christmas celebrations.

I began my fieldwork in Wenzhou right before Christmas 2004. Although I anticipated something unusual would happen during the celebration, I was still surprised by its grandeur and the combination of various popular cultural elements. Deliberately portrayed as an occasion of universal joy and celebration (putian tongqing), Christmas has become a public community event open to all. Local bosses, cadres, migrant workers, students, men and women, young and old, believers and nonbelievers flock to the various church sites as well as hotels and theaters to experience what local preachers proudly claim to be "the [world's] most authentic Christmas." This massive flow of participants in previous years caused the traffic jams that led to the intervention of the local Public Security Bureau in December 2006.

The Wenzhou churches' Christmas celebrations combine grand feasting, performance watching, and evangelical preaching in a festival atmosphere. Most large Wenzhou churches hold Christmas celebrations for several consecutive days, with Christmas Eve being the most elaborate and splendid celebratory gathering. One church in the city center, for example, held an eight-day Christmas banquet and series of performances. People ate while watching a variety of artistic shows on the stage in the main church hall. Each day sixty-five tables of food were served. In all, more than five hundred banquet tables were prepared and five thousand people attended. The church subsidized the 25 yuan admission ticket. At the feasts, hymns were often played as background music. In another large church, a recording of Handel's Messiah was played, and hundreds of people gathered while dozens of uniformed female church workers served dishes to each table. At such Christmas banquets, one church member usually pays for an entire table...