Counterpolitics of Liberation

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Counterpolitics of Liberationin Contemporary China:Corruption, Law, and PopularReligionSusanne Brandtstädter aa University of Oslo , NorwayPublished online: 12 Nov 2012.

To cite this article: Susanne Brandtstädter (2013) Counterpolitics of Liberationin Contemporary China: Corruption, Law, and Popular Religion, Ethnos: Journal ofAnthropology, 78:3, 328-351, DOI: 10.1080/00141844.2012.688757

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Counterpolitics of Liberation inContemporary China: Corruption, Law,and Popular Religion

Susanne BrandtstadterUniversity of Oslo, Norway

abstract This article explores the hidden transfers between law and religion byfocussing on the conditions of existence of ‘liberated’ peasant subjects in contemporaryChina. The post-Maoist era sought to create new citizens from the collectivised Maoistmasses who are subject to market reforms and a new politics of ‘governing throughlaw’ ( fazhi). At the same time, new religiousities have blossomed in the Chinese coun-tryside. Representing ‘feudal superstition’, their collective practices remain illegal untiltoday. I argue that, beyond the issue of belief, contemporary ‘feudal superstition’ doesnot represent a form of anti-secular resistance, but rather confirms the central tenetsof Chinese secularism from the perspective of ‘failed’ peasant subjects. Where the rea-lities of market liberalisation and governing through law are experienced as corruption,feudal superstition recreates the conditions to realise liberated peasant subjects: a par-ticipatory local public sphere, political visibility, investments in the public good, and anew collective property.

keywords Legal reforms, China, corruption, popular religion, political subjecthood

Introduction

The era known as late capitalist, postsocialist, or neoliberal has beenshaped by what could be called a secular paradox – a deepening secu-larisation as part of the worldwide turn towards more legalistic forms

of governance (that also have been linked to a general disenchantment withformal politics), and simultaneously the re-assertion of public, if not politicisedreligion that is felt in the rising ‘heat’ of religious issues in the public sphere.Classical secularisation theory has explained such religiousities as the failure

ethnos, vol. 78:3, 2013 (pp. 328–351), http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2012.688757

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of particular individuals and groups to embrace modern secular subjecthoods oras the active resistance of traditional subjects to a modern world built on law,science, and individual accountability. An important critique of such a perspec-tive was first offered in Casanova’s (1994) ‘Public Religions in the ModernWorld’, where he argued not only that some deprivatised religions are compa-tible with secularisation (understood as the differentiation of spheres), but alsothat certain public religions can even safeguard the moral foundations of secularsociety by defending them against a purely self-interested individualism (Casa-nova 1994:228–9). Kirsch and Turner (2009) have further suggested that the two‘transfigurations’ of the modern – the legalisation of politics and the deprivati-sation of religion – might actually be configured towards each other. Since lawand religion are two realms concerned with the establishment of order in anontological sense, much conceptual traffic or ‘permutations’ are likely tohappen between them – even if this is necessarily negated by secular ideologiesfounded on their absolute opposition.

In the following, I analyse such permutations of law and religion on the levelof peasant subjectivities in the People’s Republic of China, where state atheismhas been at the core of the ‘liberation’ ( jiefang) of the Chinese people. Here, too,we find after the economic and legal reforms of the 1980s a new blossoming ofreligiousities in society (see Yang 2008; Chau 2011b), helped by a more lenientpolitical attitude towards religion as such. In the countryside of south-easternChina the return of popular religion has been most striking. Temples and ances-tral halls have been rebuilt and their rituals and festivals are being celebratedagain with new fervour. But while the post-Maoist state has officially acceptedand legally protected religion (zongjiao) as an ‘ordinary phenomenon’ of themodern world, it continues to outlaw popular religion as ‘feudal superstition’( fengjian mixin), viewing it as a sign of backwardness, linking it to economic,political, and moral corruption, and considering it a threat to national develop-ment. The revival of local cults after their violent repression under Mao has thusattracted much attention by China scholars, who have also explored theirrelation to the post-Maoist state (Jing 1996; Feuchtwang and Wang 2001;Chau 2005;Yang 2008; Chau 2011b). But while most studies touch on therelation between politics and religion, they have generally not explored howthe new collective religious subject of the post-Maoist era fits into the historyof the ‘liberated’ peasant subject: a particular configuration of the subject of poli-tics rooted in Maoist state-making and its transformations in the reform era.1

Rather, the revival of popular religion has been linked to the widely acceptedview of contemporary Chinese society as fragmented, where the locality has

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become a new place of refuge. While some scholars have argued that as part ofpopular religion, alternative historical memories and notion of time can assertthemselves (Jing 1996) and that a pre-revolutionary ‘we’ and its morality arebeing reassembled (Yang 2000, 2004), others have asserted that peasants are‘half-believers’ (Chau 2011a) and their temples modern–traditional ‘hybrids’(Flower 2004). This particular image of fragmentation and partial secularisationis unconvincing when it is set in relation to the movement for political andsocial justice that has emerged at the same time, where peasants are engagingin ‘rightful resistance’ (O’Brien & Li 2006) and clearly demonstrate a secular,civic identity as citizens of the post-Maoist state.

In the following, I argue that the revival of the collective religious subject insouth-eastern rural China should be seen in relation to the failure of the liberatedpeasant subject after the reforms. The liberated subject of Chinese socialism hasalways been a public subject that owed its powers of political participation, itsproductive capacities, and its entitlements to membership in a political collec-tive, originating in the revolutionary state and rooted in collective property.Speaking of the failure of this subject after the reforms, I do not imply thatChinese peasants have failed to modernise (which is the state’s perspective),but rather that they have been failed by the post-Maoist state (which is the per-spective of most peasants today). Jean and John Comaroff have been anthropo-logical pioneers studying the traffic between religion, law, and modernity fromthe perspective of ‘failed subjects’ in the latter sense. They observed that the post-colony has in recent decades witnessed the religious auxesis of the most secularof all institutions – the law and the market – resulting in a new ‘millennial capit-alism’ and a new ‘fetishism of the law’ (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000, 2006).Working in sub-Saharan Africa, they (and others) have also argued that arenewed attention to the occult (which is often also the illegal) is correlated tomodernity’s new exclusions and to popular explorations of the hidden causesthereof (Comaroff & Comaroff 1999). The driving forces are here a growingnumber of failed modern subjects: modern subjects who have been failed bysecular institutions that promised them development, justice, equal rights, politi-cal representation, and public participation. Caldeira (2006) shows that in such asituation, the marginalised and excluded do not simply abandon the ideals of thelaw and of civic citizenship, but rather carry them into other, often confronta-tional realms of morality that are identified with particular group identities.

‘Feudal superstition’ is such a confrontational realm that is today nearlyexclusively associated with the peasantry. In the following, I explore transfersbetween the secular and its historical ‘other’ in China to argue that the new reli-

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gious subjects in rural China are often liberated subjects in disguise, who byengaging in ‘feudal superstition’ recreate the conditions for ‘liberated’, participa-tory citizenship in rural China. Feuchtwang has argued that popular religionconstitutes today a moral space from where to criticise the state (2000:173–4)and that long-standing ‘democratic’ traditions of voice, exit, and equal entitle-ments within local temples can become sprouts of a rural civil society (2003).I want to go further to argue that the collective practices of ‘feudal superstition’can constitute a counterpolitics of liberation, practices through which a rightful,civic subject owned by a peasant collective (and the god who symbolises it) isbeing created and, at the same time, the law-abiding, individualised civilsubject owned by the post-Maoist state is being rejected.

Law, Morality, and CorruptionParallel to the economic reforms, which in the early 1980s abolished collec-

tive agriculture and made peasant families again dependent on the market, thepost-Maoist Chinese state introduced an ambitious programme of building anew legal system and replacing ‘Maoist politics in control’ with a new politicsof ‘governing through law’ ( fazhi). Beyond serving as a tool to regulate the newmarket economy, fazhi, together with ‘socialist morality’ (shehui zhuyi daode),soon became a political means to create a new, individualised, and civilcitizen who could replace the outdated Maoist masses. To realise the newideal of national development, the new citizen was to be rational, civilised,entrepreneurial, educated, self-reliant, and law-abiding. Practising religionoutside the tightly controlled spectrum of state-controlled Buddhism, Islam,Christianity, and Daoism (i.e. promoting a religious subject not ‘owned’ bythe state) was seen as a threat to this new citizen project. This was especiallyso in the case of ‘feudal superstition’ – associated with irrationality, corruption,and backwardness – and ‘evil cults’ (xiejiao) such as Falungong. As a result, inautumn 2000, following the Falungong ‘incident’2 and a visit by PresidentJiang to the southeastern Chinese province of Zhejiang, authorities launchedone of the biggest rectification campaigns against ‘illegal religious activities’since the end of the Mao era, in which thousands of temples of Chinesepopular religion were destroyed in the name of ‘spiritual civilisation’ ( jingshenwenming) and ‘governing through law’ ( fazhi). Around this time, the importantjournal ‘Legal Daily’ (Fazhi Ribao) published the following article, suggestinglessons in fazhi as a remedy to cure peasants from feudal superstition andother social ills:

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Peasant Villages Must Establish ‘Governing through Law’ Classes!Several delegates raised the countryside question and said that they would liketo draw attention to a particular problem: although some villages have alreadyprogressed on the path of economic development, they still have to make up onthe side of constructing spiritual civilisation, in particular, through lessons in theconstruction of fazhi.

The delegates were not willing to disclose names, but they reported that theyhad recently visited some well-known wealthy areas in the countryside anddetected some strange things behind the veneer of prosperity. For example,some villages had set up images of gods, which they call ‘spiritual civilisationconstruction new scenic spots’, but what kind of ‘new scenic spots’ are these?Next to an honorary plate for the God of Wealth (Caishen), one finds theinscription

Caishen can dispel thunderstorm and avert disaster [. . .] In today’s market economy,making respectful offerings to the God of Wealth helps all to develop a correct under-standings of monetary affairs, fairness, justice, legality and rationality. [. . .] Therebypeople will be able to well administer families, private business and the country’spublic economy.

Below the other image with the plate Great Emperor of Heaven (TiangongDadi), there is the inscription ‘If our contemporary society produces thephenomenon of bad officials, Tiangong is urgently needed to control thesebad officials, and turn their wickedness into goodness’. The delegates couldnot believe this:

In this place, one obviously needs the God of Wealth and the Great Emperor ofHeaven to correctly administer public finances and control the phenomenon of cor-ruption, and not the law! [. . .] How can anyone turn a blind eye or be nonchalantabout such a severe case of feudal superstition. [. . .]

Also the local village organisation suffers from vanity and corruption on a big scale:no matter how many family members, a house must always have many and bigrooms; no matter whether household appliances can be used, one must have themall; no matter whether public facilities are practically used, they must have all kindsof furnishings [. . .]. The result is that a lot of houses are built but remain empty.This is both wasteful and against the land management law [. . .] it is not only awaste but can give rise to and spread corruption. The delegates were of theopinion that, as proposed within the tenth five-year plan, it is necessary to strengthen

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the public education in science, the opposition movement against feudal superstition,to strongly develop the mass movement for the construction of spiritual civilisation,to advocate a science-based, civilised, and healthy lifestyle and the legally guaranteedrights and freedoms of the people, to demand respect for the protection of humanrights, to guide people in using the law to manage their own things, and to deepenthe education in the socialist system. If we want to realise these aims, then wehave to continue to work hard in all rural areas. (Legal Daily 8.3.2001, translation mine).

This article, published in the major journal of legal reforms in contemporaryChina, provides us with the central tropes that have governed the discursiveopposition of ‘governing through law’ and ‘feudal superstition’ in the reformera. The ‘delegates’, probably an official investigation team into rural develop-ment, discover the scandal that an already prosperous village has not yet pro-gressed on the path of ‘spiritual civilisation’ ( jingshen wenming). As a result,villagers engage in feudal superstition, which defies at the same time law, scien-tific rationality, and socialist morality. The corruptive influence of this in localsociety is evident to ‘the delegates’, as they find – together with the call toworship ‘false gods’ – wastefulness, vanity, lawlessness, and the slandering ofpublic resources!

‘Governing through law’ has been flagged as China’s official departure from a‘feudal’ tradition of ‘governing through men’ (renzhi) that also Maoism hadfailed to abolish. Especially the ‘chaos’ (luan) of the Cultural Revolution hasserved as the relevant negative other against which the new politics of fazhihave constituted itself. ‘Governing through law’ brought with it a legal revolu-tion focussing on an individualised citizen and individual accountability. Itopened new, formalised avenues of conflict resolution and emphasised thesuperiority of state law over personal relations and local traditions. In 1987,the central government devised a number of five-year legal education pro-grammes with the aim of promulgating knowledge about the law across thepopulation, and new ‘citizen handbooks’ (gongmin shouce) that describe basiccivil rights and duties were distributed. As a politics of social engineering andcultural change, fazhi was to foster ‘development’ ( fazhan), ‘civilisation’(wenming), and ‘quality’ (suzhi) and to create a standardised, law-abidingcitizen across China. Central to creating this new citizen was also de-collectivi-sation, just as the collectivisation of property had been central to the creation ofsocialist masses 30 years earlier. In 2007, these new politics culminated in a newproperty law that, for the first time in Chinese history, acknowledges the rightto private property. Because of the property link of the modern subject, ‘corrup-

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tion’ has become a term – in China as well as globally – with which failures ofcitizen-becoming are being expressed.

But fazhi did not seek to create the free-wheeling, ‘self-possessive’ individualof Western civil society (see Macpherson 1962).3 Today’s individualised citizen(gongmin, literally ‘public person’) is a variation of the liberated subject: a civiland civilised subject portrayed as owing its intellectual capacities and moralqualities to public policies. It is a subject created in law but ‘owned’, in thelast instance, by the post-Maoist state. This is particularly evident in the officialdiscourse on ‘religion’ (zongjiao) and ‘morality’ (daode), in liberal secularismassociated with civil society. As former President Jiang Zemin argued in apublic speech in 1993, the law needed to be applied to religion in order toactively guide the latter’s adaptation to socialist society (Spiegel & Laber1997:7). Following another speech on the subject in January 2001, the People’sDaily, the official press organ of the Party, commented:

Ruling the country according to law and running the country with morality are aclosely integrated whole. The rule of law belongs to political construction and to pol-itical civilisation; while rule by morality belongs to ideological construction and toadvanced culture and ethics. They both have their respective positions and functions.[. . .] Socialist rule of law provides a legal guarantee for establishing, safeguarding andpracticing socialist morality. Socialist rule of morality is to regulate the conduct of allsocial members with socialist ideology and morality and raise the moral level of theentire nation. Success in rule by morality makes it possible to administer the countryaccording to law. (People’s Daily 1.2.2001, English original)

Feudal superstition is a force that undermines this state monopoly on‘making publics’: it is an ‘evil power that makes people attribute their fate to“supernatural and mysterious forces” instead of to the Party leadership’ oreven resort to ‘counter-revolutionary fatalism’ (Feuchtwang & Wang1991:262); as a public practice, it is therefore defying the law ( feifa). Superstition,furthermore, constitutes a criminal offence when obstructing state policies andharming others. As article 300 of the People’s Republic Penal Code states:‘Whoever organises and utilises superstitious sects, secret societies, and evil reli-gious organisations or sabotages the implementation of the state’s laws andexecutive regulations by utilising superstition is to be sentenced to no lessthan three years and not more than seven years of fixed-term imprisonment;when circumstances are particularly serious, to no less than seven years offixed-term imprisonment. Whoever organises and utilises superstitious sects,secret societies, and evil religious organisations or cheats others by utilising

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superstition, thereby giving rise to the death of people is to be punished inaccordance with the previous paragraph. Whoever organises and utilisessuperstitious sects, secret societies, and evil religious organisations or hasillicit sexual relations with women, defrauds money and property by utilisingreligion is to be convicted and punished in accordance with the regulationsof articles 236, 266 of the law’. Here, feudal superstition is criminalised for itsability to undermine the reach of the state and for corrupting the capacitiesor properties that mark liberated subjects.

But fazhi did not eliminate the problem of corruption; on the contrary, itbecame aggravated with the reforms. Many of the people I spoke to, whetherduring fieldwork or on short encounters such as a taxi ride from Beijingairport to the university district, saw corruption lurking everywhere: in govern-ment offices when bureaucrats on all levels brazenly break the law and appro-priate public assets for private gain, when land or houses are expropriated in away that serves private investors and harms the poor, or when connections(guanxi) rather than ability secure a place in a good school or university.Rather than marked by civilisation, lawfulness, and progress, peasants in par-ticular tend to view the period of fazhi as marked by greed and the underminingof public interests in a way not possible, as was often added, ‘when ChairmanMao was in power’. The government, on the other hand, has consistentlylocated the source of ‘corruption and decay’ ( fubai) in an unreformed society,responsible for social ills of all sorts – and especially in a rural society whichremains in the thrall of ‘feudal superstition’ ( fengjian mixin). In the post-Maoist period, however, the political concern has been less with ‘false beliefs’(mixin) than with ‘feudalism’ ( fengjian) as a source of ‘the rule of men’ andthe undermination of the law. Contemporary Chinese scholars typically attri-bute the resilience of corruption to the fact that Maoist politics were anti-capi-talist rather than anti-feudalist. This ‘permitted the residual cultural elements ofthe small-production-oriented peasantry to survive, which Maoism not just hadfailed to extinguish, but even allowed to thrive’ (Lu 2000:19–20).

How does this relate back to the formation of peasant subjects in contempor-ary China? First, fazhi shifted the emphasis on the individualised citizen ratherthan on the collectivised ‘masses’ as the bearer of the new politics, and themeaning of liberation shifted from communism to development ( fazhan).Citizen ‘quality’ (suzhi) was now associated with education, prosperity,manners, and a modern (urban) life style, whereas peasants, as a group, weredenigrated as ‘uneducated’ (mei you wenhua), ‘uncivilised’ (bu wenming), ‘poor’(qiong), and ‘backward’ (luohuo) and therefore as an obstacle to development

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(Yan 2003a; Anagnost 2004). As Kipnis (1995) writes, they were exhorted to ‘getrich, eliminating that part of peasant identity that was valued positively underMaoism. More importantly, peasants as a class should work for their own trans-formation into a proletariat, eliminating the farming part of their identity’ (12).Against the individualised, civil citizen made in state law, feudal superstition– with the emphasis on feudal – is the property of the anti-citizen, who isequally ‘possessed’ by it. The loss of peasants’ revolutionary role and therevival of popular religion in the countryside turned peasants into the‘owners’ of feudal superstition. This has legitimised the increasing oppositionof peasant and ‘public interest’ (Zhao 2009:99) and, effectively, peasants’ exclu-sion from a general public defined as a community of progress. Peasants haveexperienced this as discrimination, expropriation, and neglect by local govern-ments, as a form of state abandonment they themselves interpret as lawless(wufa) and corrupt ( fubai). With the local state unwilling to promote thelaw, we also find in the above article what ‘the delegates’ have chosen toignore: the promise that worshiping the gods will deliver the very desirablepromises of fazhi in the community: ‘a correct understanding of monetaryaffairs, fairness, justice, legality and rationality [. . .] to well administer families,private business, and the country’s public economy’ as well as the ability ‘tocontrol bad officials, and to turn their wickedness into goodness’. Popular reli-gion, as a ‘confrontational moral sphere’ (Caldeira) now entirely associated withthe peasantry, is clearly presented here as doing the law’s job in creating theconditions for, and instilling the values central to the ‘liberated citizen’, suchas securing the public good, fighting political corruption, productivity, and col-lective advancement.

Neither Traditional Nor Civil: Temples, Property Re-Collectivisation, andNew Publics

Between 1994 and 2001, I undertook various stints of anthropological field-work in southern China, more precisely in three fishing and farming villageson the densely populated coastal strip of South Fujian province. This is anincreasingly urbanised region with multiple historical links to the inhabitantsof Taiwan and Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. It was also for thisreason that the Chinese government opened here one of the first ‘Special Econ-omic Zones’ in 1981 (in the old port city of Xiamen), built to attract foreigninvestments and develop joint ventures with foreign companies. Already inthe late 1980s, the region had a thriving market economy that spawned roadconstruction, industrialisation, rural enterprises, and new population move-

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ments towards the coast. I soon – as many other anthropologists – becamefascinated by the reconstruction of rural temples and ancestral halls and theirattendant annual rituals, which again attract thousands of spectators, pilgrims,and local participants. Local governments which have tolerated such recon-structions are well aware that such ‘feudal’ institutions can produce sizable rev-enues for local communities and help to bind overseas relatives to their place ofancestry. But their formal illegality has given local governments the leeway towithdraw this toleration at any time.

Yang (2004) has described how initial toleration can turn into an ongoingstruggle over the ownership and meaning of such institutions and over theissue of whether they remain ‘feudal’ (and thereby part of an intersubjectivespace ‘owned’ by villagers) or become state museums or temples of Daoist orBuddhist organisations. In an earlier article (Yang 2000), she interpreted theattendant, vast ritual economy in villages of wealthy Zhejiang Province as a con-sumptive economy of wealth destruction. In her view, surplus wealth made inthe new capitalist economy must be destroyed (in often visibly striking, com-petitive, and dramatic ways) to protect a traditional economy that sustains amoral sphere of kinship and community. In contrast, I see the relevant ‘traffic’not between a capitalist economy and its traditional counterpart, but betweena market economy that creates an expanding private sector and individualdetachment and a collective economy that creates local publics and sustains apublic good. The ritual economy, which is sustained by private donations totemples and ancestral halls, supports not the destruction of wealth but its re-col-lectivisation and productive investment – in order to support, as a templemanager told me, ‘public interest’ (gongyi). When in Yang’s own study villagersspeak of the ritual economy in terms of ‘collecting funds among the masses’(qunzhong jizi), this furthermore suggests – despite surface appearances – aMaoist heritage that is likely to be of equal importance in sustaining the newreligiousity among China’s peasants as are the more ‘traditional’ beliefs ingods, ghosts, and ancestors.

In Baisha, Meidao, and Nanjiang, the three places of my research in Fujian,villagers had since the mid-1980s in a splendid fashion rebuilt their temples,shrines, and ancestral halls, which had been damaged or destroyed during theCultural Revolution. Without exception, such reconstructions involveddonations from all village households and substantial financial help from over-seas relatives. Behind the apparent re-traditionalisation of the village commu-nities through the new prominence of popular religion in public, however,does not stand a traditional peasant subject. In their personal–private sphere,

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villagers aspired to be the discerning new ‘consumer citizens’ (Hooper 2005)that the post-Maoist state has promoted since the economic reforms. Allvillage families had built (or were hoping to build) new homes with separaterooms for each family member, whose appearance had to be first and foremost‘developed’ ( fada). They spent a sizable amount of their income on modernhousing facilities, as well as on fashionable dresses, TVs, and mobile phones.In the 2000s, private consumption could include private computers, homecinema and karaoke sets, cars, and tourist trips. This consumption was ‘conspic-uous’ not just in terms of asserting local status, but rather because the consump-tion of quality goods and services is today frequently conceptually linked to theaccumulation of personal quality (suzhi) (Pun 2003; Brandtstadter 2009).

How do such investments in suzhi then relate to the amounts spent on themaintenance of ancestral halls and village temples and on donations, festivals,public rituals, and worship? In the wealthy areas of the southeast, historicallyknown for their elaborate community rituals and rich religious life, the newritual economy around festivals, public rites, and pilgrimages shifts today, justas the secular economy, millions of renminbi (China’s currency). The govern-ment has denounced such ritual expenditure as wasteful, irrational, feudal,and backward, as has been the official Party line since 1949. In contrast, villagersperceived what they called ‘donating to the public’ (song gei gongjia) not just as aprivate investment in blessings but also as public duty. From a local perspective,the emphasis within the ‘public’ ritual economy was on productive investmentsin the local public good, both in terms of accumulating blessings and in terms ofproperty accumulation and investment in the community’s public infrastruc-ture. To them, consuming modernity in private and contributing to collectivewelfare and progress in public – even via ‘feudal’ institutions – were twosides of the same coin of performing participatory citizenship in its contempor-ary sense of promoting private and public development.

In a comparative study of several villages in Fujian and Jiangxi provinces,Liliy Tsai (2002) has argued that the new temples and ancestral halls haveoften taken over formal tasks of the village government: they have becomethe managers of public funds, they build roads and bridges, they decide onland use, and they are running village schools. Especially when their accumu-lated wealth far exceeds that of formal village institutions, they can assemblea power that effectively turns them into, as Kenneth Dean writes, ‘secondvillage governments’ (Dean 1998, 2003 in Chau 2011a:10). The first ‘feudal’ collec-tion drives took place all over rural south-eastern China in the mid-1980s, whenthe political focus shifted onto developing urban areas at the expense of the

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countryside and when complaints about cadres privatising public funds andlevying illegal taxes and fees on their local constituencies, thereby destroyingpublic wealth and harming public interests, multiplied. The new collectiveproperty was used to renovate or reconstruct the halls, temples, and shrinesthat had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, a ‘chaotic’ (luan) andlawless time also in the villagers’ perception. It is generally assembled fromtwo sources: from private wealth and from the transformation of older (nowsocialist) collective property into a new collective property, in a way thatclearly resembles the Maoist collectivisation drives of the 1950s. In thesesouthern coastal areas, overseas relatives were nearly always importantdonors for these reconstructions. But also all village households contributed acertain sum to the reconstruction fund, even the poorest ones. In Baisha, avillage close to Xiamen harbour, which in 1991 became part of a specially desig-nated investment zone (touzhi qu) by the city government, the village’s maintemple reconstruction gave even new life to the most basic collective, thevillage small groups (cunmin xiaozu). Small groups had replaced the productionteams of the Maoist era with the re-introduction of household production, butin this process lost de facto – rather than de jure – control over their most impor-tant remaining collective property, land, to higher levels (Ho 2001). In Baisha,the village as a whole had lost control over its lands as it became part of aninvestment zone under the city government. After the golf course was builton village lands in 1991, six ‘small groups’ lost all access to farmland and 44

families had to be resettled. But with the collection drive for the new temple,the existing small groups became subunits of the temple organisation. Theseunits have since managed separate funds and recorded the yearly contributionsby their households to the temple, and each sent its own delegate to the templemanagement committee. Households of different units also made offeringsduring the main temple festivals on separate days.

I see in such conversions of property a transfer, or a permutation in Kirsch andTurner’s sense, between two public realms created by Chinese secularism: therealm of law (‘owned’ by the post-Maoist state) and that of ‘feudal superstition’(‘owned’ by the post-Maoist peasant). The new collective property has no realityin law as the Chinese constitution only recognises state-controlled collective orprivate property. Its existence is nevertheless visualised in the new temple build-ings or ancestral halls, as much as these buildings and their attendant rituals pub-licly represent their, equally legally non-existent, ‘feudal’ owner collectives inplace. After the re-consecration of temples and halls, the new collectivescan assert themselves publicly. In Baisha, whose ‘hot and loud’ (renao) temple

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festivals attracted a wide range of visitors, the temple (or its different subunits)acted as the main financier of infrastructural projects, paid ¥100 to the familiesof new university students, and even built basketball courts for village youth.In 2001, it had even become a creditor to the village government. In Nanjiang,an officially acknowledged ‘overseas Chinese home village’ (qiaoxiang), thelavish reconstruction of the village’s ancestral halls had largely been bankrolledby overseas relatives. When I visited Nanjiang in 2000 and 2001, overseasmoney also financed the building of a new primary school and its computerequipment, the village kindergarten, a cultural centre, and a village library. Itpaid most of the teachers’ wages, supplied the village with electricity and tapwater, and had built most of the village streets. Overseas Chinese were even con-structing a new office for the village government and a building for the village’sold people’s association. The majority of ancestral funds held in this village in2001 were between ¥250,000 and ¥300,000.4

The splendour of new temples and ancestral halls symbolised effectively the‘take-over’ of government task by a self-organisation of villagers, including over-seas relatives whom Nanjiang’s ordinary inhabitants called simply ‘locals whohave not yet returned’ (hai mei hui lai de bendiren). Infrastructural projects, typi-cally initiated by the temple managers, always involved the financialcooperation between temple, village government, and the benefiting villagefamilies. In Nanjiang, overseas funds for public projects were jointly managedby the village government and trusted villagers, often the managers of ancestralhalls. In Baisha, stone stelae all over the village reported that ‘this street was builtby the temple government with the village government as junior partner . . . ’,publicly rendering the village government as the junior partner of an institutionof ‘feudal superstition’. The temples and ancestral halls were in all villages themain institutions through which important collective resources, includinglinks to relatives in urban areas and overseas, were managed. The latter oftenincluded offering potential patrons a place in ‘their’ ancestral hall, with ancestralpedigree, such as having produced a grandson in the male line, no longer beingexplicitly necessary. In Baisha, the official leader of one of the temple commit-tees was even a woman. What was unheard of in the past was now explainedwith the fact that she had a son working in Hong Kong.

Investments by local elites into temples and ancestral halls and their financingof religious festivals for both ‘religious’ (seeking blessings) and ‘political’ (seekinginfluence) reasons have a long history in China. In Putian county in pre-modernFujian, the construction of a large irrigation system was partly funded byBuddhist estates, and inter-village ritual networks were formed to maintain the

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system, especially when the imperial state partly withdrew from organisingpublic labour. At the same time, in response to a developing commodityeconomy, lineages often transformed into organisations resembling a joint-stock corporation (Dean & Zheng 2010). Local elites also built roads andbridges long before the twentieth century (see Flower 2004:656), and the involve-ment of overseas Chinese communities in the development of their home towngoes back to the late Qing dynasty (Sinn 1997). Such examples show the historicalinvolvement of popular religion in charity, public projects and in collective econ-omic endeavours and the capacity for ‘religious’ innovations in response to pol-itical and economic changes. What distinguishes the present from the past isthat contemporary innovations take place in the context of a modern, secularstate and decades of Chinese socialism. The collective properties of templesand ancestral halls depends, since the loss of temple land, on the active and volun-tary participation of every village household in ‘giving to the public’. Moreover,villagers no longer view elite patronage as the normal path to local advancementor hope for the charity of a nearby Buddhist monastery, but rather perceive publicand personal progress as an entitlement and a claim they, as Chinese peasants andcitizens, hold against public institutions.

De-collectivisation, which encouraged local governments to cooperate withoutside investors also against local interests, and the ideological devaluation ofthe peasant subject, has meant that such claims have been increasingly ignoredby the institutions of the socialist state. As a result, villagers have transferred aclaim that originated in the revolutionary state to ‘new’ collective institutionssuch as temples and ancestral halls. These have come to represent politicalvalues relating to ‘the law’ such as fairness, transparency, accountability, andresponsiveness. They have also taken on the legal duty of local governmentsto promote public interest (gongyi). ‘Corruption talk’ contrasts contemporarypractices of local governments with public practices in two different fields,thereby conceptually linking them: first, with the temples and ancestral halls,where ‘no one would be so stupid to embezzle money belonging to the godsor ancestors’ (a villager in Nanjiang), and second with the Maoist era, where‘cadres would not drive around in cars and wear leather shoes’ (a villager inBaisha). Cadres of the Maoist era, who are commonly at least as critical ofthe current state of local governments as the general public, also often sit inthe management committees of the new ‘feudal’ institutions. Ironically, corrup-tion talk directed at the local government typically included the charge that itwas the acting members of local governments who were really ‘superstitious’(mixin) or ‘more afraid of the gods’ ( pa shen) than anyone else in the village.

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The transfer of political values from the state realm to that of popular religionhas often been interpreted as ‘creative dissimulation’ necessitated by bottom-upstrategies of legitimisation (Chau 2011a:6). While all ‘feudal’ temples mustindeed reach out to local cadres for protection, I argue for a different perspectiveon this transfer. Siu (1989) has argued early that the collective rites of contem-porary popular religion demonstrate socialist peasant egalitarianism rather thanthe distinctions of ‘traditional’ society and found little knowledge about the cos-mological significance of the rites. To her, the revival of popular religion thusdemonstrates the deep reach of the socialist state into local society ratherthan its absence. Chau (2011a: 16) further notes a ‘democratization’ of religiouslife that goes back to China’s land reform in 1950, which ‘allowed more peasantsto participate in organizing temple festivals [. . .]’. A similar situation was againcreated through the household responsibility system, ‘which gave impetus tothe wide base of popular participation in the religious revival’. Moreover, ‘thestructure of temple associations often mimics the leadership structure of a pro-duction team’ (Chau 2011a: 16). Today, juxtapositions of the temple’s ritualeconomy with the public economy of ‘corrupt’ governments shows how theformer has appropriated and come to embody the ‘law’s dream’ of fair justice(especially in distribution), of participation and basic equality, and of promotingpublic interest and the right to evaluate and correct political authorities. Thishas been facilitated by historical precedence. Feuchtwang (2003) has arguedthat the management of village temples in China has always involved ‘demo-cratic’ principles such as basic equality before authority, public responsibilityand participation, exit, and voice: principles which, however, were oftenusurped by patronage. In pre-modern China, village temples and their deitiesfurthermore represented the law in place and the ‘juridical continuum’ (Katz2009) between worldly and divine justice. Today, ‘traditional’ (chuantong) is aterm villagers reserve for their overseas cousins and their interest in local reli-gion. But temples and ancestral halls are also not civil society institutions inthe Western sense. None of them, as has been pointed out, can exist withoutthe involvement of state cadres. Moreover, insulation from the state in thepost-Maoist rural context has not led to further ‘liberation’ but to ‘liberalisation’,that is, to the exploitation of peasant labour and the loss of collective influenceover political elites (Brandtstadter & Schubert 2005:813). Maoism had formallyentitled the liberated masses to correct cadres who did not ‘serve the people’.On a daily basis, however, such influence depended on the mutual dependen-cies and obligations, the ‘feudal’ relations that shaped the ‘minor public’ (laterthe ‘peasants’ collective organisation’) of Maoist China. As Lu points out, the

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state had always perceived this ‘minor public’ to be politically ambiguous: it wasthe place of peasants’ collective production and political affiliations, but alsoalways in danger of being consumed by local interests. This was particularlyevident when cadres used illegal methods to retain as many resources as poss-ible in the production teams they were part of (and depended upon), a behav-iour team members regarded not just as licit but as a quality that distinguishedcompetent leaders (Lu 2000:48–9). De-collectivisation crushed this minorpublic, and its relations of mutual obligation and dependency, between anencroaching state realm and an expanding private sphere. The new templesand ancestral organisations here managed to resurrect a form of minor publicby reintegrating cadres and their families – also as a part of a strategy of legit-imation – into a new peasant public, recollectivising property and reinforcing‘local loyalties’ (Feuchtwang 2002, 2003). This is underlined by the conceptualease that accompanies conversions from socialist collective to ‘religious’ collec-tive property. In Nanjiang, for example, one smaller group had never owned anancestral hall, so it simply built an entirely new hall on the ground where ‘its’production team had owned a store house and a sports ground before. Thehall manager saw nothing unusual in this; to him, the place was collective( jitide) before and afterwards.

My argument is thus that despite surface appearances, ‘feudal superstition’seeks to recreate the liberated rather than the traditional subject as part of asecularised revival of popular religion: a revival not just as a kind of publicculture, as Ji (2011) argues for the case of contemporary Buddhism, but also asa public politics that represents the values of secular citizenship and new,truly collectively owned, civic peasant subjects. This can have measurable pol-itical consequences.

The Counterpolitics of Liberation and New Civic Subjects in Rural ChinaHanjiang District Starts 1-6 Movement to Oppose Feudal Superstition and PopulariseAdvanced Culture. With the beginning of this year [. . .] every village is to constructa permanent stage for art and literature performances to replace the stage foroperas and plays for local deities, control local opera troupes and instead organizethe popular performance of literature and art, reduce the expenditures for localoperas and organize instead screenings of elegant films, transform the meetingplaces of temples into regular locations for literature and art activities; allow advancedculture to enter the temples and shrines by setting up a newspaper rail; and spentmoney and energy on establishing a village-level culture propaganda unit. As thewriter has convinced himself, under the effect of these propaganda activities,

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people in the area from all walks of life have already started to oppose temple proces-sions and cancelled earlier planned performances of pusa operas [. . .]. The masseshappily say: ‘The advanced culture at last has entered the village on a large scale!’(Meizhou Daily, 25.4.2001, translation mine)

The legitimacy of the Party has always rested on the promise of realising ‘lib-eration’ (today interpreted as social, economic, and political development) forthe people, on its capacity of public mobilisation in the interest of collective pro-gress (today interpreted as patriotism), and on the creation of a public economythat furthers public interest. For most of the Maoist era, however, the politics ofliberation involved the orchestrated and often forced participation of the massesin political rallies, struggle sessions, and public work. Maoism thus introduced amimicry of civicness for the mass citizen, who was to experience public partici-pation and voice only through the repetition of Maoist slogans and the faithfulexecution of Maoist policies. The places of peasants’ public participation werethe production teams and the brigades, which in the South were often co-ter-minous with the older village, its neighbourhoods, and its public sphere thatused to be represented by the local temple. But this traditional public and therelations that sustained it had to be entirely transformed so that the socialiststate could fully ‘own’ the new peasant subject.

Echoes of this can still be found in the newspaper quote given above, where‘the masses happily’ participate in turning a feudal institution into a ‘civilised’institution propagating government policies and organising performances of‘advanced’ literature and art. Mostly, however, today’s interpretation of partici-pation is found in demands that individual subjects contribute to national devel-opment by transforming themselves into – materially and spiritually – civilisedindividuals. This created the conundrum for rural people that post-Maoist gov-ernments have denied ‘peasantness’ any positive political role in such a trans-formation while at the same time adhering to the administrative category‘peasant’ that confers rights of participation, residence, and abode only withina particular rural collective. For many from the countryside, this has translatedinto notions of having no future and even not being ‘a real person’ as a peasant(see Pun 2003; Yan 2003b).

How can participation in new ‘feudal institutions’ support the emergence ofcivic peasant subjects in rural China (and not just a mimicry thereof): subjectswho participate in development, who engage themselves for public causes,and who appropriate a collective public voice vis-a-vis the state? That suchcivic citizens exist in the Chinese countryside is evident from the collective

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protests, the active engagement with state law, and the new movement forpeasant rights that have been continuously growing in strength since the1990s (see Brandtstadter 2011). Also the ubiquitous corruption talk found inpeasant villages does not simply refer to ‘traditional’ values, but to popular sover-eignty, development, justice, rights, and equality interpreted on the basis of legit-imate leadership, participation, and collective entitlements emerging from a post-Maoist moral economy (Brandtstadter & Schubert 2005:808), of which the ritualeconomy only is the most ‘flamboyant’ part. This ritual economy, its institutionsand annual festivals, constitutes a new focal point of public life in the villages ofthe Southeast. As temple festivals involve the participation of every village house-hold and performances are subject to public evaluation, the ritual economy itselfdepends much more than in the past on ‘voluntary subscription and peerpressure’ (Feuchtwang 2002:207). As a result of having fulfilled their duty of‘giving to the public’, moreover, villagers maintain ‘an inner core of controlover the temple’ (Feuchtwang 2000:173) and its leadership.

In his article on roads and visions of development in rural Sichuan province,John Flower has provided an insightful analysis of how temples, which he callsmodern–traditional hybrids, attempt to engage an increasingly remote state inthe interest of local development. He writes

The temple’s revival was an attempt to restore the road, and the harmony that thestate had ruined through neglect. Restoring harmony meant reintegrating localsociety with the nation-state, but only on terms that would respect the villagers’ inter-est and local identity. (Flower 2004:677)

Flower shows that the temple could create a new alliance between villagersand cadres because it employed the state’s discourse on good governance anddevelopment. In southern Fujian, cadres might seek more political influence andcontrol over resources by engaging themselves for the new temples and halls,but this also enforces a political reorientation and a new reciprocity to theirlocal collective (Feuchtwang & Wang 2001; Brandtstadter 2003). In Meidao in1994, otherwise aloof village cadres functioned as ordinary members of theancestral halls’ management committees, with leadership positions held by vil-lagers elected for their capacities and moral character. In Nanjiang, representa-tives of the hall management committees together with village cadres managedthe investment of overseas funds. In Baisha, where the temple initiated andlargely financed most public infrastructure projects, it also organised a newcooperation between village government, the temple’s different subunits, and

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the benefiting village households. The temple committee had in 1999 even hireda professional film maker to document the vibrant festival of the main Linghuivillage temple together with the ‘development’ that had arrived in Baisha. Aftera sweep over the golf course, the new highway, and the many new houses inBaisha, the documentary zooms in on the temple, and the commentatordeclares ‘In recent years, under the wise leadership of the Party and the protec-tion of the gods, all villagers have had a better life and have built many newhouses. This is a complete change’. Here, the temple claimed to have unitedthe locally owned gods (who represent the community and its productiverelations) and the Party and thereby to have enabled all ‘development’ onvillage lands.

This claim also set into stark relief the illegalities, injustices, and brokenpromises that the villagers had had to suffer as a result of development, andwhere ‘the law’ had not intervened: the loss of collective entitlements andinadequate compensation, the village government’s ‘loss’ of the compensationfund, and the golf course’s broken promise to find employment for expropriatedvillagers and build a road to the new settlement. Similarly, the golf course hadinitially refused entrance to the village temple’s two main deities on their annual‘inspecting the boundaries’ (youjing) tour of their territorial dominion. As one ofthe temple managers told me with glee, after this refusal, the golf course wentinto financial troubles in the following years. This divine punishment eventuallyforced the manager to open his ‘exclusive’ golf course to the local gods and thelarge number of accompanying villagers, to temporarily re-own what was oncecollective territory. He also began to personally visit the temple every ChineseNew Year and to make a large financial donation to the gods.

Here, as in the other villages, the ritual economy helped to create – and visu-alise – new civic publics in rural China: publics made up of locals (bendiren),who own a temple, have a share (you fen) in its collective properties, participatethrough donations, leadership, and ritual activities, and produce local develop-ment. By participating, sharing, and contributing to a local public good, which isnow more than at any time in the past, truly collectively owned, villagers engagein a counterpolitics of liberation that rejects the individualised, civil peasant‘owned’ by the state – a subject who has no public and no voice, who canwork but who cannot participate (see Yan 2003a) – and instead recreate them-selves as political subjects along the lines of the ‘liberated’ peasant subject,thereby also placing a new claim on representatives of the state and themarket to ‘give back’ and engage themselves for collective interests. Givingback also publically demonstrates the potential of ‘feudal superstition’ to

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eliminate the new divisions and exclusion of post-Maoist China. Moreover, theongoing struggle for justice and rights in the countryside shows that new civicpeasant collectives can, under the threat of total erasure, also claim liberationagainst the state.

ConclusionRethinking the role of ‘Public Religions in the Modern World’, Casanova

concluded that

[t]he very resurgence or reassertion of religious traditions may be viewed as a sign ofthe failure of the Enlightenment to redeem its own promises. Religious traditions arenow confronting the differentiated secular spheres, challenging them to face theirown obsurantist, ideological and inauthentic claims. In many of these confrontations,it is religion which as often as not, appears to be on the side of human enlightenment.(1994:233–4)

While Casanova focussed on the structural conditions that allowed depri-vatised religion to become both the critic and the defender of ‘enlightenment’values, my article has analysed the re-emergence of ‘public’ popular religionfrom the vantage point of modern political subjects in China and their con-ditions of existence. I have argued that Chinese secularism has created a par-ticular subject – the ‘liberated peasant subject’ – which remains, if onlybecause of the absence of alternatives, the main reference for the formationof political subjecthood in the countryside. The liberated subject owes its pol-itical capacities not to private property and self-ownership, but to public prop-erty and collective ownership, not to individual rights and participation in civilsociety, but to collective institutions and participation in political society.While the promise of enlightenment – in its socialist version of liberation –is also in China today represented by ‘the law’, the new era of ‘governingthrough law’ has led, in conjunction with market reforms and de-collectivisa-tion, to a decreasing representation of the peasant voice in public politics andto state abandonment. In this situation, peasants in Fujian re-owned ‘feudal’institutions such as temples and ancestral halls as spaces that allowed newlocal – both rightful and moral – publics to emerge. While continuing tobelieve in the promise of the law – participation, equality, popular sovereignty,and justice – such political values have been transferred to the confrontationalmoral sphere of popular religion, which, as ‘feudal superstition’, is todaytypically associated with ‘peasantness’.

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My article has further argued that property ideologies have been central tothe creation of modern subjects and that corruption therefore has become amain term through which failures in the making of such subjects are beingexpressed. The Chinese socialist state has consistently attacked non-accreditedpopular religion for giving rise to a backward subject, the ‘uncivilised’ peasant ofthe post-Maoist era, who is a source of moral, economic, and political corrup-tion and thereby threatens national progress. From the perspective of peasants,however, corruption results from the state sphere, from local governmentsabandoning their legal duties to work for collective welfare. ‘Feudal’ publics,which especially in southern China are sustained by an extensive ritualeconomy, can recreate productive relations between villagers and between vil-lagers and local cadres; they can re-enforce investments in (local) public benefitwhile allowing for a new type of civicness and of public participation and pol-itical visibility. It is in this space that the liberated peasant subject’s collectiveproperty link is being recreated. This process is constantly contested by apost-Maoist state interested in re-asserting the view of peasants as objectsrather than as subjects of development and seeking to establish state ownershipover a new individualised, civil peasant.

Popular religion in China has historically been the main arena of public par-ticipation in the countryside, where a local ‘we’ was created and where legiti-mate authority was being conferred and ‘the law in place’ established. It isprecisely because of this historical heritage, together with the socialist heritageof localised collectives representing public progress and popular sovereignty inplace, that public popular religion could become, after Mao, the place wherenew civic peasant publics could emerge. It can thus become a vehicle toreclaim the ‘law’s promise’ of liberation for China’s peasants and promotesecular values that concern the public sphere in rural China – beyond theissue of belief.

Notes1. The closest here is Feuchtwang’s (2002) Remnants of Revolution in China, where he

points to the ‘displacement of collectivism onto local loyalties’ and that new spiritualpractices are ‘influenced by the disciplines and standards of the recent socialist past’.But while he views these as ‘fossils’, I shall argue that they are part and parcel ofreclaiming political subjecthood for the ‘liberated peasant’.

2. On 22 April 1999, 10,000 followers of the Falungong (‘Wheel of Dharma’) movementdemonstrated at Zhongnanhai, the residential complex for leading Party officials inBeijing, against political repressions. This incident spawned a large-scale crackdownagainst ‘evil cults’ and ‘feudal superstition’, which has seen thousands of people incar-cerated.

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3. To the extent that in 2001, the Chinese government sought to suppress the use of theterm ‘civil society’ in newspapers and other publications.

4. Ca. E34 000–E41 000.

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Counterpolitics of Liberation

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