Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaigns against Popular Religion in Early Twentieth-Century China

Abstract

Ever since the enlightenment—the dawn of the modern era—historical understanding has been much concerned with the passage to modernity. In our present century, questions and dilemmas of the transition to modernity and the evaluation of “tradition” in the non-Western world have been central to the historical problematique the world over. I have chosen to analyze the modernist understanding of this historical transition in China not only among professional historians in the West, but among Chinese advocates of modernity. Specifically, I will examine the campaigns attacking popular religion during the first three decades of this century. As a movement advocating the establishment of a rational society, these campaigns offer a view of the understanding of this transition, not just in theory and historiography, but in practice.

Philanthropie bouddhiste et politiques sociales en Chine: la possibilité d'une sociabilité nouvelle?

“…An important issue of contention was the availability of resources to deliver education, but ideology itself was also at stake, as explain Ji Zhe and the contributors to a special issue on the subject in the journal Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident (2011). Hence, when the republican and the socialist regimes in China sought to spread education to the population, they decided to harness the material resources of religious institutions to meet their objectives, seizing their land and property in an attempt to turn temples into schools (Goossaert and Palmer, 2010;Ashiwa, 2009: 52-55;Nedostup, 2009;Goossaert, 2006;Duara, 1991).…”

“…Studies on the states' attempt to use temples to serve its own social programs in education and health care during the late Qing dynasty and the early Republican period reveals important differences between China and the situation experienced in the West that remain relevant today (Goossaert and Palmer, 2010;Nedostup, 2009;Goossaert, 2006;Duara, 1991). While the state tried to establish its authority in China in the early twentieth century, it did not have to deal with a single unified institution like the Catholic Church.…”

“…As Ashiwa (2009: 55) and Welch (1968) both noted, Buddhism had suffered a series of setbacks since the Taiping Rebellion. They also endured persecution during the modernizing campaigns to turn temples into schools during the Late Qing and the early Republican era (Ashiwa, 2009: 49-55;Duara, 1991;Welch 1968). Although the religion went through a modern reform movement with the monk Taixu (Pittman, 2001), it was constrained by conditions prevailing under the periods of warlordism, the Japanese invasion, and the Civil War.…”

Social movements in China and Hong Kong: the expansion of protest space

“…This is all the more remarkable given that temple religion has been the object of repeated campaigns to destroy popular religion since the late nineteenth century, for both ideological reasons -the struggle against superstition -and practical ones -the expropriation and conversion of temples, which were usually the largest buildings in a town or village, into the infrastructure of an expanding modern state: schools, tax collection departments, police stations, army barracks, or government offices. The political significance of converting temples, as self-organising nodes of local society, into the specialised branches of a centralised bureaucracy was not lost on local residents and modernising activists alike who, throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, often clashed over the uses and appropriations of temples (Prazniak 1999;Duara 1991;Goossaert 2006).…”

“…While the process involved the rebuilding and reopening of temples that had previously existed, the social context in which temple religion was reviving was completely different from that in which its traditional organisational forms had developed. The land endowments which had previously sustained temple operations had been appropriated by the state and redistributed to the farmers, and the gentry society and traditional political economy through which temples had played their social role at the centre of what Duara has called the 'cultural nexus of power' (Duara 1988) no longer existed. If, in the first half of the twentieth century, temples could be seen as organic emanations of the old, 'feudal' order against which social movements mobilised peasants, workers, and women, the tables were reversed in the post-Mao era: while the socialist order retreated from its revolutionary voluntarism, it was temple construction which mobilised people around new projects, often virtually from scratch and in an agonistic relationship with the state.…”