The Politics of Protestant Churches and the Party-State in China

God Above Party?

Carsten Vala

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138036901
• eBook ISBN: 9781351712668
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Among China's restive religious and social groups, Protestants have arguably created the most sustained structural challenges to the Chinese Communist Party's ordering of society. By drawing on grassroots fieldwork conducted across the country, this book therefore charts the ambition of the government to restrain Protestant population growth and direct it towards regime purposes.

In particular, interviews with key church leaders who founded illegal Protestant congregations with hundreds of participants, reveal how officials and illegal congregational leaders have developed ties of trust and information that have permitted church growth, even as they preserve a public image of Party domination. Thus, by tracing the rise of large, illegal Protestant congregations apart from Party-state structures, this book highlights the importance of the public behaviour of religious actors and regime officials in understanding the dynamics of negotiation, domination, and resistance in 21st century China. Ultimately, The Politics of Protestant Churches and the Party-State in China paradoxically demonstrates that societal actors can alter the boundaries set by the Chinese Communist Party and the ways in which the Party is both more adaptive and resilient in its relations with society than first imagined.

Offering the first book-length analysis of how ambitious Protestants have founded large, unregistered churches despite regime pressure, this book will be useful for students and scholars of Chinese Politics, Chinese Religion and Sociology.

1 Introduction

Two weeks before Easter Sunday 2011, Beijing police blocked dozens of Chinese Protestants from gathering for Sunday worship services at an outdoor plaza, whisking them away in buses to police stations throughout the capital. Security agents prevented dozens more church members and leaders from leaving their homes in neighborhoods across the city. Most of these Protestants were members of Beijing Shouwang Church, a large unregistered congregation that faced repression after attempting to register with the state without Chinese Communist Party supervision.¹ Since that Sunday, Chinese worshipers and police repeated the same routine hundreds of times from 2011 to 2014.

This standoff appears to confirm the expectations of a large scholarly literature on conflict between religions and authoritarian regimes. According to this perspective, clashes erupt because religious adherents propose an alternate source of loyalty in a divine power beyond secular authority (e.g., Juergensmeyer 2008; Moen and Gustafson 1992; Smith 1996) or because authoritarian states struggle to co-opt popular religious institutions to bolster their often-weak legitimacy (Johnston and Figa 1988; Linz 1996 [2004]; Ramet and Treadgold 1995; Toft et al. 2011). Further, religious groups, as critical elements of civil society, also may mobilize to challenge dictatorial rule (Angi 2011; Baer 2006; Im 2006; Osa 2003; Weigle and Butterfield 1992; Wittenberg 2006). This literature predicts widespread, unremitting clashes between religious groups and authoritarian rulers, especially for very large illegal religious groups that eschew covert gatherings. And yet in China, frequent, high-profile conflict is remarkably uncommon (see Koesel 2014 for church-state cooperation as the norm).

Therefore, the Beijing Shouwang conflict is surprising precisely because it is unusual, rather than emblematic of most religion-state relations in contemporary China. More typical is the negotiated emergence of religious groups. In fact, while Beijing Shouwang church was growing, Protestants established a dozen other large groups and gathered hundreds of participants in congregations in Beijing, Chengdu, and Shanghai without registering them with the state, in contradiction to religion policy. This growth of large illegal religious groups is one surprise. A second surprise is that authorities only repressed a few of these congregations, such as Beijing Shouwang church, rather than all of them.² Explaining authoritarian state-religion relations solely in conflictual terms fails to capture the variation in actual interactions.

While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) center in Beijing certainly still depicts Christianity as a threat to its rule, this book recognizes that local Party-state strategies actually range from repression to negotiation and accommodation, challenging a popular narrative that pits atheist Communist Party forces against Chinese Christian churches (e.g., ChinaAid 2009; Jacobs 2011b) and bringing studies of Chinese Christianity in line with analyses of other religious groups in China (e.g., Ashiwa and Wank 2009). Understanding the variation in church-state interactions suggests answers to three questions: given that the Party-state authorizes official churches, what role do they play in the regime’s approach to Protestant Christianity? Second, in contrast to the expectations of conflict between religion and authoritarianism, how have so many large, illegal groups grown in the face of authoritarian power? Third, under what conditions do authoritarian regimes repress illegal religious groups in society?

The role of official Protestant associations and churches

The first set of questions focuses on contemporary China and the role played by state-sanctioned organizations, such as China’s Protestant bridge associations and official churches, especially in a setting in which many illegal groups form and expand their activities. Studying China today, many scholars have noted the dual, conflicting roles of official religious and social organizations, caught between their incorporation into the Party-state and their putative representational role for society (Chan 1993, 50; Chen 2009, 663; Gallagher 2004, 426–7; Howell 2004, 150–1; Jie 2004, 175–7; Kindopp 2004, 129–32). Authoritarian regimes grant such organizations, which scholars most often analyze in terms of state corporatism (Unger and Chan 1995; Schmitter 1974), a representational monopoly over specific populations that bolsters their political “voice” in policymaking discussions but also limits their capacity for independent advocacy (Hsu and Hasmath 2012). With the rise of illegal groups competing to meet societal needs, the roles of official groups may be shifting, along with the scholarly debate about their impact.

Studies of labor unions and women’s organizations point to the competition (and at times complementarity) between official and illegal groups and, by consequence, their differentiated functions. The embeddedness of the official All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) in Party-state structures, for example, means that rather than mobilize workers in defense of their interests as unions typically do, the ACFTU mediates between workers on one side and managers and the state, on the other side (Chen 2003, 1012; Chen 2010). The official union’s close state ties grant it influence in policymaking but its grass-roots branches remain ineffective, as they are subordinate to local political authorities (Chen 2009, 684).³ Similarly, the institutional status of the official All China Women’s Federation empowers it to shape policy (Zheng 2000, 68) but not to fill women’s needs at the grassroots, a role that unregistered women’s groups have begun to do (Jie 2004, 184–7).

These studies suggest that official groups, at least in the spheres of labor and gender, primarily project images of state power, are far from autonomous in their orientation, and admit little space for independent initiative under state auspices (but see Lu 2007 and Teets 2013). Founded by the authoritarian regime, the labor union and women’s federation engage in activities that are closely linked to the agenda of rulers. Chinese Protestantism represents an interesting case because although official and unregistered groups exist just as they do for the women’s sphere, a majority of Protestants worship in unregistered settings and the Protestant associations are less tightly linked to regime structures than other state-corporatist organizations.⁴ What role do official groups and their leaders play when state power is less efficacious and when powerful ideologies or religious belief systems shape official and unofficial groups and leaders alike?

The spread and survival of illegal religious groups

A second set of questions concerns the ways that illegal groups start and spread and persist under authoritarian conditions, which ultimately links to questions of authoritarian resilience. Scholars have viewed isolation from state structures in the form of “free spaces” (Polletta 1999) as a critical element for the “cultural work” (Scott 1985, 1990) done by upstart groups seeking to challenge domination by rulers. Domination is the Party-state’s undisputed authority and power to govern society and to determine the permissibility, nature, and extent of religious activities. In such small-scale settings, challengers escape social control, cultivate solidarity through frequent participation (Coleman 1990), and create a “cultural challenge” that makes a way for or accompanies political mobilization (Polletta 1999, 1). These factors suggest that the particular meanings that develop in sheltered locations attract participants to these groups. At later stages, as they increase in size, such groups outside state sanction also need to survive regime harassment, for which they must develop strong norms and solidarity. At the same time, widespread mobilization of illegal social and religious groups outside the authoritarian structures of state corporatism may lead to the failure of regimes, as in the final stages of the collapse of Eastern European Communist states (Di Palma 1991, 75–8; Osa 2003). Yet in authoritarian regimes that are considered to be “resilient” (Dimitrov 2013; Nathan 2003), surveillance and monitoring of such groups is assumed to be strong.⁵ Taken together, these theories seem to imply that officials in strong authoritarian states intentionally allow illegal groups to take root and grow in the “safe spaces” or “havens” (Gamson 1996; Hirsch 1993) that exist in the “creases,” “crevices,” or “cracks” of authoritarian power (Howell 2004, 153; Sewell 2001; Vala and O’Brien 2008, 122). And, further, if authoritarians do permit groups to form, is this permissiveness a prelude to formal incorporation of such groups into state structures (Tsai 2007) or to suppression as banned groups? The answer contributes to larger debates about the degree to which authoritarians in China and elsewhere are “resilient” authoritarians who flexibly adapt with new, temporary mechanisms of oversight (Tsai 2007) or if they are rigidly unable to stay abreast of societal changes (Dimitrov 2013).

Selective suppression of mobilizing groups and resistance in authoritarian regimes

A third set of questions asks why authoritarian regimes choose to repress some religious groups and not others. At first glance, it may appear that the public dimension of Beijing Shouwang Church’s confrontation provoked its repression by the authoritarian Chinese regime. In reality, however, Shouwang’s attempts to organize worship services in public spaces represented the outcome of a longer period of harassment in which authorities had singled out the Shouwang congregation over other large illegal congregations in Beijing. What prompted authorities’ targeting of this congregation (and of specific congregations in other cities)?

Of course, it is understandable that authoritarians repress direct challenges to their rule, as when the syncretic sect Falun Gong amassed tens of thousands of middle-aged Chinese in silent ranks around the seat of national power, prompting a brutal Chinese Communist Party eradication campaign (cf. Chlopak 2001; Tong 2002). At the same time, authoritarian regimes often accord religion a privileged place because they need the domestic and international legitimacy that comes from the support of religious populations, and so they offer religious actors limited autonomy in exchange for political loyalty (Gill 2007; Johnston and Figa 1988; Osa 2003; Potter 2003; Werth 2014). For example, Serbian regime leaders promoted Orthodoxy as a core element of Serbian identity to support their ethnic nationalist goals and in turn offered church leaders the platform to address public issues (Ramet 1995, 175).

Yet this autonomy also makes religious actors a source of state concern and a target for surveillance, because religious organizations are some of the most vigorous civil society associations. They enjoy voluntary participation across societal divisions, cultivate links to transnational networks, and draw steadfast supporters behind charismatic leaders (Koesel 2014, 3; Smith 1996; Philpott 2007). Moreover, religious sites can also catalyze activism beyond religious populations in society, as attested by the mobilization of the Muslim Brotherhood during the Arab Spring in the 2010s or by the roles played by the Polish Catholic Church and the East German Lutheran Church in the late 1980s downfall of Eastern European Communist regimes (Coleman 1991; Opp et al. 1995, 119–23; Osa 1997, 2003: 15–16, 176; but see Hoffman and Jamal 2014).

Yet it is still a puzzle why authoritarians selectively repress one group over others of the same type, especially before a group poses a public threat to regime power or draws large followings in society.

A related question is how religious actors generally face challenges in an authoritarian context. Much of the authoritarian state-religion literature focuses on cases in which leaders of state-recognized religious organizations take action, either to mobilize adherents to defend religious causes (such as the Polish Catholic Church initiating millennial celebrations) or to catalyze wider mobilization by offering space in religious venues or resources to civic actors (such as Nicaraguan churches supplying Sandinista rebels with food and medical care) (Coleman 1991; Johnston and Figa 1988, 36; Opp et al. 1995; Osa 2003). When state pressures result, established religious actors like the Catholic Church have drawn upon long-standing popular legitimacy, broad institutional presence, and moral authority to defend themselves (Osa 2003, 59, 63, 75). Further, because many authoritarians fear losing domestic and international legitimacy from entirely suppressing state-recognized religious organizations (although individual leaders have been imprisoned), religious actors tend to worry less about organizational survival and more about maintaining support among the population. Illegal religious groups must be even more circumspect about the types of interactions they pursue with autho...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 From domination to negotiation from 1949 to today: declining state capacity, rising Protestant numbers
• 3 The role of official associations: projecting a fa栤e of domination in the public transcript
• 4 Resisting the official agenda, sharing grassroots values: the spread of Protestant groups
• 5 Cultivating social capital as a resource for Protestant resistance
• 6 Enlarging the bounds of the public transcript: founding large, public urban churches
• 7 Repression of an urban church: Shanghai Wanbang Church
• 8 Challenging the bounds of the public transcript: Beijing Shouwang Church
• 9 Conclusion
• Appendix: list of interviews, 2002–14
• Glossary
• Index