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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

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.cecc.gov

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS

Senate House

CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska, Chairman

SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas

GORDON SMITH, Oregon

JIM DEMINT, South Carolina

MEL MARTINEZ, Florida

MAX BAUCUS, Montana

CARL LEVIN, Michigan

DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California

BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota

JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa, Co-Chairman

DAVID DREIER, California

FRANK R. WOLF, Virginia

JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania

ROBERT B. ADERHOLT, Alabama

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)

(III)

C O N T E N T S

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

(1)

UNOFFICIAL RELIGION IN CHINA: BEYOND

THE PARTY’S RULES

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 Partycontrolled 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

2

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

3

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 micromanage 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 latiVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:44 Jun 29, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00007 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 21814.TXT China1 PsN: China1
4

tude 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.

5

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

6

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 Internetbased 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 SociVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:44 Jun 29, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00010 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 21814.TXT China1 PsN: China1
7

ety 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 Webbased 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.

8

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 premodern 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

9

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.

10

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.

11

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.

12

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

13

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

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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

15

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

16

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 servVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:44 Jun 29, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00020 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 21814.TXT China1 PsN: China1
17

ices 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

18

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

19

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

20

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 realVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:44 Jun 29, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00024 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 21814.TXT China1 PsN: China1
21

ly 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

22

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-toone 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 oneon-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

23

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,

24

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 delegaVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:44 Jun 29, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00028 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 21814.TXT China1 PsN: China1
25

tion 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

26

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.]

(27)

A P P E N D I X

28

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 worldhistorical 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,

29

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

30

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 ‘‘revivallike’’ 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 ChiVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:44 Jun 29, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00034 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6621 21814.TXT China1 PsN: China1
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nese 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. Prerevolutionary spiritual traditions, resurrected, remixed and retransmitted to a largVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:44 Jun 29, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00035 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6621 21814.TXT China1 PsN: China1
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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. 2Transcript of Li Hongzhi’s meeting members of the press in Sydney, Australia on May 2,

1999, at http://www.falundafa.org/fldfbb/news990502.htm.

er audience via new information technologies, have resulted in unique hybrid form

of social mobilization that I refer to as cyber-sectarianism.1

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 highprofile 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

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

33

3Guan 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. 4The 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. 5 U.S. Newswire, ‘‘ ‘Campaign to Free Master Zhang Hongbao’ to Hold Press Conference Dec.

20,’’ (December 19, 2000).

[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.

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.

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

34

6The 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. 7The Information Centre was established by former Tiananmen Square student activist Liu

Siping after he fled mainland China in 1989. 8Sasha 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). 9Peter Svensson, ‘‘China Sect Claims Sites Under Attack,’’ Associated Press online report,

July 31, 1999. 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.

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

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.

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

35

12For examples, see several of the essays in Peter Ludlow, ed., Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates

and Pirate Utopias (Cambridge, Massachusetts The MIT Press, 2001). 13Susan V. Lawrence, ‘‘Faith and Fear,’’ Far Eastern Economic Review, April 20, 2000, p. 16. 1For 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 emVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:44 Jun 29, 2005 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00039 Fmt 6601 Sfmt 6621 21814.TXT China1 PsN: China1
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2Daniel 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). 3Prasenjit 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. 4Popular 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.

phasis 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.

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.

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

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

37

5Lily 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). 6On 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). 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). 8Weller, Robert P. Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan. Boulder,

CO: Westview, 1999.

committees tend to have better roads, newer schools, and other social goods.5 I will

return to this point below.

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.

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.

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

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9 Chau, Adam Yuet. Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China.

Stanford: Stanford University Press, i.p. 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.

its role especially where temples help organize local people to protect their welfare,

for example by protesting against polluting factories.

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.

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.

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.

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