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LAW, RELIGION, AND SOCIETY IN CHINA: A CONTESTED TERRAIN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2020

Joshua T. Mauldin
Joshua T. Mauldin*
Affiliation:
Associate Director, Center of Theological Inquiry
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Abstract

The tumult of the twentieth century had a great impact on the role of religion in Chinese society. Antipathy toward religion reached its height in China during the Cultural Revolution, one of the few times in history when religion was almost completely wiped out in a single country. Religion in China has experienced a resurgence since the beginning of the Reform and Opening Up period in 1978. With the renewal of religious practice, new proposals have been put forward for the role of religious ideas in public life. In addition to the endurance of Marxist and liberal conceptions of the place of religion in society, new voices have emerged, arguing for return to Confucianism as the source of moral vitality in public life, or advancing Christian public theology as a moral resource for individuals adrift and alienated by the rapid changes of a modernizing economy. These realities have reshaped debates about the protection of religious freedom in China. This article introduces these new social and discursive realities and sets the stage for the articles that follow.

Keywords

religion in Chinareligious freedomchurch and statelaw and religion
Type
Symposium: Debating Religion and Public Life in Contemporary China
Information
Journal of Law and Religion , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , April 2020 , pp. 102 - 112
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University 2020

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References

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27 Chow deploys a model of generational cohorts to organize three basic generations of Protestant public intellectuals in China in the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first. Chow, Chinese Public Theology, chapters 2–4.

28 In English, the term “Cultural Christian” can be misleading. In English it connotes individuals who are shaped by the religious culture of their society but who themselves do not practice the religion or go to church. Wenhua jidutu, by contrast, are scholars who are interested in the intellectual and culture resources of Christianity.

29 For more on these figures, see the appendix in Chow, Chinese Public Theology, 169–74. As Pan-Chiu Lai underscores in his article, the Shouwang Church in Beijing has engaged in forms of protest against governmental interference in their religious practice. Pan-Chiu Lai, “Subordination, Separation, and Autonomy.” The Early Rain Church led by Wang Yi has also come into conflict with the government. See “A Letter from Autumn Rain Church,” Chinese Law and Religion Monitor 5, no. 2 (2009): 17–22Google Scholar; Yi, Wang, “The Ban on the Autumn Rain Church: Q&A with Radio Free Asia Correspondent,” Chinese Law and Religion Monitor 5, no. 2 (2009): 23–29Google Scholar; Tongsu, Liu, “Significance of Nine Sundays: Analysis of the Autumn Rain Church Incident,” Chinese Law and Religion Monitor 5, no. 2 (2009): 93–98Google Scholar.

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31 Fällman, “Calvin, Culture, and Christ?,”159–60.

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36 The 95 Theses of Early Rain Reformed Church are discussed in more depth in Pan-Chiu Lai's article. Pan-Chui Lai, “Subordination, Separation, and Autonomy.”

37 Paul Mozur and Ian Johnson, “China Sentences Wang Yi, Christian Pastor, to 9 Years in Prison,” New York Times, December 30, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/30/world/asia/china-wang-yi-christian-sentence.html.

38 As Vala and Jianbo conclude, “until a 2014 crackdown began, the rapid expansion of Sina Weibo, alongside other microblogging services, and the active engagement of these three prominent Protestant personalities … had been unsettling party-state boundaries on religious discourse, exposing millions of Chinese to Protestant Christianity, and also challenging simplistic ideas about faith and biblical understanding among existing Christians.” Carsten Vala and Huang Jianbo, “Three High-Profile Protestant Microbloggers in Contemporary China,” 185.

39 Chow, “Calvinist Public Theology in Urban China Today,” 173.

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50 Xianfa article 36 (1982) (as amended), http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw/englishnpc/Constitution/node_2825.htm. All quotations are to the official English language translation.

51 Xianfa article 36.

52 As I discuss later in this section, the debate also hinges on the distinction in Chinese between freedom of religion and freedom of religious belief. The Chinese government protects freedom of religious belief (zongjiao xinyang ziyou), not freedom of religion (zongjiao ziyou).

53 Songfeng Li, “Freedom in Handcuffs.” This raises larger questions about the legal status of the Constitution in the governance of China and about whether China adheres to the rule of law, as opposed to rule by law. For more, see Peerenboom, Randall, China's Long March toward Rule of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Chow observes that rule by law (fazhi 法制) and rule of law (fazhi 法治) are “homophones and a pun in the Chinese language.” Chow, Chinese Public Theology, 101–02.

54 See Palmer, David A., “Heretical Doctrines, Reactionary Secret Societies, Evil Cults: Labeling Heterodoxy in Twentieth-Century China,” in Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation, ed. Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 113–34Google Scholar. Citing Palmer, Chow refers to “Confucian binaries of ‘orthodox’ (zheng) and ‘heterodox’ (xie), the latter of which has resulted in polemics around what is a xiejiao—meaning ‘heterodox teaching,’ or, in modern usage, ‘evil cult.’” Chow, Chinese Public Theology, 151n13.

55 For an analysis of religious liberty in the United States that focuses on the secular character of government, grounded in the Establishment clause, rather than primarily on religious rights grounded in the free exercise clause, see Lupu, Ira C. and Tuttle, Robert W., Secular Government, Religious People (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014)Google Scholar.

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60 John P. Burgess, “Spiritual Freedom,” First Things, February 2017, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/02/spiritual-freedom.