ABSTRACT
One unforeseen consequence of China’s market reforms has been a resurgence of popular interest in religious traditions and spiritual practices. Like the erosion of institutional structures that presaged the fall of dynasties in imperial times, the dismantling of Mao-era organizations, the relaxation of centralized control over local decision-making, and the opening of Chinese markets have created conditions favorable to the proliferation of heterodox sects and popular quasi-religious practices. Syncretic sects have emerged in large numbers during the reform era, some springing back to life and taking root in their native soil several decades after Communist officials supposedly eradicated them in the early 1950s. Shrine building, temple fairs, geomancy and rituals of exorcism have been revived in the Chinese countryside since 1978, and church attendance and recruitment are rising in China’s cities as well. 1
The revival of popular interest in spiritual matters has not gone unnoticed by Party and state officials. The emergence of heterodox groups has proved vexatious to authorities throughout Chinese history, and the current period is no exception. From 1980-82, campaigns to eradicate “feudal superstitious activities” were carried out in Shaanxi, Hainan and Anhui. In 1985, one Ministry of Public Security report lamented that the explosion of “reactionary sects and societies . . . formed the largest source of counter-revolution in the struggle against us” in the post-Mao era, and furthermore predicted that the effort to suppress such groups would surely be “a long-term and protracted one.”2
