Conducting research in authoritarian regimes is a tricky business. These regimes lack transparency, their inner workings are hidden from view, political winds shift often, there are limits to the information we can collect, and political elites are seldom “helpful” in the kind of data they provide. Research, in short, rarely goes as planned. These problems tend to be compounded when the topic of interest is considered politically sensitive. This not only heightens the risks for informants and local colleagues, but also discourages regime representatives from proving any information lest they be accused of sharing “state secrets.” And yet despite these obstacles, or perhaps even because of them, we are drawn to the study of the authoritarian political project.

To navigate the uncertainty of autocracy and sort out the many factors shaping religious-state interaction, this project draws on several methods including in-depth interviews, participant observation, political ethnography, and archival research. Data was collected during twenty-eight months of site-intensive field research divided between Russia and China from 2005 through 2007 and again in 2010 and 2012. Fieldwork was based primarily in four cities (Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, Russia; Changchun and Shanghai, China) and includes more than 185 semistructured interviews with local government officials, religious leaders and adherents, representatives of faith-based NGOs, and religious studies experts. In both countries, I interviewed local government officials and bureaucrats responsible for registering and monitoring religious groups. For instance, in Russia I met with municipal-level bureaucrats from the Ministry of Justice (Ministerstvo justicii RF) and the Council of Religious Matters for the Cabinet of the Republic of Tatarstan (Sovet po delam religij pri kabinete ministrov respubliki tatarstan), and in China with district-level bureaucrats from the Religious Affair Bureau (zongjiao ju). However, because religious management is a sensitive issue in both countries, negotiating access to government officials and bureaucrats at times was limited, and responses rarely strayed from official rhetoric. As a result, interviews were supplemented with additional open sources to better capture the interaction of religious and local governments and how their relationship changed over time, such as government speeches, local newspapers, historical gazetteers, archival materials, legal documents, and religious organizations’ printed media.