China had a long tradition of religiously inspired rebellion, and this chapter explores the ways in which folk religion fed into different forms of resistance in the Mao era. Popular protest in the Mao era was greater than has been assumed, but it was socio-economic and small-scale in characters, which did not prevent participants from believing that their protests had the blessing of the gods. It begins by looking at very low-level forms of resistance such as jokes as a way of lampooning authority; it goes on to explore the efforts of spirit mediums and others to stand up to authority in defence of folk religion, especially following the famine (1959–61) when people blamed disaster on the fact that they had denied the change to make sacrifices to the gods. Planned, organized rebellion was rare and was closely tied to the remnants of the redemptive religious societies. The chapter ends by looking at attempts by ordinary people to make themselves emperors and at millenarian risings, notably the Catholic rebellion in the Taiyuan region in 1965.

From the Socialist Education Movement onwards, folk religion specialists – now classed as ‘superstition professionals’ (akin to ‘religious professionals’) -- were targeted for re-education. Spirit mediums were singled out because of their number and their central role in healing. This was the prelude to the Four Olds Campaign inaugurated by the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when religious sites were destroyed and religious specialists came under attack from Red Guards, despite the fact that ‘religion’ was never named as one of the ‘four olds’. Two features of Cultural Revolution politics are explored: the use of iconoclasm – especially in relation to the Confucius Temple in Qufu; and the attempt to ‘revolutionize the environment’, which entailed renaming streets, shops, and consumer items, and painting buildings red. It ends with the fitful Campaign to Criticize Confucius and Lin Biao (1973–6), which engaged the rural and urban populace in a polemical critique of some simple Confucian texts.

Chapter 8 explores specifically anti-religious propaganda, arguing that initially this was relatively unfocused. The Great Leap Forward saw an attempt to propagate atheism through peasant philosophy teams and a mass campaign to get workers, peasants, and soldiers to write poems and songs discrediting belief in supernatural agency. The chapter explores the CCP’s appropriation of traditional cultural forms to erode popular belief in the agency of non-visible entities, focusing on long-form storytelling, revolutionary opera, and use of cinema for the same end. It briefly explores the onset of the Mao cult and the turn to small groups as a way of undermining folk religion, concentrating on a discussion among women in industry and a discussion in a village, again largely involving women, and suggests how taken-for-granted knowledge had become a terrain for different views.

This chapter examines ‘supernatural politics ’as practised most consciously by the Cultural Revolution Group during the Cultural Revolution, which used supernatural imagery to communicate the demonic dangers of ‘revisionism’, to exploit popular belief that surface appearances are innately deceptive (compare Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao), and to deploy modes of magical thinking (e.g. that like begets like; that things that have been in contact with one another continue to act on one another). Notwithstanding its highly ideologized content – capitalist roaders, line struggles, revisionism – Cultural Revolution discourse ‘worked’ by playing on the turbid world of yin forces.

Chapter 7 looks at the role of officials in carrying out religious policy. It begins with an analysis of their social profile from the 1950s to the Cultural Revolution and shows that despite officials’ rising literacy and improved political education, they found it hard to carry out a policy that demanded respect for religious freedom, on the one hand, and the elimination of folk religion, coded as ‘feudal superstition’. The chapter looks at four dimensions of officials’ involvement in implementing religious policy: their response to the destruction of lineages and to the persistence of lineage sentiment; their involvement in the levelling of gravesites during collectivization; their relationship to the popular upsurge to restore the ‘sacred village’ in the aftermath of the famine; and the support of a significant minority in sustaining folk religion. It shows grassroots officials displayed a variety of responses to folk religion, which affected the experiences of believers.

The redemptive religious societies represented a form of religiosity that spread rapidly in the disturbed conditions of the 1920s and 1930s. Most societies had a semi-Buddhist, millennial character, offering members the prospect of surviving the third kalpa, or cosmic cycle, which they associated with the arrival of the Maitreya Buddha. Most were non-political, but certain leaders of the largest of the societies, the Yiguandao, collaborated with the Japanese during the war and later with the Guomindang. The chapter looks at the beliefs and forms of these societies and the reasons for the CCP’s animus against them. It recounts the suppression of the societies from 1950 but shows that they were never completely eliminated. Subsequent sections examine the social profile of the societies and the nature of their appeal, including to some CCP members, and asks how and why the societies survived repression.

This chapter examines the fate of Buddhism and Daoism, mainly in relation to folk religion, looking at Buddhist monks and nuns, lay Buddhists, and Buddhists who ran local temples. It discusses the two main forms of Daoist monasticism – Complete Perfection (Quanzhen) and Orthodox Unity (Zhengyi dao) – and household Daoists, who were married and had jobs but who provided ritual services to their communities. It shows that the majority of monks and nuns were forced out of religious life following land reform but also that monastic life persisted fitfully until the Cultural Revolution. It looks at the responses of Buddhists to the new regime and at the efforts of Chinese Buddhist Association and the Chinese Daoist Association to carry out reform of their structures and theologies. It shows that a small number of former monks and nuns continued to sell ritual services to individuals and local communities, especially for funerals, while household Daoists and musical associations sometimes continued to operate into the Cultural Revolution.

Chapter 1 explores the discourse of ‘superstition’ (mixin) from the New Culture Movement (1915–20s) to the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), focusing on the intersection of the categories of ‘superstition’, ‘religion’, and ‘science’. Nationalist intellectuals and Guomindang leaders counterposed superstition to modern religion, seeing the former as an impediment to China’s becoming a modern nation-state. A strong theme in the discourse of the CCP was to counterpose superstition to science, and the chapter discusses briefly efforts to propagate scientific knowledge of the natural world. It examines the efforts of the CCP to rethink what religious policy might mean in a country where ‘religion’ did not conform to the implicitly European conception of religion that underpinned the Marxist–Leninist tradition.

The CCP rejected an ‘anti-religious’ policy such as the Soviet Union had developed in favour of one that reflected its commitment to a ‘united front’ with loyal and progressive religious leaders. It involved the setting up of five state-regulated national associations for each of the five religions the regime recognized – Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Christianity, and Catholicism. With the move to the phase of ’socialist construction’, the united front policy came under attack from leftists. Despite efforts by the United Front Work Department to maintain the policy from the Socialist Education Movement (1963–6), the policy mutated into an anti-religious policy that reached its apogee with the Cultural Revolution. The chapter explores how the Chinese Buddhist Association and the Chinese Daoist Association, set up in 1953 and 1957, were affected by the changing policy.

Supernatural politics is a theme that runs through the preceding chapters. It is intended to show how efforts to indigenize Communism by the CCP drew consciously and unconsciously on traditional religious culture, even though this was only ever one mode of political legitimation. It is hard to measure its effectiveness in promoting the legitimacy of the regime, although it certainly served to mystify the workings of power. Through an assessment of the CCP’s reliance on repression, its failure to forge a new-style religious policy based on the united front, its organizational incoherence, divisions among its grassroots cadres, popular resistance in defence of folk religion, its policies to improve health and popularize science, it concludes that the project to roll back the influence of the recognized religions and eliminate ‘feudal superstition’ had only limited success. Judged from the perspective of religion, the party-state is shown to be much weaker than is often assumed.

The introduction examines the CCP’s hope to break with a Soviet-style anti-religious policy. It examines policies towards the five religions that it recognized – Buddhism, Daoism, Protestantism, Catholicism (Islam is not discussed), as well as towards the folk religion of the vast majority of Chinese which the Party did not recognize as a religion and dismissed as feudal superstition. The CCP’s initial aim was to create a united front with patriotic religion leaders. However, this came under attack from those who increasingly saw religion as an obstacle to socialist advance. Through propaganda, campaigns and scientific education, the regime aimed to eradicate popular belief in supernatural agency. At the same time, it sought to bolster its legitimacy through what is called ‘supernatural politics’, i.e. the use of supernatural imagery and Confucian values to communicate its messages. This led to tensions within the ruling ideology. The introduction uses the steady move towards repression of religion to reflect on the unhappy relationship of Marxism to religion in general.

This chapter explores the influence of Confucian culture on the political culture of the CCP, with a particular focus on the latter’s attempt to establish a revolutionary morality. Having analysed different views of Confucius within the Party leadership, it reviews the debate among intellectuals about Confucianism, which reached its peak in the early 1960s. By the Cultural Revolution, Confucian values had come under fierce attack. It explores the CCP’s relation to specific Confucian values, such as loyalty, family relations, filial piety, benevolence, ‘conscience’, hard work, and the pursuit of wealth. It rejects the idea of the CCP as a ‘Confucian Leninist party’, concluding that its appropriation of elements in the Confucian tradition was often unconscious and always fraught with tension.

This chapter examines the regulation of Protestantism through the Three-Self Movement. Liberal Protestants, like progressive Buddhists, tended to view the Communist accession to power fairly positively, even though it meant that foreign missionaries were expelled. Indigenous denominations were more hostile to the CCP. Things were considerably worse for Roman Catholics, at least for those who were unwilling to break their tie with the Vatican. The Patriotic Catholic Church proved difficult to establish, and no sooner had it been set up in 1957 than its priests and bishops found themselves caught up in the surge of anti-religious leftism. The chapter shows how the Socialist Education Movement tried to use techniques honed during land reform, such as ‘speaking bitterness’, to split insular Catholic villages along class lines. The chapter shows how at the grassroots both Protestant and Catholics fell back on informal networks as churches were closed and clerics arrested. In the case of the Protestant houses, the grassroots movement actually grew during Cultural Revolution.