Traditional marriage was a transaction between two families, negotiated by a matchmaker. Through the Mao era, marriage remained focused on reproducing the ancestral line, but new ideas of love and free choice of partner gained ground. The chapter examines the supernatural practices that established the compatibility of a potential couple, the transfer of the bride to her husband’s house, the bride’s laments, and other practices. The chapter analyses beliefs and practices around fertility, including taboos around female pollution. The 1950 Marriage Law sought to eliminate ‘feudal’ aspects of traditional marriage and there was resistance to it in rural areas, especially over its divorce provisions. Significant change took place, evinced in the rise in the average age of marriage and a decline in female infanticide. Marriage registration became the norm in towns and grew steadily in the countryside, providing something akin to a wedding ceremony. The chapter explores CCP efforts to promote companionate marriage whilst stressing the duties of a couple to the collective. It ends with the drive to eliminate extravagance from weddings.

This chapter examines what the authorities called ‘mass superstitious incidents’ that took place in the early 1950s. These involved the movement of large numbers of people in search of holy water and sacred medicine. They were inspired to travel by the belief that sacred medicine had been brought down to earth by gods who were exhibiting their spiritual efficacy. It was an opportunity to access healing without the mediation of ritual specialists. The chapter looks at the role of stories of miraculous cures in spreading the phenomenon. Those who partook of sacred medicine explained that they did so because the level of rural healthcare was so dismal. Local officials were disconcerted by these events, not least because Beijing emitted conflicting signals on how local officials should respond. In a handful of cases pilgrims, stood up to attempts to shut down the sacred sites. As rural healthcare improved, pilgrimage for sacred medicine declined.

The chapter examines how and why ordinary people petitioned gods and other non-visible entities, such as spirits, ‘immortals’ (仙 xian), protective saints, or ancestors, for favours of all kinds. In return for offerings of food and drink and the burning of ritual items, such as incense, oil, paper images, paper money, charms, or printed prayers, they asked for help, cures for illness, the birth of a son, protection against evil forces, or success in business or examinations.

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 discusses ghosts and demons. Ghosts were a capacious and ill-defined category. People feared ghosts but might also pity them. The annual Ghost Festival on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month marks the moment when ghosts enter the yang world. Buddhist and sometimes Daoist priests perform pudu, the rite of universal salvation, and ordinary folk put out food for ghosts to eat. Demons are an altogether more chaotic and violent force. A major dimension of folk religion is concerned to protect communities against demonic attack. Ritual specialists, especially Daoist priests and yin-yang masters, devise complex liturgies to keep demon armies at bay. The chapter looks at the role of ghosts in folk entertainment, particularly ‘ghost opera’. It shows that the attitude of the CCP was contradictory. Mao Zedong, like many members of the educated classes, valued this art form and backed efforts to reform it. Much of the content of ghost opera, however, could not be reconciled with materialism and revolutionary values, and after an aborted effort at reform, Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, succeeded in banning it (although in practice the ban was never completely effective).