Since the 1980s, China’s central government has reversed the Maoist radical political agenda and loosened its restrictions on religious practices. Christianity has consequently gone above ground and has witnessed a conspicuous revival. Cao (2007: 46) estimated that the number of Protestants in China increased more than 85-fold between 1949 and 2007, with an estimated 60 million Protestant Christians in the country. In the 2010s, overseas observers were predicting that China would have the largest Christian population in the world in the 2020s. But the authoritarian state continues to view religions as “potential rivals on ideological, organisational and financial grounds” (Lai 2006: 56). The very trends that observers cited in predicting the growth of Chinese Christianity have sparked a claim by the government that a “Protestant fever” is afflicting the country. Citing building and zoning violations, the government has instituted campaigns to remove crosses from the tops of church b...
Visibility in Dilemma: Institutional Work in the Regulatory Practices of Protestant Churches in Wenzhou, China
Abstract
Although scholars have explored the regulatory governance of Christianity at the local level, less attention has been paid to the ambiguity, tension, and inconsistency of the religious policies imposed by the central government and its challenges to local bureaucrats’ regulatory practices. Offering insight into the theory of institutional work, this article intends to address this gap, revealing how local bureaucrats in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, employ contextual solutions (e.g., discursive work, selective implementation, and operational work) to repair the top-down policy problems they encounter. In the post-Mao era, the visibility of local Protestant organisations, in a physical and metaphorical sense, has been entangled with contradictions in religious regulations and the central-local discrepancy.
Index terms
Index by keyword:
Protestantism, institutional work, informal regulation, discursive work, selective implementation, operational work, local bureaucrats.Editor’s notes
Manuscript received on 8 October 2022. Accepted on 14 March 2023.
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Full text document will be published online on June 2024.
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References
Bibliographical reference
Yujing Zhu and Yun Chen, “Visibility in Dilemma: Institutional Work in the Regulatory Practices of Protestant Churches in Wenzhou, China”, China Perspectives, 133 | -1, 9-18.
Electronic reference
Yujing Zhu and Yun Chen, “Visibility in Dilemma: Institutional Work in the Regulatory Practices of Protestant Churches in Wenzhou, China”, China Perspectives [Online], 133 | 2023, Online since 01 June 2024, connection on 02 October 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/15315; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/chinaperspectives.15315
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