Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity by Rebecca Nedostup (review)

Abstract

128 Journal of Chinese Religions Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity REBECCA NEDOSTUP. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, distributed by Harvard University Press, 2009. Harvard East Asian Monographs 322. xiv, 459 pages. ISBN 978-0-674-03599-7. US$45.00,£33.95, €40.50 hardcover. In Superstitious Regimes, Rebecca Nedostup sketches the history of secularism during the Nanjing decade of the Republic of China, from 1927 to 1937. In the opening of the book, she evokes how miraculous signs, reported by the press following the victory of the Northern expedition in 1928—a chicken laying an egg with a twelve-pointed KMT star on it; a crab with the markings “unite all under heaven” (統一天下)—caused a malaise among secular KMT officials. While such signs were the auspicious omens of a new dynasty’s mandate of heaven, the new republican regime could only claim the mandate of the people, not of heaven—and so, one official, Zhang Zhenzhi 張振之, glossed the reports as signs of the hopes and expectations of the “psyches” 心 理 of the people (pp. 2–3)—recasting the traditional, spiritual legitimation into an expression of the peoples’ will. This story shows the dilemmas faced by the KMT, as it attempted to build a new nation on foundations entirely alien to those which had integrated and legitimized the Chinese empire and local societies for over 2000 years—unable to brush away the old forms of legitimation, it could only try to recast them into its own mold. On the one hand, this project entailed applying the Westernderived concepts of “religion” and “superstition,” institutionalizing the one and eradicating the other—the temples, rituals, and religious specialists which had been essential components of the social fabric. Superstitious Regimes provides a meticulously researched account of this process of elaborating new categories and imposing them on society, as it played itself out in debates among intellectuals, religious activists and politicians; as it found bureaucratic expression through surveys and regulations on temple registration and ritual specialists; as it influenced redemptive societies such as the Daoyuan 道院 and the Tongshanshe 同善社; and as its implementation encountered the resistance and creative adaptations of local communities. On the other hand, this was also a sacralizing process, involving the elaboration of new rituals and sacred places and times, to mould the citizens of the nation into a new “affective regime.” But, since the nation could not be built in a vacuum, it could only have recourse to elements of past tradition, on the condition that they be purged of their position within the traditional cosmology, and recast within the limits of the secular ideology of the nation-state. Figures such as the Yellow Emperor, Confucius, and Guan Yu 關羽 could thus be honored, but only as “worthies” and “heroes,” intended to be remembered as symbols of the nation, but which people continued to worship as spiritual powers for themselves and their Book Reviews 129 families. Nedostup considers the imposition of the new, Gregorian calendar and the banning of the Chinese lunar calendar, the New Year celebrations, the Ghost festival, funerals, cemeteries, and commemorative ceremonies for ancient heroes and sages of the nation. But, as she aptly points out, “the ritual environment in China, centered as it was on the concept of efficacy, raised a very particular question regarding nationalist ceremony: what would it do?” (p. 284). The desired “efficacy” of the nationalist rituals was, of course, to give body and life to the nation, through its own self-representation. Nedostup’s account, and the questions she raises, may lead us to reflect on how the KMT were, in fact, Durkheimian modernists. Recall that Durkheim argued that religion is the expression of social unity, it is society’s worship of itself; the deity or totem is the society’s unconscious self-representation. And he implied that a modern society, conscious of its own reality, would be able to assure its cohesion through a civil religion, eliminating the need for a supernatural reference. The KMT project thus appears as an attempt to engineer such a civil religion as an expression of a self-referential nation, replacing the ancestors and deities who were the expression of family, clan, local and regional...