Temple Fairs and the Republican State in North China

Abstract

TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA TEMPLE FAIRS AND THE REPUBLICAN STATE IN NORTH CHINA JAMES FLATH, UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN ONTARIO 39 Early in the fourth lunar month of 1928, the west-Shandong temple known as Shaodaishan (Little Mount Tai) awoke from a state of quiet retreat and opened its doors to a throng of people eager to join in worship and watch the theatricals of its annual fair. I The daily arrival of as many as ten thousand people also gave rise to an extensive market radiating out from the temple where farmers, householders , and merchants from as far away as Jining, over one hundred kilometers to the south, came to trade in livestock, tools, agricultural produce, and household wares. Later that year, however, the future of this event was called into doubt as local political activists entered the premises and destroyed the sacred images in the name of the anti-superstition policies that followed in the wake of the Guomindang's (GMD) Northern Expedition. The fair went into decline, but in 1931 the local government permitted the restoration of the images, and by 1932, Shaodaishan began to recover some of its former glory (SMD, 1933: 31). Shaodaishan's experience with ambiguous reform was symptomatic of the political uncertainties that emerged in North China in the wake of the tentative establishment of the GMD and its regional affiliates. The worst excesses of warlordism had been eliminated by military force, but the struggle for political legitimacy continued in the townships and villages of North China as local strongmen, government agents and administrative authorities maneuvered for control over whatever resources their localities had to offer, including temples and temple assets. GMD efforts to eradicate local belief systems through antisuperstition campaigns have been demonstrated by Prasenjit Duara (1995) and Roxann Prazniak (1999). Roger Thompson (1988) and Paul Bailey (1990) have I The term "temple fair" may appear as problematic for several reasons, but I have nonetheless retained it in this discussion for the following reasons. First, as Susan Naquin points out (2000: 20), Chinese religious institutions held a wide variety of designations including miao (temple), and si (monastery), but these did not necessarily indicate the function of the institution. In light of this I adopt Naquin's practice of referring to all such institutions collectively as "temples." Second, "fair" may misrepresent the religious function of the event, and consequently has in some recent discussions been abandoned in favor of 'festival' (i.e. Johnson, 1997). This debate is certainly justified in certain cases, but given that the present discussion focuses on commercial and other secular aspects of "these events, "fair" better describes the spirit of the occasion. -© Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 30, NO.1 (November 2004): 39-63. 40 JAMES FLATH also considered the late-Qing- and Republican-era efforts to expropriate temple property, ostensibly for purposes of funding education. But when it came to temple fairs, the principal conflicts that emerged between the locality and the expanding Republican state had less to do with real estate and religious principles than they did with determining who would control the economic and political assets that the fairs so conspicuously exhibited. The state approached the temple not merely as a bastion of objectionable religious practices, but as a center of a non-governmental (or locally self-governed) public sphere that defied the interests of a government seeking to expand its administrative hold below the county level. Historical research on temple fairs has increased dramatically in recent years, including book-length studies by Gao Zhanxiang (1992), Gao Youpeng (1997, 1999), Zhang Shuanglin, editor (1995), Wang Zhaoxiang and Liu Wenzhi (1997), and Zhao Xinghua (1999). Relying largely on county annals (xianzhi) and records of folklore, these researchers have been able to reconstruct the historical background of many better known fairs and to address questions of customs , frequency, timing, and spatial distribution. County annals and folklore, however, seldom provide the type of detail necessary to explain the socioeconomic and political character of the events. The connection between local power and religious institutions has received greater attention in Western language studies of temple organizations. James Watson's 1985 study of the Tianhou cult in southern China, for example, argued that temples and...