The People’s Living Guanyin Bodhisattva: Superstition, Entrepreneurship, Healthcare, Rural Economic Control, and Huidaomen in the Early PRC

Abstract

During the Republican era and the PRC, both regimes labeled religious practices outside official institutionalized religions as “superstition” (mixin). In the early PRC, the CCP labeled superstitious activities with mass participation as “mass superstitious incidents.” This article examines a mass superstitious incident in Chongqing in 1953 in which more than fifty thousand people participated. In this case, local residents, especially local merchants, advertised an old woman as a Living Guanyin Bodhisattva with supernatural disease-curing powers to expand their economic interests. The incident was also a result of poor healthcare infrastructure management. Key organizers in the incident were severely punished, in part because they were scapegoats for the problems of the new national policy of State Monopoly for Grain Purchase. The incident also had a strong contagion effect that led to various similar “superstitious incidents” in the vicinity that were eventually suppressed under the name “huidaomen.”