The Rise of Protestantism in Post-Mao China: State and Religion in Historical Perspective

Abstract

This article, using fieldwork from a Chinese county, seeks to explain why Protestantism has experienced explosive growth in post-Mao China, but not before. It identifies six institutional features of Chinese Protestantism vital to the religion’s rapid growth, but it does not make a simple institutional argument. Instead, it contends that each of these institutional features can facilitate or impede the spread of Protestantism depending on the context. Protestantism flourished in the post-Mao era because the Maoist state had dissolved the locally entrenched social/cultural resistance to Protestantism and because the post-Mao state’s market-oriented economic reform created an environment conducive to the expansion of Protestantism. Theoretically, this article makes a claim that the effect of any religion’s institutional features on its growth is contingent on the sociopolitical context of the religion, and that the state is the most powerful actor in creating and shaping that context.