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Morality, Gift and Market: CommunalTemple Restoration in Southwest ChinaYongjia LiangPublished online: 19 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Yongjia Liang (2014) Morality, Gift and Market: Communal TempleRestoration in Southwest China, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 15:5, 414-432, DOI:10.1080/14442213.2014.951069

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Morality, Gift and Market: CommunalTemple Restoration in Southwest ChinaYongjia Liang

This paper analyses a temple restoration initiative during a state-funded project toattract scattered villagers back to their old village centre in southwest China. Whilestate agents who implemented the project created a public space to bring ‘civilisation’ tothe ‘backward’ peasants, the villagers appropriated the project by restoring an oldtemple, which immediately became the venue for a variety of communal events. Thepaper argues that the temple restoration manifested the grassroots idea of moral life,which rests upon proper reciprocities between humans and the gods, as well as amonghumans in reference to the gods. This emphasis on gift relations explains why villagersprefer the temple for public events over the space of civilisation created by the state inits developmentalist project.

Keywords: Temple Restoration; Gift Relation; Religious Market Theory; Southwest China

Introduction

Visiting the Dali Bai Prefecture in southwest China, I am struck by two distinct typesof public space emerging from the rural landscape. One is the stone-paved miniplazas for ‘public use’, sponsored by the government. They are typically engulfed by amini-park with a lotus pond and a stone bridge replicating a classical garden in anurban setting. As developmentalist spectacles, these expensive mini-parks are eye-catching, and are often ridiculed as ‘image projects’ (xingxiang gongcheng)—wastefulinfrastructure commissioned by local officials who wish to impress higher authorities.The other spaces are communal temples recently restored on their old sites fromworn-out structures of rotten pillars and collapsed statues, financed by donationsfrom the villagers in and around the temples through door-to-door fundraisingcampaigns by grassroots activists. Compared with the mini-plazas, the communal

Yongjia Liang is a Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology, College of Humanities andDevelopment Studies, China Agricultural University, specialising in religion and ethnicity in southwest China.Correspondence to: Yongjia Liang, Department of Sociology, College of Humanities and Development Studies,China Agricultural University, 223 Minzhu Bld., 17 Qinghua East Road Haidian, Beijing, PR China, 100083.Email: yjliang@cau.edu.cn

The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 2014Vol. 15, No. 5, 414–432, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14442213.2014.951069

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temples are moderately restored in a fashion that requires close replication of theirprevious incarnations.A stark contrast exists between the two public spaces: the former is seldom visited

by the villagers, while the latter hosts a variety of community events. Why is this so?What myriad of powers impels the construction of both spaces, and how? Whatmoral implications are embedded in these two spaces? In this paper, I will analyse atemple restoration campaign by examining its evolution in counterpoint with a statedevelopment project called the ‘Rebuilding of a New Socialist Countryside’. Duringthe process, villagers actively appropriated the project by successfully restoring an oldcommunal temple. While the temple immediately became the venue for villageevents, the ‘public space’ created by state-agents accords little meaning to the villagers.I argue that the use of public space offers an instructive vista onto religious revival incontemporary China: while the state materialises a developmentalist discourse ofcivilisation, the villagers practice a gift morality between villagers and gods, andamong villagers in reference to the gods.At stake is the space pertinent to ‘morality’ involving the sovereignty of communal

gods. I argue that the restoration of the communal temple in DZ Village involves thegrassroots idea of moral life, which rests upon proper reciprocities between humansand the gods, as well as among humans in reference to the gods. This gift-relationexplains why villagers prefer the temple for public events over the space created in thestate’s developmentalist project.

Religious Revival in China: Market vs Gift

The post-imperial Chinese state assigned itself a normative role to create a secularworld (Goossaert 2005; Szonyi 2009; Yang 2004a). By secularism, the state notsurprisingly adopted the conventional definition of the term: firstly, religion woulddecline as science advances; and secondly, the state must separate itself from religion.However, the state placed much more emphasis on decline than separation in thecourse of nation-building, as manifested in the various campaigns against religions(Duara 1997; Liang 2013a; Palmer 2007), to the extent that during the first threedecades of the People’s Republic of China, most forms of religious practice weredeclared illegal under the rubric of what Fenggang Yang (2004a, 103) called ‘militantatheism’. However, the five legitimate-cum-nationalised religions, together with a vastarray of practices and beliefs called ‘superstitions’, survived the harsh suppression.With the introduction of materialist developmentalism and statist GDP-ism in the

last three decades, China experienced a ‘surprisingly’ strong revival of variousreligious practices, especially in rural China (Yang 2010). One of the manifestationswas the widespread restoration of communal and lineage temples in rural China(Chau 2006, 2011a; Dubois 2005), of which there are estimated to be as many as fivemillion (Dean 2009). The ‘spatial struggle’ (Yang 2004b) over public spaces emergedin the last decade when developmentalist projects sponsored by local governmentsincreasingly encroached into rural areas.

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A market theory was proposed to explain the religious revival (Lu 2005; Yang 2006).In this light, religious practice is akin to individuals shopping in a market, where whatmatters is supply-demand correlation, marketing strategies, institutional apparatus andpolitical regimes, terms conventional to economists. Following Stark and Finke’s (2000)rational choice theory on religion in North America, Fenggang Yang (2006) suggests‘triple-colour religious markets’ to explain the religious landscape in reform-era China.Because the religious market is not a free one, the red market of officially-permittedreligions does not garner many new adherents. Neither does the black market of theillegal religions that imposes high costs. Therefore, the grey market of alternativespiritual practices grows significantly, practices such as proselytising outside religiouspremises, the spread of the so-called ‘diffused religions’ and the sudden burst ofbreathing-exercise (qigong) practices. For Yang (2006, 99), state regulation will not leadto the ‘reduction of religion per se…Although participation in formal religiousorganisations may decline, other forms of religiosity will persist and tend to increase’.Though celebrated as a ‘Copernican Revolution’ (Wei 2003), this rational choice

arcana focuses more on the survival of market theory than the revival of religiouspractice. The grey market concept was introduced ‘in order to apply the economicapproach to religion in China’ and it ‘accentuates noninstitutionalized religiosity thathas been largely neglected in the studies of the economic approach that focus onAmerican and European societies’ (Yang 2006, 115). However, the market ‘metaphor’(Yu 2012, 460) excludes the state and its developmentalist project as forms of religiosityby deeming them external to the market. Within this framework, however ‘difficult todemarcate because of its ambiguous and amorphous nature’ (Yang 2006, 97), the greymarket (actually, the religious market itself) is independent from the state a priori. Yet,when Fenggang Yang (2012, 36) defines religion as ‘a unified system of beliefs andpractices about life and the world relative to the supernatural that unite the believers orfollowers into a social organisation of moral community’, one may ask why stateideology with all its institutions is not a form of religiosity. In particular, why Marxismor nationalism, dear to reform-era China, have to be excluded from the ‘market’?To understand the Chinese state as a form of religiosity is not a new idea

but seldom has it been treated seriously by the market modellers. As Anthony Yu(2005, 3) observes,

[T]here has never been a period in China’s historical past in which the governmentof the state, in imperial and post-imperial form, has pursued a neutral policytoward religion, let alone encouraged, in terms dear to American idealism, its ‘freeexercise.’ The impetus to engage religion, on the part of the central government,stems first of all from its own subscription to a specific form of religiosity that,most appropriately, should be named a state religion. For more than two millennia,the core ideological conviction shaping and buttressing imperial governance alsodirect correlatively the purpose and process to regulate, control, and exploit allrivalling religious traditions whenever it is deemed feasible and beneficial tothe state.

The state’s active engagement in religion in contemporary China demonstrates itscontinued assumption of a religious aura—a unique promise of delivering utopia,

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a particular claim to universal transcendence and an enduring attempt to encompassother religions. If we move away from the indulgence in neoliberal, rational choicetheory of the free market, we are able to see state relations with religion through thelens of a state religion that persists in post-imperial China.1 Similar to the denialof the imperial court’s own religiosity, post-imperial China never described itsideology—nationalism or communism—as religious. However, the Chinese Com-munist Party (CCP) and its predecessor, the Nationalist Party (KMT), never felt sureof its legitimacy by virtue of the people’s mandate. Both seek legitimacy through adiscourse of transcendence that paradoxically keeps religions away. Actually, theword ‘religion’ (zongjiao) was introduced into China precisely for the state to separateitself from it so that it could exercise regulatory measures (Goossaert 2005).With the decline of communist Utopia, the post-Mao state has not abandoned its

quest for transcendence and works through a new form of ‘state religion’: nationalism.Indeed, both Marxism and nationalism, according to Bruce Lincoln (2006, 5–6),could and should be understood in terms of religion, because ‘should they groundtheir views in Scripture, revelation, or immutable ancestral traditions, in that momenttheir discourse becomes religious because of its claim to transcendental authority’.In practice, religious discourse reveals itself ‘when speakers make claim to absolutetruths without explicit gestures to the transcendent, as in the case of Marxists withextreme confidence in historic dialectics’, Lincoln (2006, 115) argues, and claims that‘similar points can be made about varying forms of nationalism’.This is almost exactly what the post-1949 Chinese state has been doing, except that

it has made explicit gestures to the transcendent—a communist utopia, followed by aclaim to a universal deliverance, ‘the great revival of the Chinese nation’ (zhonghuaminzu de weida fuxing), two essential parts of the Party’s ‘Construction of SpiritualCivilisation’ (jingshen wenming jianshe), a narrative suggesting a social Darwinistideology blended with imperial religiosity (Feuchtwang 2012). In a paper on thereligious landscape of urban Dali, I also suggest ‘hierarchical plurality’ to characterisethe institutionalisation of relations between various authorised religious groups andthe state power’s transcendent religiosity (Liang 2013a).My point of departure from religious market theory starts with taking the state’s

developmentalist project as a player in the ‘religious market’, and testing what actualmechanisms make up the ‘competition’ in religious public spaces in a rural setting.Following David Palmer (2011), both market and gift operate in the so-calledreligious ‘market’. Central to the landscape in my case is dyadic exchange whereby asupernatural being plays the central role of giver-cum-receiver, rather than embodyingthe individualistic conviction of a distant being—an Abrahamic God.One thing that perplexes state-agents at lower levels of administration is why the

landscaping projects designed by trained architects and endorsed by visionaryofficials, do not work in grassroots settings, as demonstrated by the contrasting useof public space we have seen above. A theory explaining religious revival cannotafford to exclude such perplexity since developmentalist projects embody transcend-ental, moral regimes in secularist disguise. Such kinds of projects with an evolutionist

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vision are contingent to a modernist future, intended to overcome ‘backward’,superstitious practices. It is a form of religiosity engaged in competition with a ‘pre-modern’, ‘magical’ one, the exact opposite of the presumption that ‘general compen-sators’ (that is, an overarching religious explanatory framework) will ‘win’ in faircompetition (Stark & Finke 2000). In the Chinese context, as Adam Chau (2011b)reminds us, the religious landscape is not defined by a membership-based churchstructure. Rather it ‘should best be understood as competitions between differentmodalities of doing religion as well as competitions within each modality’ (Chau 2011b,548, emphasis original). If there is a competition, what matters is not so much themarketing strategies of the religious groups after the manner of commercial firms,nor the rational choices made by religious ‘customers’ with the said goal of salvation.Religion involves long-term loyalty and expectations directly related to non-marketstructures, summarised by David Palmer (2011) as the ‘gift economy’.

A ‘Civilising’ Project

DZ Village is an agricultural community of 1200 residents set by a huge lake in theDali Bai Autonomous Prefecture of southwest China. Villagers are ethnically classifiedas Bai, whose identity was formally established in 1956 under the PRC’s ethnicclassification system (Liang 2012). Their ethnic distinctiveness should not be exag-gerated since the Bai were once considered as a mere sub-branch of the Han after sixcenturies of intensive sanitisation (fourteenth to twentieth centuries). Many arguethat in contemporary Dali (Notar 2006) as well as in the 1940s (Fitzgerald 1941; Hsu1948), ethnic distinction does not matter much in everyday life, especially in ruralsettings. As we shall soon see, the communal temple they are restoring is dedicatedto the God of Exam Success (Wenchang), a pan-China god, without any ethnicadherence or sense of cultural autonomy.After two decades of continuous outward migration, DZ faces serious decentralisa-

tion. The old settlement made of hundreds of residential compounds was deemed tooold for habitation, and was inaccessible by major roads to the outside world. From2000 to 2008, with the annual income per capita reaching 6000 RMB (100 RMB isabout 19 AUD), 252 out of 358 households built new houses, many of which werebuilt on their ‘reserved land’ (ziliu di), the cropland legally assigned to rural house-holds exclusively for agricultural production. Most did so without official permits.New house-owners did not give up their old ones as required by law. Some simplyabandoned them, making the old settlement at the village centre even less inhabitable.A handful of remaining villagers who were too poor or too old to move had to liveamid the debris and half-collapsed structures.This was a nationwide issue called ‘the hollow village’ (kongxin cun), which the

government vowed to deal with because the newly-built houses occupied arable lands,endangering the state-sanctioned minimum of arable land supply (as expressed in thepopular official parlance, ‘the red line of 1.8 billion mu’ [1 mu = 0.2 acre]) to ensurenational food security. A more urgent reason was perhaps that rapid urbanisation had

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already grabbed too much arable land from peasants. To safeguard the red line, theDali Prefectural government had to share a specific quota of land supply (765,000acres). Land use in rural areas like DZ was normatively under strict control by thestate which classified lands in terms of usage. Since all rural households already hadin hand their ‘residential land’ (zhaiji di) for building houses, the process of turningarable ‘reserved land’ into ‘residential land’ was tightly controlled by the govern-ment’s Bureau of Land and Resources. One nationwide rule was that a registeredhousehold in a rural area could not hold two pieces of ‘residential land’ at the sametime. However, this rule was hard to follow since housing and residential patternswere dynamic and the village authorities who negotiated the permit conferringauthority usually favoured villagers’ needs and benefits, in response to the micro-politics of governance. Many ‘ignorant’ peasants might also have kept the old houseswhile occupying new pieces of land, owing to house-division among married brothersor between parents and married children, or purchase of apartments in town.2 Inaddition, increasing mobility has also contributed to the deterioration of the oldhouses since many rural migrant labourers who live in the cities return onlyoccasionally to their own houses.Faced with a dwindling amount of arable land, the Dali municipal government felt

compelled to solve the problem. In 2007, it launched a project called ‘Building a NewSocialist Countryside’ with the alternative name of the ‘Hollow Village Transforma-tion’ (kongxin cun gaizao) and selected DZ Village as the first place to be transformed.The project drew a red line for the minimum quantity of arable land, implementedmuch stricter measures to approve new residential land and forbade any purchase ofsuch land by rich villagers in order to prevent housing deprivation by privateeconomic interests. The project was nothing more than a reaffirmation of theregulations and laws that had already been around for decades, since not a single rulewas new. In other words, it was a project to restore a supposedly well-maintainedorder. By launching such a project, the government ironically revealed its malfunctionto the extent that it could keep daily order only by resource-pouring projects, adynamic Qu (2012) describes as ‘project-centred governance’.Seemingly informed by economic rationality, the logic of the new socialist

countryside project was not economic in tenor. Rather, its implementation was aprocess of materialising a moral discourse to ‘help the ignorant villagers’, to ‘educatethem to cope with the life of the next 50 years’ and ‘to bring about civilisation’. Astrong ‘civilising mission’ narrative was articulated in every step. The project’s name,the ‘Building of a New Socialist Countryside’, came directly from China’s centre in2005, when the Fifth Plenary Session of the CCP Central Committee released such aterm in its official Communiqué, declaring it an ‘important historical task’ aimed atmaking the countryside an area of ‘enhanced production, well-off living standards,healthy rural culture, neat and clean villages and democratic management’ (CCPCentral Committee, 2005). In other words, the project was not just an attempt tosolve an economic problem or guarantee certain rights of citizens, but a compre-hensive endeavour to rejuvenate the countryside in all respects with a strong

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historical determinist tone of moral correctness that asserted authority to direct thepeasants along the right road. It was a ‘civilising project’, to borrow from Harrell(1994), when China’s centre required the rural ‘culture’ to be ‘healthy’, villages to be‘neat and clean’ and management ‘democratic’.The plan in question specified the functions of land use in detail: the municipal

government secured RMB 2.8 million for the cost of demolishing old houses,renovating the old roads and streets, greening and building sewage and sanitationsystems, all reflecting a developmentalist image of the ‘modern’ world of east China.A Ms Ch. from the township government, together with the village head Mr S, were

appointed to implement the plan. According to them, the project had specific goals‘based on humanitarian concerns’ (yiren weiben). They commissioned most of theinfrastructural works—the construction of roads, streets, greenery, sewage, lighting andsanitation. They also cleaned up the mess of ambiguous ownership of the old residentiallands, and put some undisputed plots up for bidding to encourage some villagers toabandon their plans for building their houses outside the village and return. A verysmall portion of the funding also went to the compensation of those who had to pulldown their houses. By early 2010, the old houses belonging to sixty-eight differentfamilies were pulled down, and most of the other infrastructural works were completed.In various government reports, the DZ Village project was often singled out as asuccess. When I was there in 2010, much of the construction was near completion.The two leaders were proud of telling me how they had successfully convinced

many villagers to build their houses in the village centre to save arable lands, whichthey described as ‘optimising land’ (jiyue tudi):3

After all, this is a land of 70 per cent water and 20 per cent mountain. Only 10 percent is arable land. If ignorant villagers keep on wasting their land, they will soonfind there isn’t any left. Only 50 years later could they understand the benefit wehave brought to them.

The metaphor of moral leadership ran through the narrative. Villagers were said toknow nothing about the state’s strategic vision of minimum land supply or their ownlong-term benefits. Only the project officers knew what should be done, and Ms Ch.barely felt the need to hide her moral superiority. Neither did her superiors, such asprefectural Governor L, who in his official address to the local congress qualified theproject as “civilisational” and “responsible to history and to our sons and grandsons”(Gao 2010).History played an important part in this moral narrative. In addition to the futurist

construction lent by Ms Ch., Mr S and Governor L, the project was also presented asa legitimate successor of local tradition. According to the project planners, the Dalibasin enjoyed the fame of ‘harmony of nature and culture, multiculturalism, and themanifestation of traditional philosophy of “heaven-human combination”’ (Wanget al. 2010, 1). Accordingly, the project was designed in such a way that integratedDZ’s ‘development level, natural environment and historical/cultural traditions’(Wang et al. 2010, 2). Perhaps the most conspicuous materialisation of thishistorical-cum-moral manifestation was a small plaza built along with the project.

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Ms Ch. and Mr S found an old, deserted well in the village and decided to turn itinto a plaza. They engaged a school teacher to write a eulogy for the well, highlightingthe history of Kublai Khan’s conquest and the consequent ‘barbaric’ rule in thethirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The eulogy was then inscribed on a stone tabletplanted by the well. They also had a wood-stone pavilion built beside the well,imitating one that could be found in a typical urban setting in China’s prosperouseast. The pavilion-well cluster was added to the original plan at the cost of ‘squeezingsome money’, but the alteration was justified as ‘infrastructural works’. Ms Ch. tookpains to make this happen, believing that the plaza would create a space forcommunal activities, at least for villagers’ recreational purposes. She believed thepavilion-well cluster represented the heart of the entire project, which would:

change the mindset of the villagers. Now that they have a public sphere—roads andplazas—like in urban areas, the idea of civilisation will gradually grow.

Ms Ch. believed that because the plaza was cosmopolitan, it would attract thevillagers for public events. She explicitly related the public space to ‘civilisation’(wenming), and even used the term ‘public sphere’ (gonggong lingyu) to indicate this‘civilisation’. As a low-level civil servant, she had spent most of her life behind anoffice desk after two years of technical training in a vocational school. ‘Public sphere’as she used it, did not mean what Habermas (1991) suggested, but a common spacedeemed to be ‘advanced’, ‘cosmopolitan’ or, as she put it, ‘civilisational’. The plazametaphorically represented the state agents’ idea to relate public space with a moralcommunity.The curious combination of history and modernity underscored the concept of

‘civilisation’ too. It placed the project in a historical continuum in which adevelopmentalist project like ‘Building a New Socialist Countryside’ assumes a senseof transcending mundane life to a longer process of historical destiny. Legal rights,action over consensus, democratic deliberation—things familiar to the competitivedemocratic world in relation to community development projects—were of no concern.What drove the state machinery into action at the very lowest level of government was anarration of moral progress that the state never did away with. As Levenson (1965,87–101) put it, imperial sanctioned history is absolute, pointing to an eternity:‘Absolutism is parochialism of the present, the confusion of one’s own time with thetimeless.’ Of course the contemporary Chinese state no longer sanctions the absolutehistory of sage-kings. However, when the project established its goal to build a ‘neat andclean village’ and a ‘healthy rural culture’ as an ‘historical task…responsible to historyand our sons and grandsons’ and when the lowest-level state-agent turned an old wellinto a ‘public sphere’ for ‘bringing about civilisation’, the religiosity of the state becamematerialised in DZ Village.Paul Ricoeur (1988) defines ‘historicality’ as that urge to reach back into the past to

change the future and see life as a whole, reminding us that the emergence of linearhistory inherent to the modern nation-state’s legitimation of governance has affinitieswith ‘mythic knowledge’. The developmentalist project introduced by state agents

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rehearses a hegemonic narration of the linear history of progress, whereby local eliteseasily relate cosmopolitan-cum-developmentalist projects with ‘civilisation’. Manyargue that the contemporary Chinese state has continued to assert its religiosity overeveryday life in various ways (Yu 2005; Duara 1988; Oakes & Sutton 2010, 14–15).The embedded religiosity of the state reminds us of the moral commitment of statepower, whose legitimacy is based not just on a ‘mandate of the people’ but on the‘mandate of heaven’, if we take history not as a static objective, but a dynamic field ofinterpretations that lends crucial legitimacy to the state. Here, we can discern thestate’s religiosity manifested in a small development project that targeted not justoptimising land use, but bringing about ‘civilisation’, which legitimises the projectitself. As a Bai community in twenty-first-century China, DZ villagers were notnecessarily envisioned as a peripheral people subjected to sexualised, educational orhistorical metaphors—what Stevan Harrell (1994) summarised as ‘the civilisingprojects’. The project to build a new socialist countryside in DZ Village wasnonetheless a ‘civilising project’.

Restoring the Communal Temple

While the hollow-village transformation project went on with a narrative of civilisingthe peasants, some village activists, composed of retired workers, old ladies and someof the family heads, put forward an unexpected proposal to Ms Ch., asking her tofund an initiative to restore the old Wenchang Temple (wenchang gong) dedicated tothe God of Exam Success. Mr L, the leading activist, who had spent most of his lifeteaching in the local primary school, told me that Wenchang had blessed the villagesince the inception of his temple in the ‘ancient era’ (gudai). Rewarding the villagers’devotion, Wenchang ‘let some people come out of our village’ (rang women cun chulejige ren), meaning Wenchang had enabled some villagers to become outstanding andsuccessful beyond the village, including an imperial graduate (jinshi) in the Qingdynasty, and a KMT colonel. However, no villager had attended a ‘real university’ orbecome a high official since 1938, when some ‘powerful guy’ had moved theWenchang image to another temple ‘against the will of the villagers’. ‘How can wemake any progress if we forget about Emperor Wenchang?’ said Mr L.Ms Ch. was not unsympathetic to the initiative. However, spending budgeted

government funds on a temple like Wenchang could not be justified as one had todemonstrate that it met one of two criteria: an economic value or a social one.Arguing for its religious value had no traction, since in China only five majorreligions are recognised (Christianity, Catholicism, Buddhism, Daoism or Islam). Anordinary temple like Wenchang Temple could be found in almost any Chinese village,but rarely could one be turned into cultural heritage, an ancient relic or a religioussite such as the rare exception in Shaanxi where the Black Dragon King Temple wasturned into a Daoist site (Chau 2006). With goodwill, Ms Ch. managed to providefunding for the temple street, which was then justified as a part of infrastructuralexpenditure. By this arrangement, RMB 80,000 (about 15,000 AUD) of government

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funds went to the actual construction of the temple, though this was not documentedby the two leaders.The Wenchang Temple was one of two temples in the village. After the removal of

the god’s tablet, the temple’s premises were converted into a primary school in 1938,and then a municipal granary in the 1950s when the newly-founded PRC destroyedmost of the images in rural communal temples in this area. After the granary systemcollapsed in the early 1980s, the temple venue was allocated as a piece of residentialland to the Y family who built a house on it. However, for decades the Y family faceda series of troubles, which they attributed to the family’s bad ‘prosperity’. Prosperity,or fawang, means multiplicity in progeny and wealth that could be achieved in manyways in addition to hard work: proper arrangement of the ancestral tombs; dueexchange with ‘old friends’ (fvl jiart); and regular homage to communal temples.There were many ways leading to the failure of prosperity too, especiallyblasphemous conduct towards gods. After ‘seeing the incense fire’ (han hsianghui),that is, consulting oracles with a specialist who was able to see the supernatural worldby reading incense smoke, the Y family was told that the reason for their bad luck wastheir occupation of a temple, Emperor Wenchang’s ‘enclosure’ (dipan). Occupyingland possessed by a god constitutes quite a serious act of blasphemy, and moving thehouse was the only option.When the ‘Building a New Socialist Countryside’ project was announced, the Y

family saw in it a golden opportunity to stop occupying the god’s land. The familyhead joined with a number of local activists who hoped to restore the temple,declaring he would pull down his house and donate the land—his ‘residential land’—to the temple restoration initiative, provided he could find another place to build anew house. The activists were so happy that they quickly drafted a ‘letter of guarantee’(danbaoshu) on behalf of the village committee and secured the signature of theheads of most households, stating that the ‘people of the village’ (quancun renmin)allowed the Y family to build a new house on the family’s ‘reserved land’. The letterhad no authority since it lacked legal status. Nor was it sent to any superior authority.In fact, what was guaranteed in the letter ran exactly against state policy. The letterwas nonetheless sufficient for the Y family who were eager to move away from theabode of the communal god. Once the letter was handed over to the Y family, theyimmediately started to build a new house.Here we see an interesting twist: in order to attract more villagers back to the

village centre and save the arable land, a reverse-move became the condition—a movethat resulted in building a new house on a piece of reserved land. According to theexpressed goal of the government, new occupation of the reserved land was strictlyforbidden for another twenty years, and in the case of violation, the old residentialland allocated to the violating family would be confiscated from further circulation.However, the government took no legal action against the Y family, and the villagersdid not submit their letter to the government. Mr L told me that there was ‘no need’to submit the letter to the government which would have no choice but to stop the Yfamily. On the other hand, the letter would lend support to the family’s action should

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someone ‘question’ them. In this light, the letter was neither a petition to draw theauthority’s attention to an unjust case, or a legal document that required an action.It was therefore a documented artefact of complicity—a transaction of silent trade, avalid momentum of understanding between the state and the villagers.Why was this silent trade possible? I argue that it was because the government

agents also believed that the land belonged to a god, and consequently refrained fromconfiscating the land from circulation. It would constitute a blasphemy on the part ofthe government agents if they seized the ‘god’s land’. Even if the land was confiscatedfrom the Y family for further circulation, it is unlikely that any household in thevillage would want to become a successive occupant. In the end, unlike thousands ofreported cases of government seizing land from villagers, the DZ villagers successfullyclaimed a piece of legal ‘residential land’ for religious use in full view of the government,which ‘kept a closed eye’ to the initiative. In order to restore a community, the civilisingproject with an agenda to build a ‘public sphere’ for communal life had to accommodatethe unexpected agenda of the grassroots religious activists with their own idea of acommunal life.Villagers’ donations comprised the major source of funds for the restoration

project. Unlike the pattern of the government vs individual family in the new socialistcountryside project, the re-building of the Wenchang temple was carried out in acommunal manner. A total of 355 families made their donations in cash, each givingseveral hundred RMB. Other important sources included donor funds (RMB 83,000)remaining from the rebuilding of the village patron-god temple (benzvlt) in 2008;RMB 10,000 derived from the patron-god temple’s income and donated by The LotusPond Societies, an association of women devotees; and RMB 52,800 derived from therent money of ‘public houses’ collectively owned by the village. The fourth sourcecomprised donations from other villages (RMB 10,600) as a result of a fund-raisingcampaign. In addition, many well-to-do people donated extra cash or constructionmaterials such as marble and wood in the form of a few stone steps or doors. Theircontribution added up to RMB 80,000. In total, the Wenchang temple cost RMB554,450. Upon completion of the temple, a list of donors and amounts contributedwas written on paper and fixed to the wall of the temple for everybody’s inspection,or ‘proofreading’. This list was to be inscribed on a stone stele and planted by thetemple as a ‘tablet of merits’ (gongde bei) just as Ms Ch. had done for the well. Thedifference between the two tablets was that the ‘tablet of merit’ was a practice datingback six centuries while Ms Ch.’s tablet was an ‘invented tradition’.Two spaces with moral implications were thus created for the public events—the

pavilion-well cluster and the Wenchang temple, but there was no division of functionbetween them. The villagers seldom stayed around the pavilion or used it for publicevents. They simply passed by the cluster as if it did not exist. On the other hand, theWenchang temple immediately became the venue for public events, which wasplanned for in the design of the temple: one flank of the temple courtyard wasseparated by a wall with a moon-shaped door, covered with a plastic shelter andequipped with cooking facilities, tables and folding chairs. Banquets for weddings,

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funerals, god’s birthday and other festivals were scheduled all year round. On theother side of the temple courtyard, two small halls honouring the Money God andFertility Goddess were built, and some tables for mahjong games erected. Twocorners of the courtyard were dedicated to ‘the good men and believing women fortheir cultivation’ (shannan xinnü xiuxing) and the activities of ‘the association of theelderly’—the village Dongjing music group who believed themselves to be theservants of Wenchang. If entering the temple on a regular day, one is likely to seepeople milling around for an event, a festival, a mahjong game or simply a good chat.

Market or Gift?

The situation outlined above would appear to illustrate a typical market competitionbetween two public spaces. In the course of implementing a developmentalist project,the government agents created a pavilion-well cluster to impose a certain moralityover the ‘backward’ villagers in order to foster a supposedly cosmopolitan ‘civilisa-tion’. On the other hand, the restored temple hosted a variety of events spontaneouslyorganised by the villagers themselves. The religious market theory based on thepresumption of rational choice explains well the filtering of believers whose choiceswere based on their conviction of the efficacy of the two spaces. However, asI elaborated above, the model of the triple colour market deems the state to be anillegitimate interfering power on the religious landscape, and the competition betweenthe plaza and the temple reflects the intrusion of the state on society. The Chinesestate, with all its religiosity, is never an ‘equal’ competitor in the neoliberal terrain ofreligious freedom exactly because the state is external to the marketplace and ‘religion’has to be defined a priori. A religious market theory cannot go anywhere without suchan out-of-context definition. Therefore, it is a value-laden theory conditioned by aparticular definition of ‘religion’. Under such conditions, not only is the state deemedexternal, but the Wenchang temple itself would be dismissed as ‘superstition’ giventhe seance, possession, trances and intangible organisational forms. The religiousmarket model seems to apply only to ‘religion’ that looks like Christianity.Without going to the extent of defining ‘religion’ as a particular genealogy of the

institutionalisation of a discourse that entails a particular mechanism of power andknowledge production (Asad 1993), the Chinese religious landscape must take a varietyof religiosities into account, including such parallel universes as the state, ‘superstition’and body cultivations. The more meaningful question in this context is not about‘religion’, ‘state’ or ‘superstition’, but about the meaning accorded by the actors to theiractions. In particular, what impels the restoration of the Wenchang temple?The Y family’s desire to give away the god’s land is of course important, because

occupying it constitutes a blasphemy to Wenchang who is unable to maintain properrelations with the villagers. Called ‘non-veneration’ (burjin), the blasphemy suggests avernacular demarcation of domains between human and gods, without which theworld cannot operate properly and the fortunes of the blasphemers are certainlyjeopardised. The illegal measure to build a new house on the strictly controlled

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‘reserved land’ endorsed by most family heads of the village demonstrated unanimous,vernacular opinion on proper relations in their cosmological world—humans must beseparated from gods. Exchanges between villagers and gods, and among villagers withreference to gods, are conditional on this separation.The second point to be made is that it is the desire of the entire village that makes

the restoration possible. The ‘village’ in this context is not a legally-defined admin-istrative unit, but a moral community composed of every household created byproper alliance and represented by a male head. The correspondence between theWenchang temple and each individual household is apparent. The individual namesof the family head inscribed in the donation list represented their households (jia).Unmarried children will follow the names of the family head as ‘students’. Names offemale heads were not listed, or were registered as ‘wife of someone’ in the case of adeceased male head. Relatives resident in other villages who donated were usuallygrouped with their own household head. Donations were also made by thecommittees of neighbouring villages and the local police station. These donors wereeach classified as a ‘working unit’ (danwei) but called ‘households’, reflecting theirconsideration as constituent parts of this moral community too. The townshipgovernment which employed Ms Ch. donated 1000 RMB. It seems there is nocontradiction in the government acting as executioner of the state’s ‘civilising project’as well as a ‘household’ that pays homage to the communal temple. The five house-holds that did not make a contribution were also inscribed as a reminder to thecommunity. They were the exception that proved the rule: the temple restoration isnot an economic endeavour, but a campaign to restore a moral community, tangiblyrepresented by the list of donors.Elsewhere I have argued that the household in this area is the constituent moral

community (Liang 2013b). Prosperity in progeny and wealth (fawang) is the mostimportant concern of a household, and comes from domains other than the householditself—from in-laws, ‘old friends’ (fvl jiart) and, most importantly, the communal temples.Such temples are often the patron-god temple, and other temples dedicated to gods such asWenchang. For example, the inscription of the inauguration of Wenchang reads:

The rebuilding of the Wenchang temple of our village lets those who desire blessingand success have a place to pray, those who are faithful have a place to worship,and those who want to enjoy their leisure time have a place for fun. This is what allof us desire, so the restoration is a good and moral thing.

Prosperity in progeny and wealth is achieved through a series of giving and receivingevents. In the case of the communal temple, a family is obliged to reciprocate withgods on such important lifecycle events as weddings and funerals, and at the time ofsuch activities as embarking on travel, starting a business and building a house. Onthese occasions, a family must visit all temples in and near the village, and payhomage to the gods by offering food, incense and lighting a string of firecrackers.Most of the time, it is female members who pay such homage, with their friends inthe same age-set (called ‘old friends’) who live in the neighbourhood. Sometimesvisitors cook in the temple and commune with the gods. There are elaborate, bodily-

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transmitted ritualised offerings, accompanied with a series of promises such as ‘if you[the god in question] blesses me with such and such, I will donate this amount of oilto your offering lights’. Wedding and funeral feasts are held in the temple not onlyfor the practical reason of space, but to strengthen the relation between human andgods through which the god may favour a particular family by bestowing prosperityin humankind and wealth to it. In addition, a good relation with the gods ismaintained simply by being in the temple—playing mahjong, chatting and helpingfellow villagers carry out rituals.A gift-relation is created between humans and the god, as well as between humans

in reference to gods—a binary one and a dyadic one. When a household makes awish to the gods through offerings, it is not unconditional or non-reciprocal like therelation between an omnipotent God and His pre-destined followers. It creates anexpectation, and if the wish is delivered, the venerator’s promise certainly has to befulfilled. But if the wish is not delivered, the god in question may not be blamed;rather, an explanation might be made in terms of such things as wrong rituals, poorofferings or improper conduct in the house. A god who is properly venerated isexpected to make people ‘come out of’ the village arena and become successfulbeyond the community. In a Maussian sense, a gift is meant to create a delayed,reciprocal act that fulfils the giver’s expectation yet creates further reciprocal acts.This is where trust, credits, expectations—in a word, social solidarity—come from(Mauss 1990). In the Wenchang temple we see a situation of total prestation betweenhouseholds and the god that maintains their mutual indebtedness. Of course, therelation is not a simple and static one, and the institution is not tangible. Rather, it isa system of individual desires, particular choices and strategic actions. Nevertheless,the delayed, moral act of giving and receiving generates a communal consensus.A dyadic relation is also created in reference to gods. Family members, neighbours, ‘old

friends’, ritual experts and congregations all offer reciprocal services on particularoccasions, creating obligatory-cum-voluntary relations. For example, on the occasion ofwedding or funeral ceremonies when the household in question is busy, neighbours and‘old friends’may divide the labour and visit different temples on behalf of the event-holdinghousehold. This obligation is mutual and delayed, invoked by the gods as the third party.A Dongjing band looks after the temple routines and ritual activities ‘on behalf of

Wenchang’. As a widespread association of sinicised southwest China, Dongjing is agrassroots music band composed of village elders who believe themselves to be moralexemplars of the community. The association was introduced in Dali about fivecenturies ago, dedicated to the cult of Wenchang. Nowadays, a Dongjing band usuallycomprises a group of literate males who practice various séances and occult rituals, andobserve several important festivals. They host the festivals on behalf of Wenchang,inviting villagers to the event as ‘Wenchang’s guests’. The proxy hosting constitutes yetanother set of dyadic relations: Dongjing members and the other villagers in referenceto Wenchang. The inviting and receiving creates communal solidarity since in each ofthe temple events, every household is supposed to send a male member with offeringsand food for collective consumption, as explained in the inscription:

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It is said that in the old time, each year on the third of the Second Month of thelunar calendar, which is the Birthday of Wenchang, and in the event of observingthe South and North Dippers, all the good men and believing women of the villagewould gather at the temple, playing music and reciting sutras, and pray for thegrace of Wenchang. Moreover, on the 27th of the Eight Month (the birthday ofConfucius), teachers and students would hold a solemn ceremony to offer‘sacrifice.’ Therefore, the Wenchang Temple has become the holy site for the DZpeople’s veneration and caring for each other.

In justifying the restoration, the inscription omits ‘superstitious practices’ such as incensereading, séances, trances and spiritual mediums, but acknowledges the significance of thetemple in terms of communal veneration and caring for each other in the name of god.In the inscription, three occasions of veneration are enumerated: the birthday of

Wenchang; the dipper-observing days (twice a year with each lasting for about a week);and the birthday of Confucius. While the functions of Wenchang, Confucius and thedipper-stars are not the topic of this paper, it should be said that the three occasionsrelate a community to celestial orders. Two kinds of relations are involved on theseoccasions: the good men and believing women, and the teachers and students. Theformer refers to the men and women of the village who rarely interact in public apartfrom on these three occasions. The latter relation is deemed to be particularlyimportant to the gods in question. Both Wenchang and Confucius are worshipped bythe literati who honour the teacher-student relationship. When these occasions andrelations are invoked, the Wenchang Temple ‘becomes the holy site for the DZ people’sveneration and caring for each other’. In other words, the solidarity of a community isenacted through veneration by which everyone cares for everyone else.

Conclusion

The short story of temple restoration demonstrates how and why religious beliefs andpractices are revived in China. Of course, as repeatedly demonstrated, a temple isrestored ‘when one person took the initiative to launch a full-fledged rebuildingproject—an undertaking requiring significant organisational capacity as well as theability to mobilise networks of support among villagers, donors, and officials’(Goossaert & Palmer 2011, 251). In the case of this study this agent was Mr Y, thehead of Y family. However, the working principle behind most of the actors is not achaotic assortment of individual desires that may or may not be conflictual. Rather, itis the old and habitual principle of giving, receiving and returning—a principle bestsummarised in the Maussian concept of the ‘gift’—that informs the collective actionsof the village. The appropriation of the state project, the accommodative arrangementmade by the state agent, the extreme measure of building a new house on ‘reservedland’ and, finally, the social meaninglessness of the pavilion-well plaza, tellinglydemonstrate the actual existence of such a gift principle.While it proposes to examine market competition between the state religiosity and

popular religions, the religious market model fails due to its a priori definition ofreligion that excludes the state on the one hand and popular religion on the other

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because neither fit neatly into the definition. An investigation of the Chinese religiouslandscape cannot overlook the sophisticated reciprocal relations operating in ancientand modern China which anthropologists have been writing about for a century (see,for example, Granet 1932; T’ien 1946; Kipnis 1997; Yan 1996; Yang 1994), and whichreduces ‘religion’ to a pre-defined ‘social phenomenon’ separate from politics oreconomy. Zhe Ji (2009) argues against such reductionism by rejuvenating Mauss’sconcept of ‘collective expectation’, a totalising force which does not separate thecollective from the individual, and obligation from voluntary action. The gift model‘merely insists that utilitarian exchange or coercive distribution alone cannot achievethe solidarity necessary for social order because social solidarity cannot go withoutsentiments and morality (i.e. the Chinese expression of renqing yili)’.4 The ‘expectation’created through delayed exchange, as demonstrated in our case of binary and dyadicrelations, has also been explored within a new Buddhist movement in Taiwan (Ji 2008).We are facedwith the real reason for religious revival in contemporary China: grassrootsefforts to restore a morality without the state. Through temple activities, people create‘indebtedness’ with gods or the supernatural, or in reference to them, that guaranteescontinuous reciprocity of moral actions. While the ‘Building of a New SocialistCountryside’ was a civilising project to transform ‘backward’ peasants into cosmopol-itan citizens, it failed to create proper gift-relations with various moral communities,especially the constituent households. On the other hand, the Wenchang templesustained moral life, enacted and re-enacted through a myriad of social relations.Perhaps, when a village became physically ‘hollow’, the state became spiritually empty.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Adam Chau, Stephan Feuchtwang, Michael Feener, Aga Zuoshi and twoanonymous reviewers for their comments.

Funding

This work was supported by Chinese Universities Scientific Fund (grant number2012RC027).

Notes

[1] For a critical assessment of rational choice theory and religious market model, see Peter vander Veer (2012).

[2] The parents of a new couple experience intense pressure to build a new house for them.The big-family ideal, Francis Hsu (1948) argues, has long given way to an individualisationdesire in contemporary China (Yan 2009).

[3] Thanks to Adam Chau for this translation.[4] Literally, it means ‘human feelings and moral rules’.

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