The Red, Black, and Gray Markets of Religion in China

Abstract

The economic approach to religion has confined its application to Christendom in spite of the ambition of the core theorists for its universal applicability. Moreover, the supply-side market theory focuses on one type of religiosity—religious participation (membership and attendance) in formal religious organizations. In an attempt to analyze the religious situation in contemporary China, a country with religious traditions and regulations drastically different from Europe and the Americas, I propose a triple-market model: a red market (officially permitted religions), a black market (officially banned religions), and a gray market (religions with an ambiguous legal/illegal status). The gray market concept accentuates noninstitutionalized religiosity. The triple-market model is useful to understand the complex religious situation in China, and it may be extendable to other societies as well.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of The Sociological Quarterly for their helpful comments. Many people offered suggestions and criticisms on several earlier drafts of this article. I appreciate all of them. I am especially grateful to Carolyn Chen, Roger Finke, Paul Froese, Dean R. Hoge, Graeme Lang, Daniel V. A. Olson, Maryjane Osa, R. Stephen Warner, and Dedong Wei for their suggestions.

NOTES

Notes

¹ “Whether or not (1) there is a single, officially designated state church; (2) there is official state recognition of some denominations but not others; (3) the state appoints or approves the appointment of church leaders; (4) the state directly pays church personnel salaries; (5) there is a system of ecclesiastical tax collection; (6) the state directly subsidizes, beyond mere tax breaks, the operating, maintenance, or capital expenses for churches” (Chaves and Cann 1992:280).

² I will have more discussion of the religious dimension of qigong when describing the gray market. The unconscious consumption of qigong as a religion is a view shared by other scholars. For example, David Ownby recently states, “Few of the millions of those participating in the qigong boom were aware of the ‘religious' dimension of what they were doing, although many qigong masters explained the workings of qigong by reference to traditional spiritual and religious discourses” (see “Unofficial Religions in China: Beyond the Party's Rules,” a round table held on May 23, 2005, by the Congressional–Executive Commission on China).

³ The only exception is East Germany, where the rebound of religiosity in conventional religion has been modest. However, it is this exception, not the general pattern of religious rebound, which begs further research and explanation (Froese and Pfaff 2001; Froese 2004a). I would speculate that it is possible that alternative spiritualities in a gray market of religion are abundant in East Germany.

⁴ There have been a number of annotated English translations of the Chinese Constitution, CCP Documents and government ordinances, and detailed, explanatory analyses of them. See, for example, MacInnis 1989; Pas 1989; Human Rights Watch/Asia 1993, 1997; Potter 2003; Spiegel 2004.

⁵ Because of the Communist desire for reducing religion, local government officials tend to report lower numbers of religious believers than what exist in reality. As a matter of fact, Ye Xiaowen, the head of the State RAB since 1995, acknowledges this ubiquitous problem in a speech at the CCP Central School in Beijing. According to him, a major problem of gathering accurate statistics is that, as a rule of the political game, “the numbers come from the cadres; and the cadres come from the numbers.”“More precisely,” Ye says, “regarding religion, it is ‘the negative numbers come from the cadres; and the cadres come from the negative numbers'” (Ye [1997] 2000:9). In other words, local officials who report negative or lower growth of religion are more likely to get promoted. On the other hand, counting religious believers is difficult. Buddhism and Daoism do not have a membership system. A Buddhist and Daoist believer does not belong to a particular temple, may patronize several temples, or may just practice at home. Although Protestant and Catholic churches have had clear definitions of membership, congregational leaders are often discouraged from reporting the real numbers because of the government's hostile policies toward religion. Many churches do not even keep baptismal records, so that baptized Christians are not easily identifiable by the authorities.

⁶ In the late 1970s, many Catholic priests were released from prison, but Gong Pinmei was kept until exiled to the United States for medical treatment in 1988.

⁷ For example, Reverend Gong Shengliang, the founder of the South China Church, was sentenced to death by a court in Hubei Province in 2001. Following the outcry of human rights groups such as Amnesty International, the Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom and many Christian groups, and under political pressure from Western governments, the sentence was changed to life imprisonment. Many lesser-known religious leaders have been sentenced and executed without international notice.