Religion, superstition and governing society in nationalist China

In its self-appointed role as the savior of Chinese culture, the Nationalist regime at Nanjing (1927–1937) sought to define habits suitable for a modern citizen, and to eliminate customs that might hinder the formation of a cohesive nation. In religion, reformers saw laudable systems of ethics degraded by wasteful and unseemly popular practices, and institutions whose influence threatened to impede government control. Thus party and government officials sought to translate a nebulous distinction between acceptable beliefs and harmful superstition into executable ways to regulate religious groups and control practitioners. Meanwhile, by confiscating temple property and attempting to substitute civic rituals for old-style customs, the regime sought to reorder the pattern of power in local society, sometimes to great resistance. This project aims to trace the story of Nationalist policy towards Chinese popular religion and then place it in the context of local history, employing case studies from the capital and Jiangsu province. The result is not simply a case of an “urban intellectual” government seeking to repress a clear-cut set of “traditional” cultural practices. The difficulties faced by KMT officials and party cadres in dealing with superstition reveal the inherent contradictions in the regime's greater project to remake Chinese culture, society and nation.