The Order of Local Things: Popular Politics and Religion in Modern Wenzhou, 1840--1940

This dissertation offers a new approach to the still dominant state/society paradigm, which has long assumed that local society would inevitably succumb to state power in the course of modernization. By applying the concept of "popular politics," my work illustrates how common people organized themselves to weather the great transitions and upheavals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.;My research is based on rich sources, including local archives like local gazetteers, as well as the anthologies and personal diaries of Wenzhou literati, many of which are only available at Wenzhou, where I have conducted extensive archival, library, and field research. My study shows that popular religion---not the state---was the most important social force in the daily life of commoners.;Each chapter of my dissertation presents a different aspect of the relationship between religion and politics in modern China. I begin the dissertation with an analysis of two peasant uprisings of the 1860s, to explore interactions between local officials and the local community before the emergence of a strong Western presence in the region. The dissertation then identifies a local political reconfiguration triggered by the rapid penetration of foreign religions, especially Catholicism and Protestantism, on the heels of Wenzhou's acquisition of treaty port status in 1877. Having characterized the nature of what I found to be an unparalleled reconfiguration of local politics, the project turns to the changing policies of local officials toward the area's most important non-Christian religious event, the Dragon Boat Race, which had been held annually at Wenzhou since the thirteenth century. The dissertation closes with an examination of the policies of the Nationalist regime (1928-1949), focusing in particular on its concerns with indigenous local religious practice. My overall objective is to flesh out the extent to which the Nationalist Party-State apparatus succeeded in molding the common people's daily life by combining old and new religious systems.