Vala The Politics of Protestant Churches and the Party-State in China

God Above Party?
Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-1-351-71266-8
Verlag: Taylor & Francis
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 244 Seiten

Reihe: Routledge Research on the Politics and Sociology of China

Among China’s restive religious and social groups, Protestants have created the most sustained organizational challenges to the Chinese Communist Party’s ordering of society, prompting fresh regime strategies to contain society’s assertiveness. Tracing the rise of large, illegal Protestant congregations apart from Party-state structures, this book highlights the importance of the "public transcript," the public behavior of religious actors and regime officials, as critical to understanding the dynamics of negotiation, domination, and resistance in the 2000s. It paradoxically demonstrates that societal actors can alter the boundaries set by the Chinese Communist Party and that the Party is more adaptive and resilient in its relations with society than imagined.

By drawing on grassroots fieldwork over a decade and spanning the country, the book charts the ambition of the regime to restrain Protestant population growth and direct it to regime purposes. Interviews with key church leaders who founded illegal Protestant congregations with hundreds of participants reveal how officials and illegal congregational leaders developed ties of trust and information that permitted church growth even as officials monitored them. Negotiation turned to coercion, however, when the largest and the most prominent unregistered churches disregarded the red lines implicit in the public transcript. Providing the only scholarly account of the rise, development, and suppression of urban Protestant churches, this book demonstrates how regime power, societal assertiveness, and official boundaries interact in unusual ways in the world’s largest Communist state.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Vala, Carsten T.

Vala, Carsten

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politikwissenschaft Allgemein Politische Studien zu einzelnen Ländern und Gebieten
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Christentum/Christliche Theologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1 Introduction 2 From Coercion to Negotiation: The Evolution of the Official Agenda from 1949 to today 3 Leadership of the Official Protestant Associations, Projecting Domination and Obscuring Negotiation in the Public Transcript 4 Failure of the Ambitions of the Official Agenda and the Shared Values of Official and Unregistered Protestants 5 Cultivating Social Capital and Protestant Solidarity 6 Altering the Public Transcript: Founding Large, Public Urban Churches 7 Suppression of an Urban Church – Shanghai’s Wanbang Church 8 Challenges to the Bounds of the Public Transcript – Beijing Shouwang Church 9 Conclusion

Über Autor(innen)

Carsten Vala is Associate Professor in the Deaprtment of Political Science at Loyola University, USA.