State-Building Encounters Popular Religion: Pingxiang, 1912-1978

This dissertation explores the dynamic interaction between state expansion and popular religion based on a single locale, Pingxiang county, Jiangxi province. Pingxiang is a major site of China’s revolutionary tradition. It also has a strong and lively religious tradition that consistently resisted state expansion, survived waves of revolutionary campaigns, and revived between the cracks of state power. This thesis draws on original materials in local archives, oral history, ethnography, and other documents such as government reports, county and village gazetteers, newspapers, genealogy books, memoirs and personal diaries to reconstruct the tension between the state and popular religion in the context of state-building throughout the period from 1912 to 1978.

The thesis takes a critical engagement with Joel Migdal’s anthropology of the state as its theoretical framework. Migdal, an important scholar in state-building studies of the Third World, has argued that in developing countries, the key to state success or failure was the state’s struggles with social organizations, because in Third World societies, social control within the state’s claimed territory was not monopolized by the state but dispersed among social organizations. Because of this dispersed pattern of social control, leaders of certain Third World countries failed to build an overpowering state. Following Migdal’s argument, this study focuses on struggles between the state and its rivals throughout the process of state expansion in China.

In contrast to Migdal’s findings, this research shows that in China, rather than social organizations, popular religion was a more recalcitrant counterpart of the state, a larger challenge to state policies, and a tougher obstacle to state control over people. In contrast to domination by an identifiable organization or state, popular religion could be said to dominate people without a dominator. This is because popular religion does not have a formal institution or organization, as C. K. Yang has argued. It exerts control over people through its diffused capacity. Here, I focus specifically on the diffused nature of popular religion, consisting of interconnected beliefs, embodied in people’s habitus, guiding people’s outlooks, modes of thought, sentiments, and behavior. As such, it was an invisible but formidable power that was in tension with state ideology, ran counter to modern governance, and provided legitimacy to popular resistance to the state. The thesis explores the consequences when an expanding state encountered the diffused religion in the case of Pingxiang.

By examining state expansion in a religious society, I seek to introduce a new dimension of analysis to existing state-building theories, which have ignored the diffused power of religion. At the same time, examining the transformation of popular religion against the backdrop of state-building enriches our knowledge of popular religion. I argue that the theory developed from this research can help to explain the challenges and failures of state-building in some Third World societies. Because state builders overlooked the diffused power of religion that operates and works on people at a deeper level than visible institutions or organizations, no matter how well state policy and institution are designed and established, they could not achieve the anticipated effects, as they were undermined “invisibly” by the diffused forces of religion in people’s daily lives.