Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. x, 374 pp. (B&W photos.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0827-9.
A media-dominated myth in the general Euro-American understanding of Chinese society holds that the Chinese party-state is so powerful and penetrating, and Maoist socialism so transformative, that local self-governance in post-Mao China is weak and fragile, prone to party-state co-option. Many scholarly works have focused on tackling precisely that myth, explaining to an audience outside China why and how local self-governance is actually dynamic and strong in many parts of China. Mayfair Yang’s book Re-enchanting Modernity and her earlier work on Wenzhou in southeast China have been prominent in debunking this Euro-American myth. Yang achieved this powerfully through her ethnographic engagement from 1990 to 2016 with communities in Wenzhou, especially among religious and lineage groups and associations. Her work provides incredibly rich empirical data for the significance of minjian (民间; among the people or realm of the folk as opposed to the realm of officialdom) and the local ritual economy in governing local political, social, and economic life.
A review of this length cannot cover all the multilayered and multidisciplinary threads of enquiry presented in Yang’s book. I will therefore focus on Yang’s sustained enquiries into two key questions in social science and Chinese studies: the relationship between religiosity and modernity in the context of a century-long anti-religious discourse and nation-state building, and the possibility of talking about a civil society in post-Mao China. Yang’s central argument is that Wenzhou’s resurgence of religiosity is intertwined with post-Mao economic liberalization, which marks an active engagement with state-led modernization. The outcome of such “willed re-enchantment” (9) is the ritual economy that provides the backbone for what Yang terms the “religious civil society” that is “reterritorializing” state governing space to form alternative spaces of communities governed by the logics of generosity and service that counteract and mediate the spaces of neoliberal capitalism (31).
In chapter 9, Yang elaborates on her thought-provoking interventions into the debates on civil society. The modern Euro-American category of civil society has often been used as a yardstick to gauge the process of democratization in non-Western societies, but this approach has faced much scholarly criticism. Rather than dismissing its relevance in analyzing non-Western cases, Yang suggests that a pluralized reconception of civil society would be fruitful for our understanding of emerging autonomous civic associations in post-Mao PRC and beyond. Yang rightly questions the overemphasis on elite actors and urban contexts and the dismissal of rural populations and religious actors as primary political agents in theorizing civil society. In her proposal, such a broadened conception of civil society would lead to greater empirical and conceptual attention to rural and small town contexts as well as to the non-elite actors who constitute her notion of the religious civil society. Indeed, from chapter 6 through chapter 8, one gains the sense that the minjian—particularly the members of the religiously and ritually orientated associations—are highly efficient in resource mobilization and redistribution for problem solving and public benefit.
Yang’s observation that rural women play a crucial role in cultivating religious civil society despite their conservative and self-sacrificing logic is notable. Critically engaging with Mahmood Mamdani’s postcolonial reading of agency, Yang identifies five different “modes of women’s religious agency” that transcend the resistance paradigms of agency in chapter 8 (232). Fascinating examples include women’s communities, such as religious sisterhood groups, and women in leadership positions, such as Ms. Golden Lotus’s dedication to rebuilding a temple and hosting cross-strait religious festivals with Taiwanese religious actors. These examples demonstrate that women’s agency can strengthen, adjust, or transform patriarchy (253). Yang makes the insightful point that attention to these structural effects will help us formulate alternative forms of feminism in non-Western contexts that build upon local modes of female agency and structures of power.
Another intriguing contribution is Yang’s concept of ritual economy, which she further articulates in chapter 10. Drawing upon J.K. Gibson-Graham’s call to make visible the diverse “non-capitalist” practices within global capitalism, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss’s notion of sacrifice, and Georges Bataille’s concept of “excessive ritual expenditures,” Yang shows how the ritual economy logic of sacrifice to gods and to the community is essential for social recognition and thus counterbalances and challenges capitalistic logics of accumulation in Wenzhou’s post-Mao economic development. Nonetheless, since Yang’s research is restricted to qualitative analysis, one may question the extent to which the ritual economy has moderated wealth redistribution for public benefit in Wenzhou.
This brings us to the limitations of ethnographic fieldwork. Chapter 1 contains an exemplary account of Yang’s positionalities and processes for doing fieldwork as an empathetic and reflective ethnographer, including details on fieldwork access and police entanglement. These accounts will be invaluable references for overseas researchers (as well as local researchers) who are confronted with the growing challenges of conducting on-the-ground research in China in a changing political climate. Given the restrictions on overseas scholars conducting research there, Yang has been mostly accompanied by local interlocutors in her consecutive short annual visits to China, leading her to focus on the significant roles of religious and lineage associations in inducing the building of civil society. However, based on my own ethnographic research in Wenzhou, there are in fact many voluntary associations that are explicitly demarcating themselves from those with stated ritual or religious orientations, leading me to question the dominant role of the ritual economy in local self-governance. Thus, attention to the multiple organizational principles beyond religion, ritual, and kinship may allow us to gain an even more dynamic picture of the alternative communities that are emerging.
This book contains some of the most compelling analyses of Chinese society I have read, and it will continue to nourish future debates. As Yang powerfully suggests, pluralized discussions of civil society and the ritual economy may help bring alternative visions of society and economy into being.
Jiazhi Fengjiang
University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh