Abstract
This article compares the growth trajectories of Catholicism and Protestantism in modern China and tackles a puzzle: Why did Catholicism, which maintained a substantial numerical advantage in Chinese converts over Protestantism before 1949, come to lag so far behind Protestantism today? The article identifies three crucial differences in the institutional features of Catholicism and Protestantism, but shows that an institutional argument alone is insufficient to explain their reversal of fortune. It argues that the growth trajectories of Catholicism and Protestantism changed less because their institutional features have experienced major changes, but more because their institutional features played out differently in the sociopolitical contexts of pre-1949 China, Maoist China, and post-Mao China. The article advances a new approach that combines the currently dominant institutional argument with a historical perspective that stresses the importance of political forces in order to understand the growth dynamics of religions. It concludes by making some preliminary observations on the generalized patterns of how institutional features of Catholicism and Protestantism play out under different kinds of political structures, shaping their waxing and waning in a global context.
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Notes
The Chinese Rites Controversy was a drawn-out dispute among the Catholic missionaries over the nature of certain Confucian rites practiced in China. Jesuit missionaries defended the position of Matteo Ricci that the rites did not have religious content and were compatible with the Catholic belief, while missionaries of other religious orders strongly disagreed. After the Vatican sided with the Jesuits’ opponents and condemned the Chinese rites as idolatry, the Qing emperors proscribed Catholicism, expelled Catholic missionaries, confiscated church properties, and persecuted Catholics (Mungello 1994). Catholicism was labeled an “evil cult” in 1724 and was persecuted along with other heterodox religious societies until 1842.
The century-long proscription and persecution of Catholicism severely set back its growth in China. Catholic communities that had once thrived in urban centers became dispersed. And Catholicism no longer attracted elite converts. It was in places remote from the centers of power, such as rural Fujian, Shanxi, and Sichuan, where persecution was not carried out rigorously and consistently, that Catholic communities were able to sustain themselves. After experiencing some steep drops, by the early 1800s, the number of Chinese Catholics reached two hundred thousand, close to the level a century earlier (Bays 2012, p. 31).
The original data are from Milton Stauffer’s The Christian Occupation of China, published first in Shanghai in 1922. In 1918, there were more Catholics than Protestant converts in all Chinese provinces except two (see also Stark and Wang 2015, pp. 25–26).
Estimates of the Catholic and Protestant populations in China today vary. The figures released by the Chinese government do not count unofficial church groups and thus tend to underestimate the number of Christians. The figures produced by churches themselves, on the other hand, often inflate the number of adherents. This article uses the widely adopted estimates of the Pew Research Center (2011). Its 9 million estimate of the Catholic population is close to the estimate of 9–10.5 million made by the Holy Spirit Study Center (2015), a Hong Kong-based Catholic organization committed to culling information on the Chinese Catholic Church. The Pew Research Center’s estimate of the Protestant population has been corroborated by a survey carried out in 2007 by Horizon, a reputable polling firm in China. Based on a sample of 7021 individuals, the survey initially came up with an estimate of 28 million Protestants in China. However, it was faulted for not taking into account the high percentage of Christians who refused to be interviewed or who concealed their religious identity to avoid possible political risk. A follow-up study was devised to correct this problem, and it adjusted the estimate to a little over 60 million (Stark and Wang 2015).
The number of Catholics in Shanghai in 1949 is from Bays (2012, p. 169). For the 2016 estimate, the figure of 150,000 was provided by a priest in Shanghai Diocese in December 2016 (Informant 264). The Shanghai municipal government’s figure for the Shanghai Catholic population is 138,800 by 2014 (Shanghai Municipal Government 2016).
China’s one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was more strictly and effectively implemented in urban areas. This, coupled with the rural-urban disparity in the level of economic development, contributed to the higher birth rate in rural areas (Settles et al. 2012)
While empirical studies of Protestantism in contemporary China are plentiful (e.g., Cao 2010; Huang 2012, 2013, 2014; Hunter and Chan 2007; Leung 1999; Li 2005; Sun 2017; Tang 2014; Yang 2005), studies of Catholicism are not. Madsen’s 1998 monograph and various articles (Madsen 2001, 2003, 2015) are pioneering works and constitute a major contribution in the field. Other works include Chan (2012a, b, 2015, 2016), Harrison (2010), Liu and Leung (2004), and Mariani (2011).
Between 1856 and 1946, China was divided into different apostolic vicariates. In 1946, these apostolic vicariates were promoted to become dioceses. This change notwithstanding, clerics were always organized into a chain of ecclesiastic authority.
The French religious protectorate was not officially abandoned until the French government negotiated away its old treaty rights in China in 1946 (Young 2013, p. 34). But after the violent anti-foreign and anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion of 1899–1901, and especially after the anti-Catholic Nanchang incident in 1906, France was no longer keen to play the protector role (Young 1996). Meanwhile, the Vatican began to seek direct control over missionary societies in China (Bays 2012, pp. 113–114; Li 2012, pp. 96–109; Young 2013, pp. 211–232). The effect of the French religious protectorate, however, lingered into the 1920s.
Despite the surge of anticlericalism at home during the Third Republic (1870–1940), and despite the Law of Separation—which separated church and state—adopted by the National Assembly in 1905, the French government was convinced that an alliance with missions served the national interest (Young 2013, pp. 88–92).
The French religious protectorate was transnational, affording protection to all Catholic missionaries regardless of their nationality (Young 2013, pp. 29–30). The French had tried very hard to prove the effectiveness of their protection in order to encourage Catholic missionaries of other nationalities to turn to France for protection rather than to alternatives such as Germany and Italy.
Chen (1999) has detailed the failure of the campaigns to make Confucianism the state religion during the Republican period.
Extraterritorial rights were abolished in 1943.
In 1948, China had 5788 Catholic priests, of which 2676 were foreign missionaries (Leung 2010, p. 794).
According to the database on Catholic religious communities in China during 1800–1950, compiled by Tiedemann (2016), only five of the fifty-seven religious communities of men were constituted by Chinese. And they were also founded by foreign missionaries.
Fengshui feuds were common in premodern China (Coggins 2003, p. 211, p. 309).
Wang was incarcerated from 1955 to 1980; Yuan from 1958 to 1979.
The text of Document 19 can be found at http://www.mzb.com.cn/html/folder/290171.htm.
The CCPA and TSPM were reinstalled as umbrella associations for Catholicism and Protestantism respectively.
The Chinese Supreme Court in 1999 defined evil cults as “illegal groups that are founded using religion, qigong, or other things as a camouflage, deify their leaders, produce and spread superstitious ideas and heretical teachings to deceive people, recruit and control their members, and pose a danger to society” (Edelman and Richardson 2003, p. 31).
The total of 2650 priests in China in 2002, which include both the open and underground churches (Holy Spirit Study Center 2002), was less than half of the number in 1948.
There has been a substantial and steady drop of the number of seminarians in China in the past decade or so: from 2250 in 2004 to 1260 in 2014 (Lam 2016).
The Franciscan order in Fengxiang Diocese of Shaanxi is an exception. It was reestablished in the early 1980s and remained underground for many years. After the underground church changed its status to an open church in 2004, the Franciscan priests also obtained legal status by association (Chan 2012b).
Over eighty bishops were consecrated secretly by Fan and his associates between 1981 and 1993 (Lam 2011).
Here, the underground Catholic church and the independent Protestant church refer to those that are not registered with the Religious Affairs Bureau and do not have legal status. Yet, underground/independent churches today do not necessarily operate secretly. In some areas, they can organize religious activities openly (Chan 2012a; Sun 2017).
The inclusion of the prayer was due to the efforts of Jin Luxian, one of the most prominent personalities of the Chinese Catholic Church (Clark 2010). A Rome-educated Jesuit, Jin was in prison and labor camps from 1955 to 1982. In 1985, he accepted the appointment by the CCPA to serve as the auxiliary bishop of the Shanghai Diocese without papal approval. He became the official bishop in 1988. In 2005, he reconciled with the pope.
By February 2017, only seven such bishops remained to be pardoned by the pope (Fraze 2017).
The underground bishops ordained priests and bishops, some of whom were poorly qualified. In some dioceses, more than one underground bishop was ordained, with chaotic results (Madsen 1998, pp. 44–48; Tang 1993, p. 35). Because of a lack of training, many of the underground priests have an inadequate understanding of the Church’s doctrines and history. Indeed, while I was often impressed by the knowledge of the CCPA priests I encountered in the field, I was surprised by the lack of knowledge among the underground priests I interviewed.
Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 pastoral letter to bishops, priests, and lay Catholics in China, in particular, signified a sea change in the Vatican’s policy toward the Chinese Church.
There is a huge variation in the relationships among the open and underground churches. Some dioceses are rife with antagonism, while others enjoy limited collaboration (Chan 2012a). In Fengxiang Diocese in Shaanxi Province, there is no underground church sector but the open churches, which resist the CCPA and are in communion with the pope (Chan 2012b).
As of October 2016, only four students remained in the Sheshan seminary, once the best Catholic seminary in post-Mao China. Sheshan has trained a great number of seminarians and contributed significantly to the revival of Catholicism in China.
Cardinal Joseph Zen, retired Bishop of Hong Kong, has been one of the most outspoken critics of Pope Francis’s attempt to make a deal with China (Lui 2016).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Cole Carnesecca, Andy Junker, and particularly Dingxin Zhao for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article. This article also benefited from the helpful feedback of Flemming Christiansen, Tao Liu, Tam Ngo, Peter van de Veer, Fei Yan, Ji Li, and other participants as the paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, the sociological colloquium of Zhejiang University, the research forum of the Institute of East Asian Studies of University of Duisburg-Essen, the Religious Diversity Colloquium of the Max Planck Institute, and the historical sociology workshop of Tsinghua University. My thanks also go to the reviewers and the Editors of Theory and Society, whose critiques and guidance have helped me to improve this article significantly. I owe special thanks to Alice Ye and Guozhong Li, who offered the much-needed help in finding access to field sites.
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Sun, Y. Reversal of fortune: growth trajectories of Catholicism and Protestantism in modern China. Theor Soc 48, 267–298 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09342-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-019-09342-8