Russian and Chinese Politics
Authoritarian Regimes
Democratization
Religion and Politics
Political Culture
Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict
Islam in Post-Communist Contexts
Belief In Transition: Religious Revivals and the Local State in Russia and China
What are the political consequences of growing religiosity in Russia and China—two countries that share a communist past and thus a long history of atheism, but that have followed very different political and economic trajectories since the 1980s? In this dissertation, which is based upon nearly two years of fieldwork in multiple sites within these two countries, I carry out a systematic comparison of the relations between religious communities, on the one hand, and the Chinese and Russian states, on the other. This comparison leads to five conclusions. First, there is strong evidence that religious groups are playing an increasingly important role in the political economy of both states. Second, while Moscow and Beijing have set the parameters on religious expression, it is at the local level where the interactions between religion and politics actually take place and where, as a consequence, the relationship between the two sets of players is defined. Third, in direct contrast to what the literature on civil society within authoritarian states suggests, church and local-state relations in both Russia and China are collaborative, not conflictual. Just as religious groups court those in power, so local governments rely on these groups to take on some of the responsibilities of governance. Fourth, collaboration is not based on faith; rather, it is based on convergent interests, with bargaining between religious communities and the state focusing on the distribution of money, power and prestige. Indeed, material, not spiritual concerns drive most of their interactions with each other. Finally, not all religious communities are equally effective at forging alliances with the state. Thus, Muslims and Protestants alike—as opposed to the members of the more dominant religions within each of these countries—must rely on their cultural and economic capital to provide the leverage they need to secure a place in the transition.
In my dissertation I draw on data gathered from over twenty-two months of field research, divided between Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan, Russia, and Changchun and Shanghai, China. My data includes over 150 interviews with government officials, religious leaders and adherents, representatives of faith-based NGOs, and religious studies experts. Given the plurality of the Russian and Chinese religious landscapes, I interviewed a representative sample of all legal religious communities found in each case study, including Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim, Catholic, Protestant, Russian Orthodox, and popular religious communities. In addition to the legal or state-approved religious communities, I met with “un-registered” religious communities, including Old Believers in Russia and members of the Protestant House Church Movement and the underground Catholic Church in China. Besides a horizontal sampling of confessions, I also made use of participant observation in religious services and rituals, philanthropic projects, and religious classes, and I held focused discussions with religious practitioners. Researching religion and politics, particularly in China, is a highly sensitive topic; therefore, I supplemented interviews in both countries with additional open sources, including local newspapers, historical gazetteers, religious organizations’ printed media, archival documents, government speeches and legal documents.The plan of this dissertation and summary of arguments is as follows.
Chapter 1, “Religious Landscapes,” provides an introduction to the religious revival in Russia and China, and details the diversity and scale of growing religiosity. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening of China both countries have experienced a “cultural earthquake”—global forces, porous borders, and mobile populations mean that states can no longer keep religion out. Moscow and Beijing have responded to growing religiosity with pragmatism, renouncing their strategy of suppression in favor of co-optation. Such an approach is not unique to the post-communist region; in fact, regimes of all stripes attempt to promote, monitor, and control religious activities. In the period of transition, however—where regime legitimacy is under scrutiny and political ideology has lost much of its potency—religion has become an important tool to help fill the vacuum and build national unity.
Chapter 2, “Regulating the Religious Marketplace,” addresses how central governments attempt to manage the diverse religious revival through top-down reforms. This chapter traces the central laws and policies pertaining to religion and religious freedom since the mid-eighties. I demonstrate that while central policies regulating religion have certainly created more space for religious freedom, they are intentionally ambiguous and vague. As such they give the center the flexibility to adapt and amend them as needed, but also empower local governments to manage religious groups according to different standards. Without clear and transparent religious policies, religious groups and the local state bargain with each other in order to determine the rules of the religious marketplace.
Chapter 3, “Debating Transitions and Debating Religion,” develops a theory of local-state and society relations to explain the bargaining games that develop around the distribution of money, power, and prestige. I argue that cooperative relations have evolved, wherein local officials and religious communities negotiate the rules that govern the religious revival with the guiding goal on both sides of maximizing economic interests and minimizing costs. This relationship is fluid and may at times become parasitic; however, there is ample room for collaboration. Local states use strategies of patronage to ensure compliance and rely on religious communities to meet the financial goals of the state. And for the most part, religious communities welcome these forms of patronage and develop complementary strategies to help negotiate their own niche with the local state. Religion, therefore, cannot be divorced from politics, and it is through bargaining that religious groups and the local state establish a mutually beneficial relationship.
The next three empirical chapters elaborate the bargaining games that take place and flesh out the key factors that shape local authorities’ attitudes and behavior toward competing religious groups, along with the strategies both groups adopt to pursue their interests. The result is usually cooperation, but conflict occurs as well.
Chapter 4, “The Political Economy of Religious Revival,” applies the above framework of church and local-state relations to explain the bargaining games that revolve around money. I introduce four cooperative games that illustrate varying degrees of cooperation, compliance, and control between religious groups and the local state. These games converge around materialistic goals of increasing local revenue, attracting tourism, improving property values, and relying on religious groups to provide public goods.
Chapter 5, “State Power and the Power of Faith,” elaborates the bargaining games between the local government and competing religious groups to consolidate power. Following the logic of political competition, I demonstrate that local elites have powerful incentives to reach out to a diverse body of constituents in order to expand coalitions of local support. When the religious landscape is plural, local elites seek cooperative exchanges with multiple religious communities; however, when one religious group establishes a monopoly, the local state focuses its collaborative efforts with that group while excluding other religious communities from the negotiating process. As a result, minority religious communities develop competing strategies to help ensure their survival, their influence, and their ability to compete with the religious monopoly for state resources and “souls.”
Chapter 6, “The Politics of Religion and Prestige,” examines the process of negotiation between religious groups and the local state over prestige. Although religious communities have few mechanisms of influence over the local state, they can lend a surprising amount of prestige in the form of cultural capital and status to local governments. This chapter considers bargaining games in which local states attempt to draw on religious capital to not only influence those living within their domain, but also to make an impression on other local governments and the center; and, in turn, how faith-based communities wield religious capital as leverage over the local state.
In Chapter 7, “Collaboration and Conflict in Comparison” revisits the empirical findings of the previous three chapters and presents a systematic and comparative analysis between the two countries and among the four case studies: Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Changchun and Shanghai. I compare what factors shape local authorities’ attitudes and behavior toward different religious communities, and evaluate the strategies employed when bargaining takes on the distribution of money, power, and prestige. I conclude this chapter by addressing why some religions are more effective at forging alliances with the local state, addressing questions such as the following. Why have Buddhists become effective collaborators with the state in Shanghai; remain marginalized in Changchun; but are considered a “cult” in Nizhny Novgorod? How do mosque-state alliances differ between Tatarstan and Shanghai?
Chapter 8 summarizes the theoretical arguments and key findings of the dissertation. I conclude the chapter by identifying the contributions of this study to key areas of research in comparative and international politics. In particular, this thesis provides new insights into the role of the local state, especially under conditions of severe economic constraints, and the uneven relationship between central laws and local practices. This study also contributes to the work attempting to explain the sources of competition and conflict in divided societies. For example, most work in this area has focused on conflict, rather than competition, and on ethnic, rather than religious diversity. In addition, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of the politics of culture. Here, the dissertation adds a much-needed cultural component to analyses of post-communist transitions, while bridging in the process two major, but usually competing approaches in political science; that is, cultural analysis and political economy. The thesis also contributes to recent discussions about the role of civil society in authoritarian regimes by arguing that associational life independent of the state (which is how civil society is often defined) is both less independent and more supportive of the regime than often assumed. Finally, this dissertation contributes to discussions addressing the relationship between religion and politics. While it is widely recognized that the two interact, there is very little work that specifies in a systematic way both how these interactions take place and their consequences for the political influence of religious communities and the stability and economic vitality of both local governments and authoritarian regimes seeking stability and greater legitimacy.