| Summary/Abstract |
While Christianity is among the fastest growing religions in the reform
era, state-led sporadic demolition campaigns have targeted unauthorized
church structures and sites in order to contain massive Christian
growth, especially in regions where there is a high concentration of
Christian population. Such campaigns oft en stir heated international
concerns about China’s religious freedom violations, naturally making
church-state relations the recurring central theme of both public and
academic discourses on the church in China. However, a heightened
emphasis on church-state tensions and religious persecution may
obscure the cultural and spatial dimensions of local church development.
Focusing on the case of the recent campaign against rooft op
crosses in Wenzhou—the most Christianized Chinese city, I go beyond
the one-dimensional framework of church-state relations by off ering a multifaceted analysis of the local religious scene in the political
economic contexts of contested spatial modernity and of central-local
relations amid the party-building process. In so doing, I methodologically
place Chinese Christian studies at the center of contemporary
China studies.
|