The Politics of Protestant Churches and the Party-State in China. God Above Party? By Carsten T. Vala

In this study on the relationship between Protestant Christian groups and the state in contemporary China, Carsten Vala focuses on three sets of questions: the role played by official Protestant organizations and churches; the spread and survival of unregistered groups; and the seemingly selective suppression of Protestant churches. Vala’s data is derived from fifteen months of fieldwork (interviews) conducted between 2002 and 2014 in a number of major cities across China. Vala shows that the relationship between Chinese churches and the state is not a straightforward case of domination and oppression. One of Vala’s most important findings is that unregistered religious groups have not emerged in “‘cracks’ of power, as if there are areas into which party-state power does not extend [. . .] but rather that there are informal ties between officials and illegal organizations [which] constitute part of an accepted gray zone, in place of formal, legal limitations [. . .] of these organizations” (p.148). Here, it seems a missed opportunity to rely on James C. Scott’s concept of “public transcripts” rather than theoretical frameworks developed on the basis of Chinese data on civil society, like Lu Yiyi’s (2009) “amphibious state” of organizations, or Luigi Tomba’s (2014) concept of “consensus” derived from the study of neighborhood governance, or Kerri Koesel’s (2013) comparison of party and house church organizations. It would be of huge benefit to read Vala’s rich data in the context of such studies to understand better the many ways in which Chinese Christian churches, registered and unregistered, conform in their behavior and relation with the state to other non-religious social organizations.

China · Oppression · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Protestantism · Sociology · State (computer science) · Law · Public Administration · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religion and Society Interactions