It is not entirely clear what the party had in mind by deeming religion to be ‘complicated’. Maybe they just needed a fifth defining feature to create a symmetry with China’s five official religions: Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. Or did they have in mind China’s five sacred mountains? In any case, the old dictum that religion was the ‘opium of the masses’ clearly wouldn’t do; that might call to mind Marx’s corollary, that religion was also ‘the heart of a heartless world’ – and that would be tantamount to admitting that there was something heartless about reform-era China.

The complications of Chinese religion have puzzled outside observers, too. Before the Vatican ruled on the question, Christian missionaries famously couldn’t decide whether worshipping at the familial shrine was a religious rite or not. Indeed, the whole concept of ‘religion’ was a foreign import to China, and arguably our Western talk of religious ‘-isms’ has remained a poor fit for Chinese spirituality. To this day, only a minority of Chinese identifies with a ‘religion’; far more would admit to engaging in (what we think of as) religious activities from time to time. Hence the view of some scholars that Chinese religion isn’t so much a question of what people believe, but of what they do. The CCP’s five official ‘religions’ by no means exhaust the rich pantheon of local deities or the smorgasbord of spiritual practices that persist in the People’s Republic of China. For the most part, the party can live with these ambiguities. Only when fringe-dwellers such as the Falun Gong begin to threaten stability do they risk being outed as religion’s nefarious twin: the evil cult.

Ian Johnson’s The Souls of China is an extended meditation on the complications of religion in China. The book is organised into a series of vignettes of various lengths, strung out according to the cycle of the lunar year – a nod to the agrarian roots of Chinese spirituality. In them, Johnson introduces the reader to religious practitioners of various stripes. We meet the Li family, heirs to a line of yinyang masters in rural Shanxi, whose ritual clanging now finds an audience in international music festivals as much as at local ceremonies; the Whole Heart Philanthropic Salvation Tea Association, active in a growing pilgrimage circuit around Beijing; the Early Rain Reformed Church in Chengdu; as well as networks of Qigong teachers, and charismatic exegetes of the Confucian classics.

Chinese buddhist priests, 1907 (Wikimedia Commons)

Johnson is not much of a seeker himself. Gone are the days when Westerners might think of China as a place of spiritual salvation, or when Chinese might confidently tout their spirituality in reply to Western materialism. We get only a few glimpses of the author’s own participation in the rituals, and mostly his tone is detached.

For Johnson, the real miracle here is the survival of religion in the wake of Maoist repression. His story maps neatly onto a familiar account of post-Mao reform. Like the early adaptors and DIY entrepreneurs who profited from Deng Xiaoping’s economic pragmatism, a first generation of religious revivalists stepped heroically into the post-Mao void. The individuals we meet in his book mostly represent their disciples, who consolidated the breakthroughs and stabilised themselves in the 1990s, as a political crackdown reduced the space for forms of independent civil society.

A post-Tiananmen turn away from public engagement to spiritualism is most evident in the case of the Early Rain church. These Protestant evangelicals defy the authorities by maintaining links to dissident networks, and consciously propagating a counter-discourse to the party, in which they valorise the role of Christian missionaries in China’s modernisation.

Elsewhere, we see a cautious accommodation with the state. Believers have found ways to skirt the pitfalls of public religiosity and legitimise their practices in different terms, be it as martial arts, or within the catch-all category of ‘culture’. What were once terms of opprobrium in the party’s anti-religious discourse have been reclaimed. ‘People say I’m good at superstition,’ quips one female fortune-teller. Conversely, the atheistic state, while naturally hesitant to rule on questions of theology, has ended up heavily implicated in the daily religious life of its citizens. As one Chinese scholar puts it, ‘Everything is mixed up in China. You have a listed stock company running temples, and the government running temple fairs. That’s China; it’s chaotic.’

Now, in the age of Xi Jinping, Johnson’s interlocutors are cautiously optimistic. Xi himself has cultivated a certain reputation as a patron of religion since his early days in provincial postings. A similar aura surrounds his pop-star wife, said to be a devotee of a Tibetan Buddhist guru. Whether genuinely religious or not, as Johnson says, ‘people want to believe that their leaders have faith’.

This is a book about the Chinese ‘heartland’, not the whole of the People’s Republic of China, and Johnson avoids discussion of Tibet and the Muslim Uyghurs of Xinjiang. Yet setting his account alongside these sensitive regions may yield a slightly different view of them. Particularly in Xinjiang, where renewed faith in Islam is invariably given a political colouring, and treated by the party as inherently subversive, Johnson’s description of the complexities of religious revival in China may give us reason to think differently.

Religion has returned to China, of that there is no doubt. But what is its future? Johnson offers few predictions but evinces a quiet confidence that religion will one day play some role in transforming China. Yet alongside scenes of remembering in the book, there are also scenes of forgetting. City-slicker youth lack the innate knowledge of ritual that rural society imparts. Wistful elders wonder if their children will pass on the ‘old’ traditions that they have so recently renewed. The idea that religion might be a force to remake China in the mould of a Western democracy carries with it the obvious irony, that in so doing religion may well be sowing the seeds of its own demise.