Law and Religion in China: An Economic Approach,

• Author: Aaron Walayat
• Pages: 3-46

e Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law

ISSN: 2338-7602; E-ISSN: 2338-770X

http://www.ijil.org

© 2020 e Institute for Migrant Rights Press

is paper was presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientic Study of

Religion and the Religious Research Association in Las Vegas, Nevada on October 27, 2018.

My gratitude to Professor George B. Shepherd for serving as my advisor for this project, to

Professor Teemu Ruskola for his helpful comments on my dra, and to Professor Sasha Volokh

for his help brainstorming ideas when this paper’s thesis was still in infancy. Special thanks to

Dr. Patrick Carey of Washington & Jeerson College for digging up my undergraduate term

paper that served as the impetus of this project.

rEligion in China

An Economic ApproAch

Aaron J. Walayat

aaronjwalayat@gmail.com

is project is an interpretation of the regulation of religions in China through

economic language, analyzing the religious behavior of individuals given heavy

regulation. e relationship of Chinese regulation of the ve legal religions as

either a regulated monopoly or an oligopoly. Due to the fundamentally legal

nature of the industrial organization of religion in China, the project will anal-

ogize the legal relationship between the Chinese government and the ve legal

religions with the legal status of Chinese state-owned enterprises. e compar-

ison between the laws governing state-owned enterprises and the laws govern-

ing social organizations like the legal religious organizations is important in

interpreting the behavior of religious groups. e project will be focused mainly

on the behavior of so-called religious “rms” in the context of the industrial

organization model and the constrains that such a model puts on these rms.

Furthermore, given the presence of an industrial organization of religion, spurs

the creation of a parallel “informal” market of religious activity which includes

special economic behavior among religious consumers.

Keywords: Religion, China, Law and Economics, Informal Economy, Rational Choice

eory

VII Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law 3-46 (January 2020)

4

Walayat

INTRODUCTION

It will likely come as a disconcerting unease (rather than a shock) for

the reader to nd that I write from a generation that does not remem-

ber the famous, live-image of the Tank Man. e photograph embodied

the persistent idea of what China meant to Western eyes: “the solitary

encounter between the two main protagonists of the liberal political

universe . . . a lone but heroic individual facing o the power of the

state.”1 To this day, laymen of Chinese studies insist on decorating the

noun China with the adjective “communist” including all the authori-

tarian, totalitarian, and “unfree” connotations the word invokes. How-

ever, even while attributed, categorized, and dened with a Western

political theory,2 the denition still retains the resilient notion of China

as, eo ipso, an authoritarian despotism.

e contexts that shaped China are so fundamentally dierent

in origin from the contexts of Western civilization, such that the

“modernization” thesis, as commonly understood in the Western

paradigm, is nearly inapplicable to the cumulative analysis of Chinese

civilization. Indeed, Europe “owns modernity itself” and has become

the sort of measuring stick by which comparisons of modernity

are conducted.3 Such a Eurocentric preconception of China in the

context of modernization led Professor Teemu Ruskola to note that, to

Eurocentric observers, the questions of “Where is Asia? When is Asia?”

are answered simply as “not Europe” and “not now,” respectively.4

China, to the Western mind, is a stereotype-riddled caricature of

contradictions, interpreted as anarchic yet despotic, spiritual yet

practical, manifold yet monolithic.

In considering Chinese religion, therefore, it is common for

observers to interpret China as a slew of contradictions. Chinese

1. T R, L O 210 (2013).

2. Lest we forget that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were Germans.

3. Teemu Ruskola, Where is Asia? When is Asia? eorizing Comparative Law and

Internationa l Law, 43 U.C. D L. R. 879, 885 (2011).

4. Id. at 881-885.

5

Religion in China

Walayat

religions like Daoism,5 and especially Confucianism6 are oen taken

as basically privatized by enveloping every aspect of the private lives of

adherents without crossing over into public, political life.7 At the same

time, news of China’s persecution of members of Falun Gong8 and the

animosity between China and the Dalai Lama over Tibet,9 support the

persistent Western image of the Cultural Revolution stretching into

modern times where religion poses an existential threat to the Chinese

government. Survey studies contort Western perception even more,

determining (perhaps unpropitiously10) that China is the least religious

country in the world with 90 percent of Chinese considering themselves

to be a convinced “atheist” or, at the very least, “not religious.”11 To the

Western mind, only in China is it possible to have a society where the

religions are private, the government is religiously repressive and the

people are irreligious, all at the same time.

However, China’s relationship with religion has been a complicated

one, moving from a period of heavy repression during the Mao

Zedong-era to a more accommodating position in recent years.

5. Taoism, BBC (2014), http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/taoism/.

6. Judith A. Berling, Confucianism, A S, http://asiasociety.org/

education/confucianism.

7. Historically, however, politics played a role in the relationship between Chinese

religions. One notable example is in 842 when the Tang Emperor Wuzong,

who was personally attached to religious Daoism, launched a persecution

against Buddhism as well as other “foreign” religion in China. See Richard J.

Smith, Buddhism and the ‘Great Persecution’ in China in C M

 R H (Kenneth Keulman ed. 1993).

8. John Li & the International Herald Tribune, China vs. Falun Gong: Aer four

years of repression, it’s time to let go, N. Y. T, July 22, 2003, http://www.

nytimes.com/2003/07/22/opinion/china-vs-falun-gong-aer-four-years-of-

repression-its-time-to-let.html.

9. Tibet prole, BBC (Aug. 16, 2017), http://w ww.bbc.com/news/world-asia-

pacic-16689779.

10. Ian Johnson, Chinese Atheists? What the Pew Survey Gets Wrong, N. Y. R. 

B (Mar. 24, 2015), http://www.ny books.com/daily/2014/03/24/chinese-

atheists-pew-gets-wrong/.

11. Rick Noack, Map: ese are the world’s least religious countries, Wash.

Post (Apr. 14, 2015), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/

wp/2015/04/14/map-these-are-the-worlds-least-religious-countries/?utm_

term=.f30fa897d086.