The area around Wenzhou is a hotbed of religious belief and practice. It has been called “China's Jerusalem” because of its abundance of Christian churches. Its landscape is also filled with Buddhist temples and monasteries, local deity temples, enormous ancestral halls, and spectacular ritual performances, such as dragon boat races during the duanwu festival, which draw many thousands of participants and reach a wider audience through television. Where did this come from? To many Western scholars as well as many Chinese intellectuals (some of whom have confidently assured me that “we Chinese aren't religious”), it appeared that religion had been obliterated during the Maoist regime.
Now that the rise of religion is an indisputable fact, many, if not most, scholars have explained it in terms of a revival or reinvention of practices that were destroyed during the Mao years, in response now to spiritual needs generated by the market economy...
