Abstract
Since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 and the subsequent withdrawal of foreign missionaries, Protestant Christianity has been thoroughly indigenized in China by weaving itself into ritual forms, sets of cultural assumptions, and the fabric of power relations derived from immediate local realities. In the absence of a central interpretative authority, organizationally independent church groups are often divided along rural/urban lines, by theological differences, and due to varying relationships with the state apparatus. Pentecostalism has been the most active and dynamic of all Chinese Christian groups outside the officially controlled church system in part due to its ability to adapt to changing local circumstances and its emphasis on people’s direct religious experience. In the last few decades of dramatic economic development, the growth of the Pentecostal sector of Chinese Christianity seems to have become increasingly pronounced in certain regions. This has to do with the rapid expansion of new urban church space informed by the emerging prosperity gospel movement. This chapter explores the socio-economic dynamics of urban Christian revival in post-Mao China with a focus on the rise of the prosperity gospel in developed coastal regions. I first place this prosperity gospel in the historical context of Pentecostal development in modern China.
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Notes
Allan Anderson, “The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia,” in Allan Anderson and Edmond Tang, eds., Asian and Pentecostal: The Charismatic Face of Christianity in Asia (London: Regnum Books International, 2005), 2.
Alan Hunter and Kim-Kwong Chan, Protestantism in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 126–35.
Daniel Bays, “Indigenous Protestant Churches in China, 1900–1937: A Pentecostal Case Study,” in Steven Kaplan, ed., Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 124–43.
For a discussion of native revivalism in the early twentieth century and its continued impact on contemporary Chinese Christianity, see Daniel Bays, “Christian Revival in China: 1900–1937,” In Edith L. Blumhofer and Randall Balmer, eds., Modern Christian Revivals (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 161–79.
Cf. Adam Chau, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), ch. 8. The Christian notion of huo re can be compared with the term honghuo (social heat) that characterizes the most desirable mode of peasant sociality.
See Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
Mayfair M. Yang, “Spatial Struggles: Postcolonial Complex, State Disenchantment, and Popular Reappropriation of Space in Rural Southeast China,” Journal of Asian Studies 63, no. 3 (2004): 719–55.
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© 2012 Katherine Attanasi and Amos Yong
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Cao, N. (2012). Urban Property as Spiritual Resource: The Prosperity Gospel Phenomenon in Coastal China. In: Attanasi, K., Yong, A. (eds) Pentecostalism and Prosperity. Palgrave Macmillan’s Christianities of the World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011169_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137011169_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-34131-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-01116-9
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