In 1982, six years after the Cultural Revolution ended with Mao Zedong’s death, the Chinese Communist party issued a paper known as Document 19. In its 10 pages, the party admitted that during the previous two decades leaders had erroneously suppressed religious expression, forcing believers underground and persecuting those who attempted to practise their faith openly. Those days were over, Document 19 declared: religious practices would henceforth be permitted, although subject to the oversight and regulation of the party-state.
Document 19 set the stage for a religious revival in contemporary China that can go unnoticed amid stories of the country’s economic progress and political stagnation. But as journalist Ian Johnson describes in his absorbing and often surprising book The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao, hundreds of millions of Chinese have turned to religion in search of something more than the go-go consumerism peddled by the party during the 1990s and 2000s. “We thought we were unhappy because we were poor,” one interviewee tells Johnson. “But now a lot of us aren’t poor anymore, and yet we’re still unhappy. We realize there’s something missing and that’s a spiritual life.”
The party has recognised this desire for something more among the Chinese population and signalled its approval — within limits — of religious practice. Since assuming office in late 2012, President Xi Jinping has overseen a propaganda campaign promoting traditional belief systems such as Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism. Propaganda, however, is not the source of the religious revival Johnson documents in The Souls of China; today’s believers occupy a space created by the government but they arrived in it on their own. Although the book’s subtitle implies Mao bore responsibility for the erasure of China’s spiritual life, Johnson dates the beginning of an upheaval in Chinese religious practices to a century earlier, as the imperial government faced foreign incursions in the mid-1800s.