2015 UCLA-SJTU Summer Workshop July 7-13, 2015 Shanghai Jiaotong University Research Topic I am going to examine the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chinese Protestantism in the early People's Republic of China (PRC) in terms of state-society relationship by analyzing Tian Feng, official journal of the Three-self Reform Movement Committee, preserved in the Shanghai Municipal Archives. The research Question is why the CCP allowed the Three-self Committee, the mass organization for Protestantism and sustained tolerant attitude to Protestants right after having established the Communist state. Although many conventional studies assumes that the system by which the CCP managed Chinese Protestantism in the early days of the PRC was coercive and the Party-state was the only agent of religious policy formation aiming at complete control over Chinese Protestantism. the CCP encouraged political participation of Chinese Protestantism for efficient implementation of its religious policy. According to my analysis, this was due to the discrepancies between the ideals and the realities. the CCP state’s strong intention to expand its power to religious area, on one hand, and on the other, the lack of means to realize the intention. Facing such discrepancies CCP paid its attention to “autonomous” Christian’s organization which led to the establishment of Three-self Committee in national level in 1954. According to the CCP terminology, the “autonomy” did not mean self-determination or complete independence of Protestantism from state power, but rather believers’ voluntary response to and active participation in the governmental religious policy execution. The CCP’s emphasis upon the autonomy of Protestantism signifies that the CCP power could not infiltrate into religious area under its early conditions of lacking in enough ability to administer the over one million protestants believers, and thereby appealing to the their voluntary cooperation with state. And in the early PRC, the Party-state intended to exert effectively its power over the religious sphere, thereby absorbing social capital from religious forces to consolidate the regime. To this end, the CCP guaranteed a certain space of religious activities for Chinese Protestantism and invited it to cooperate with state by forming its own mass organization. In response to state's demand, Chinese Protestantism organized Three-self Reform Movement Committee since 1950 and cooperated with CCP in its religious policy in many ways. First, the Committee legitimized its participation in the Korean War and the anti-imperialism movement by declaring a series of manifesto. And it also arranged various accusation meetings and political study sessions in favor of CCP's requests. It is worth noting that such cooperation with the CCP was based on Chinese Protestantism's own motives. By meeting the state's demand, it could secure a theoretical basis that guaranteed the existence of Christianity under the communist regime and furthermore could obtain social reward that permitted the Committee to exert its influence on whole Chinese Christianity. In this regard, it can be concluded that the Committee's political participation in the early 1950s was not necessarily attributed to fear for the repressive Party-state, but to a certain degree of voluntarism of Chinese Protestantism itself. In sum, beyond the conventional “state control” approaches based on the totalitarian model, I try to redefine such autonomy given to the Three-self Committee as the Communists’ effort to establish a kind of governance system in which the state leads religious autonomy under the state leadership. In other words state-society relationship formed between the CCP and Chinese Protestantism in the early PRC is kind of co-operational governing meaning that the state encourages the voluntary participation of society under state leadership rather than state's unilateral control over society. In this system, though it is apparent that the Party-state still played a leading role in the relationship with Protestantism, it attempted to govern society through the interaction with people who have faith in God.
