Paper short abstract:

China is currently experiencing a 'legal revolution'. But as the government has emphasised the creation of law-abiding subjects, the unfulfilled promise of emancipation has 'infiltrated' popular religion, whose festivals recreate local collectives as proprietors of self, and as historical agents.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on the relation between popular religion and law in contemporary China, both of which are defined by the state as mirror opposites: the one are made to represent order, progress, modernity, and rationality, the other chaos, corruption, and regression. As politics in the Maoist era, law is today enchanted with the power to remake the person and society and to transcend the present to lead China to a better future. But as China is not a democratic country, the promise of political emancipation has always been postponed until a 'better future'. Also today, state law is promoted as the new ideology of the self-disciplining citizen, rather then as a resource of rightful citizen. In this situation, non-private religion becomes a sphere beyond that individualising control. It allows the creation of a community of equals that bestows rights and empowers through collective membership. This paper approaches the revival of popular religion in rural China through the prism of Maoism, arguing that territorial festivals, in which local people re-appropriate the local from the state, reinstitute local collectives as the proprietors of self, and as historical agents. With their festivals set against the 'science' of the (post)socialist state, 'peasants' claim a right to politics in the here and now, from a state who has located 'liberation' always either in the past (in 1949) or in a future paradise.