Resistance Under Communist China

This book examines religious activism—Christianity, Buddhism, and Taoism—in China, a powerful atheist state that provides one of the hardest challenges to existing methods of transnational activism. The author focuses on mechanisms used by three kinds of actors: protesters, advocates and opportunists, and uses regional, inter-faith, and international comparisons to understand why some foreign advocates can enter China and engage in illegal aid and missions to empower local activists, while the same groups cannot conduct the same activities in another geographically, economically and politically similar location. The stories in this book demonstrate a more inclusive and bottom-up approach of transnational activism; they challenge the conventional spiral theory paradigm of human rights literature and the narrow views about GONGOs in civil society literature. This new knowledge helps to sustain a more optimistic view and offers an alternative way of promoting human rights in China andcountries with similar authoritarian environments.

“The book amply achieves its descriptive and theoretical goals. Readers will gain a new understanding of the state of religious freedom … amid riveting human stories of ingenuity, wisdom, and courage. … In short, the author should be congratulated for this original, thoughtful, and provocative book.” (Jianlin Chen, Review of Religion and Chinese Society, Vol. 7, 2020)

“This book is a fascinating and illuminating extension of existing fieldwork studies of the Protestant churches in China. Ray Wang has done something extremely valuable by shining a light on a new phenomenon and then developing a novel theory that explains how and why house and official churches win Party-state support for illegal connections to overseas groups. They do this by ‘marketing’ the resources that overseas organizations can bring to government officials. An important, ambitious theoretical addition to understanding church-state relations in contemporary China.” (Carsten Vala, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Loyola University Maryland, USA) 

“Ray Wang’s original study theorizes the conditions under which transnational religious advocacy can augment, or constrain, opportunities for religious expression in contemporary China. His empirically rich and theoretically informed analysis identifies specific strategies that allow transnational and Chinese domestic religious actors to cooperate in the pursuit of shared goals, despite political obstacles. Wang provides new insights into Chinese state-religion relations, and a new framework for analyzing dynamics of transnational advocacy under authoritarian rule.” (Susan K. McCarthy, Professor, Political Science, Providence College, USA) 

“In this fascinating study, Ray Wang investigates how transnational religious activists in China have expanded religious freedoms for some groups. Building on years of research, Wang challenges conventional assumptions about human rights by demonstrating how transnational activism can effectively operate in ways that are subtle, quiet, and behind the scenes. In so doing, he also makes a powerful case for looking beyond the ‘naming and shaming’ strategies cultivated by prominent human rights organizations in order to pay more attention to the sophisticated strategies pursued by local actors to advance social change.” (Bronwyn Leebaw, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California Riverside, USA) 

“Ray Wang’s book carefully examines how transnational networks have helped local believers in China to overcome many obstacles in the restrictive regulations. The outsiders have helped to fund the construction of churches and temples, provide social services to the needy people, and facilitate evangelism or propylitization. He shows that there are regional and personal variations in the implementation of the regulations, and the regulations themselves have left certain gray areas between the red (legal) and illegal (black), so that transnationals may work with certain local groups in the ‘red market’ of religion and provide support in all red, black, or gray markets. It sheds light on the challenges and opportunities of cooperation between local believers and transnational activists under an authoritarian regime.” (Fenggang Yang, Professor, Sociology, and Director, Center on Religion and Chinese Society, Purdue University, USA)

Ray Wang is Associate Professor at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. His major research interests focus on human rights, religious freedom and transnational advocacy networks, and he is the recipient of an Excellent Young Scholar Research Fund from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan (2018–2021).