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Two Protestant Assemblies in Tianjin: In Search of Markers of Certainty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2025

Isabelle Thireau
Isabelle Thireau*
Affiliation:
EHESS, CNRS
*
isabelle.thireau@ehess.fr
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Abstract

This article is based on fieldwork carried out between 2011 and 2017 at two Protestant places of worship in Tianjin, a city to the southeast of Beijing: an official church and a “domestic gathering point.” Based on the observation of eighty-three services as well as exchanges with preachers and worshippers, this study was conducted in a context of religious growth, particularly in the case of Protestantism, that saw the multiplication of public gatherings despite restrictions. The analysis shows how, in a context where references to the past cannot be mobilized to make sense of present experiences, preachers and witnesses draw on the Bible and its “true stories” to propose a less equivocal understanding of situations encountered in everyday life. In this way, the Bible offers new linguistic models that enable new forms of interpretation, at a distance from the uncertainties but also the ideological rigidities of the language available in twenty-first-century China. It also offers reference points that, freed from notions of doubt, can absorb the expression of all sorts of anxieties and uncertainties. The figure of the “false believer” and that of the bad fellow citizen are thus deplored for the same evil: false pretenses. Language, often denounced as misleading and full of dissimulation, is here used to name and contain such suspicions and to develop shared references and interpretations deemed less ambivalent.

Cet article part d’une enquête menée entre 2011 et 2017 sur de deux lieux de culte protestants à Tianjin, ville située au sud-est de Pékin : un temple officiel et un « point de rassemblement domestique ». Prenant appui sur l’observation de 83 moments de culte ainsi que sur des échanges avec des prédicateurs et des fidèles, cette étude s’inscrit dans un contexte d’essor du religieux, celui notamment du protestantisme, et de multiplication des rassemblements publics en dépit des contraintes rencontrées. L’analyse montre comment, là où des références au passé ne peuvent être mobilisées pour éclairer l’expérience présente, prédicateurs et auteurs de témoignages s’emparent de la Bible et de ses « histoires vraies » pour pouvoir parler des événements et situations rencontrées au quotidien et en proposer un sens moins brouillé. La Bible offre en effet de nouveaux usages linguistiques qui permettent de nouvelles formes d’interprétation, à distance des incertitudes mais aussi des rigidités idéologiques du langage disponible dans la Chine du xxie siècle. Elle propose des repères qui échappent à l’emprise du doute et auxquels peut s’arrimer l’expression de toutes sortes d’inquiétudes et d’incertitudes. La figure du « faux croyant » mais aussi celle du mauvais concitoyen sont ainsi déplorées à la lumière d’un même mal : les faux-semblants. La langue, première modalité de l’apparaître et dénoncée à ce titre comme lieu privilégié de diverses dissimulations, surgit ici pour nommer et contenir pareil soupçon, mais aussi pour proposer des interprétations et des orientations moins incertaines.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales - English Edition , First View , pp. 1 - 33
Copyright
© Éditions de l’EHESS 2025

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Footnotes

This article was originally published in French as “Deux assemblées protestantes à Tianjin. En quête des repères de la certitude,” in “Le fait religieux à l’épreuve du monde,” special issue, Annales HSS 78, no. 1 (2023): 109–141, doi 10.1017/ahss.2023.40. It was translated by Juliet Powys and edited by Chloe Morgan.

*

I am grateful to Philippe Gonzalez for reading an early version of this text. I would also like to thank Antonella Romano, Vincent Azoulay, and the two anonymous peer reviewers for their insightful comments.

References

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2. Sebastian Veg and Edmund W. Cheng, “Alternative Publications, Spaces and Publics: Revisiting the Public Sphere in 20th- and 21st-Century China,” China Quarterly 246 (2021): 317–30; Thomas B. Gold, “The Resurgence of Civil Society in China,” Journal of Democracy 11 (1990): 18–31; Guobin Yang, The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

3. Alain Cottereau, “‘Esprit public’ et capacité de juger. La stabilisation d’un espace public en France aux lendemains de la Révolution,” in Pouvoir et légitimité. Figures de l’espace public, ed. Alain Cottereau and Paul Ladrière (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 1992), 239–72.

4. As happened on the release, in November 2017, of the film Youth by the director Fang Xiaoguang.

5. On this subject, see Nathanel Amar’s analysis of punk culture and Marie Bellot’s work on the spaces and forms of engagement mobilized by qualified young people in China: Nathanel Amar, Scream for life. L’invention d’une contre-culture punk en Chine populaire (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2022); Marie Bellot, “Faire entendre les voix en Chine : jeunesse qualifiée, autoritarisme négocié et civisme ordinaire” (PhD diss., Université de Lyon, 2019).

6. On the notions of gathering and engagement used in this article, see Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York: The Free Press, 1963).

7. For the population of Tianjin, see the Tianjin municipality government website and, more specifically, the “Statistical Data Report Concerning the Social and Economic Development of Tianjin in 2011,” published March 1, 2012, https://www.tj.gov.cn/sq/tjgb/202005/t20200520_2468070.html.

8. Yuhua Guo, Shoukuren de lishi: Jicun lishi yu yi zhng wenming logis 受苦人的歷史：驥村歷史與一種文明的邏輯/The Narrative of Those Who Suffer: The History of Ji Village and the Logic of a Civilization (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press of Hong Kong, 2013).

9. On the history of China from 1949 onwards and its current transformations, see in particular Gilles Guiheux, La République populaire de Chine. Histoire générale de la Chine (1949 à nos jours) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2018); Alain Roux and Xiaohong Xiao-Planes, Histoire de la République populaire de Chine. De Mao Zedong à Xi Jinping (Malakoff: Armand Colin, 2018); Tania Angeloff with Wang Su, La société chinoise depuis 1949 (Paris: La Découverte, 2018).

10. Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2.

11. Ibid., 10.

12. The countries that emerged victorious from the Second Opium War (1856–1860)—Britain, France, and the United States—were the first to found concessions on the west bank of the Hai He in 1860, though the American concession never established a municipal government and joined the British concession in 1902. The rush for concessions then led to the successive emergence of the German (1895), Japanese (1898), Russian (1900), Italian (1901), Austrian (1901) and Belgian (1902) concessions.

13. David C. Schak, “Protestantism in China: A Dilemma for the Party-State,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 40, no. 2 (2011): 71–106, here p. 73.

14. Nanlai Cao, Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 5.

15. Katharina Wenzel-Teuber, “2012 Statistical Update on Religions and Churches in the People’s Republic of China and in Taiwan,” trans. David Streit, Religions & Christianity in Today’s China 3, no. 3 (2013): 18–43.

16. Kenneth Dean, “Local Ritual Traditions of Southeast China: A Challenge to Definitions of Religion and Theories of Ritual,” in Social Scientific Studies of Religion in China: Methodology, Theories, and Findings, ed. Fenggang Yang and Graeme Lang (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 133–62.

17. Anthony Barthels, “Sinicization: Political, Social and Doctrinal Implications” (MA diss., Asia Lutheran Seminary, Hong Kong, 2020).

18. Unregistered (in other words unofficial) churches are under greatest threat, especially when they have a large number of worshippers—crosses outside buildings have been destroyed, places of worship closed down, and leaders arrested. In contrast, it is more difficult to understand the temporal and spatial variations in the control exercised over official places of worship. Xiaoxuan Wang’s book offers a detailed analysis of the sanctions faced by churches in Wenzhou: Wang, Maoism and Grassroots Religion: The Communist Revolution and the Reinvention of Religious Life in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

19. The official English name for this church is “Shanxi Road Christian Church Tianjin.”

20. Daniel H. Bays, “Chinese Protestant Christianity Today,” in “Religion in China Today,” ed. Daniel L. Overmyer, special issue, China Quarterly 174 (2003): 183–98.

21. Tianjin, February 8, 2011, Shanxi Road, Sister L., lay preacher, fifty-five years old; Tianjin, June 3, 2011, Liuzhi Road, Brother W., pastor, thirty-five years old.

22. Dean, “Local Ritual Traditions of Southeast China,” 136.

23. Schak, “Protestantism in China,” 72.

24. Ibid., 79.

25. Juliette Duléry, “La visibilité des organisations protestantes en Chine sous le regard de l’État-parti,” in “La religion sous le regard du tiers,” ed. David Douyère and Philippe Gonzalez, special issue, Questions de communication 37 (2020): 143–66.

26. Launched in 2003 by several Chinese research institutions, the “Chinese General Social Survey,” or Zhongguo zonghe shehui diaocha (中国综合社会调查), is a joint survey, annual or biannual depending on the topic, http://www.cnsda.org/index.php?r=projects/view&id=67200093.

27. Fenggang Yang, “The Red, Black and Gray Markets of Religion in China,” Sociological Quarterly 47, no. 1 (2006): 93–122.

28. Tianjin, October 27, 2011, Shanxi Road, Sister F., apprentice pastor, thirty-five years old.

29. Tianjin, May 3, 2012, Shanxi Road, Sister L., lay preacher, sixty years old.

30. In Guangzhou (Canton), Pastor Zhang Yuanlai has noted that 84.37 percent of those baptized between 2000 and 2005 in the city’s official Protestant churches were administratively domiciled elsewhere, highlighting the importance of these spaces as welcoming communities and networks of sociability for migrants: Zhang Yuanlai, Weiji yu qiji. Guangzhou jidujiaohui fazhan xiankuang 危机于契机. 广州基督徒教会发展情况 [Crisis and Opportunity: The Development of Protestant Churches in Guangzhou] (Hong Kong: Christian Communication International, 2009), 42.

31. Tianjin, September 16, 2015, Liuzhi Road, host of the gathering point, pastor’s son, sixty years old.

32. See Bruce Bégout, La découverte du quotidien (Paris: Alia, 2010).

33. Katrin Fiedler refers to the “communal” character of these places of worship: Fiedler, “China’s ‘Christianity Fever’ Revisited: Towards a Community-Oriented Reading of Christian Conversions in China,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 39, no. 4 (2010): 71–109.

34. The first complete translations of the Bible date back to the 1820s. Thanks to the efforts of the Protestant missionaries Robert Morrison (1782–1834) and William C. Milne (1785–1822), a first translation was finalized and printed in Malacca in 1823; another translation, by Baptist missionary Joshua Marshman (1768–1837), was apparently completed later but printed a year earlier in India. A series of new translations was published from 1830 onwards by Walter Henry Medhurst, Charles Gützlaff, Elijah C. Bridgman, and John R. Morrison (1840); W. H. Medhurst and James Legge (1854); E. C. Bridgman (1862); J. T. Goddard (1868); S. I. J. Schereschewsky (1875); and Griffith John (1905). More recently, in 1954, the work begun by the Franciscan Gabriele Allegra led to the publication of a new translation of the Hebrew Bible, accompanied, in 1968, by that of the New Testament.

35. Questions of vocabulary and the translation of Christian terms into Chinese have naturally been the subject of much discussion over the years, especially during the famous “Chinese rites controversy” at the end of the seventeenth century.

36. A more detailed understanding of these moments would involve exploring the role of song as a medium for legitimizing and disseminating all kinds of precepts, maxims, and ideological terms, as well as the popularity in Tianjin of different types of song, including, before 1949, the “songs” of mothers, railway workers, and laborers, and of the struggle against Japan, and, after 1949, songs of agrarian reform and revolutionary songs.

37. Although testimonies can still be given at the Shanxi Road church, since 2015 they have been subject to a stricter preliminary validation process and their number has been considerably reduced.

38. Justine Rochot, “‘Un parc à soi.’ Les parcs, territoires de la vieillesse en Chine urbaine contemporaine,” Lien social et Politiques 79 (2017): 193–214; Lisa Richaud, “Between ‘Face’ and ‘Faceless’ Relationships in China’s Public Places: Ludic Encounters and Activity-Oriented Friendships Among Middle- and Old-Aged Urbanites in Beijing Public Parks,” in “Urban Friendship Networks: Affective Negotiations in the City,” special issue, Urban Studies 55, no. 3 (2018): 570–88; Isabelle Thireau, Des lieux en commun. Une ethnographie des rassemblements publics en Chine (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2020).

39. Alfred Schütz, “Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship” [1951], in Collected Papers, vol. 2, Studies in Social Theory (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), 159–78.

40. On emotions, especially collective emotions, as a form of valuation, see Louis Quéré, “Natures et formes de l’émotion collective,” Occasional Paper 32 (CEMS-Institut Marcel Mauss, Paris, 2015).

41. Tianjin, October 26, 2011, Liuzhi Road, Sister F., lay preacher, fifty-five years old.

42. Tianjin, October 26, 2011, Liuzhi Road, Sister F., lay preacher, fifty-five years old.

43. On the training of pastors, and on Protestant theological seminaries in China and their activities, see Daniel H. Bays, A New History of Christianity in China (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Gerda Wielander, “Protestant and Online: The Case of Aiyan,” China Quarterly 197 (2009): 165–82; Fenggang Yang and Joseph B. Tamney, eds., State, Market and Religions in Chinese Societies (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

44. The current predominance of male pastors is undoubtedly provisional given that theological institutes are now attended by large numbers of women. In Guangzhou (Canton) in 2007, thirty of the city’s fifty official pastors, including in suburban districts, were women. Women were also in the vast majority among those enrolled in specialized theological training. See Yuanlai, Weiji yu qiji, 82.

45. Tianjin, March 12, 2011, Shanxi Road, Sister L., lay preacher, sixty years old; Tianjin, May 6, 2015, Lizhi Road, Sister L., lay preacher, sixty-four years old. After observing the frequency of testimonies and collecting accounts from his students, Sigurd Kaiser, the head of New Testament teaching at Nanjing Theological Seminary between 2007 and 2014, wrote that “the personal witness plays a central role in Chinese Christianity”: when reading religious publications, the students turned first of all to the pages containing testimonies. See Sigurd Kaiser, “Church Growth in China: Some Observations from an Ecumenical Perspective,” Ecumenical Review 67, no. 1 (2015): 35–47, here p. 38.

46. Tianjin, September 9, 2015, Liuzhi Road, Brother W., lay preacher, sixty-five years old.

47. Tianjin, September 24, 2015, Shanxi Road, Sister F., lay preacher, forty-five years old.

48. The zhiqing 知青, or “educated youths” displaced as part of the Down to the Countryside Movement, were the seventeen million or so young urban Chinese who, between 1968 and the late 1970s, were sent to rural areas to work and, in theory, complete their political training among peasants. See in particular Michel Bonnin, Génération perdue. Le mouvement d’envoi des jeunes instruits à la campagne en Chine, 1968–1980 (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2004).

49. Tianjin, May 19, 2011, Shanxi Road, Brother L., lay preacher, sixty years old.

50. Yangbanxi, or 样板戏, refers to the particular art of revolutionary operas and plays that occupied the cultural stage during the years 1966–1976. The White-Haired Girl and Red Detachment of Women are emblematic examples.

51. Tianjin, November 17, 2011, Shanxi Road, Brother W., lay preacher, fifty-five years old.

52. This expression refers to the process of collectivization and nationalization of private companies from 1955–1956 onwards. By extension, it refers to the so-called revolutionary decades, characterized by a planned economy with its own hierarchies, excesses, and practices.

53. Tianjin, May 19, 2011, Shanxi Road, Brother L., lay preacher, sixty years old.

54. Tianjin, October 25, 2014, Shanxi Road, Pastor G., seventy years old.

55. Tianjin, September 20, 2014, Shanxi Road, Pastor M., fifty-five years old.

56. Marieke Borren, “‘A Sense of the World’: Hannah Arendt’s Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Common Sense,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 21, no. 2 (2013): 225–55, here p. 248.

57. Anne Cheng, “Le saint confucéen : de l’exemplarité à l’exemple,” in “La valeur de l’exemple. Perspectives chinoises,” ed. Karine Chemla, special issue, Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 19 (1997): 73–90.

58. Tianjin, May 20, 2014, Shanxi Road, Sister H., lay preacher, forty-five years old.

59. Tianjin, June 1, 2011, Liuzhi Road, Sister Z., lay preacher, sixty-five years old.

60. Tianjin, May 1, 2013, Liuzhi Road, Sister Z., lay preacher, sixty-seven years old.

61. Tianjin, June 15, 2011, Liuzhi Road, Pastor Z., thirty-five years old.

62. Tianjin, March 31, 2011, Liuzhi Road, Sister F., forty-five years old.

63. Tianjin, November 2, 2017, Shanxi Road, Sister W., sixty years old.

64. Hannah Arendt, “Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government” [1952], The Review of Politics 15, no. 3 (1953): 303–27, here p. 316.

65. Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique, xix e – xx e siècles (Paris: Éd. du Seuil, 1986), 285.

66. Alain Cottereau, “Dénis de justice, dénis de réalité. Remarques sur la réalité sociale et sa dénégation,” in L’expérience du déni, ed. Pascale Gruson and Renaud Dulong (Paris: Éd. de la MSH, 1999), 159–89.

67. At the 2016 National Work Conference on Religion, chaired exceptionally by Xi Jinping, the need to “Sinicize” religions in China was reaffirmed, together with the prohibition on Chinese Communist Party members basing their values and beliefs on any religion.

68. Tianjin, November 24, 2011, Shanxi Road, Sister Z., lay preacher, sixty-five years old.

69. Tianjin, May 10, 2011, Shanxi Road, Sister W., lay preacher, forty-five years old.

70. Tianjin, December 8, 2011, Shanxi Road, Pastor M., fifty-five years old.

71. Tianjin, February 2, 2012, Shanxi Road, Sister H., lay preacher, fifty-five years old.

72. Tianjin, November 14, 2012, Liuzhi Road, Pastor Y., thirty-five years old.

73. Tianjin, November 24, 2011, Shanxi Road, Sister Z., lay preacher, sixty-five years old.

74. Tianjin, October 27, 2011, Shanxi Road, Sister F., apprentice pastor, thirty-five years old.

75. Tianjin, December 6, 2011, Shanxi Road, Sister J., lay preacher, sixty-five years old.

76. Tianjin, November 30, 2011, Liuzhi Road, Sister F., fifty-five years old.

77. Fiedler, “China’s ‘Christianity Fever’ Revisited.”

78. Lefort, Essais sur le politique, 282.

79. For a more in-depth discussion of the issue of appearances in politics, see, for example, Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977); Étienne Tassin, “La question de l’apparence,” in Miguel Abensour et al., Politique et pensée. Colloque Hannah Arendt (1997; Paris: Payot, 2004), 87–118; Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, “Peut-on parler philosophiquement politique ? Merleau-Ponty and Hannah Arendt lecteurs de Machiavel,” in L’enjeu Machiavel, ed. Gérald Sfez and Michel Senellart (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2001), 179–98.

80. Furnishing written narratives destined for state and Party officials, ranging from a detailed account of one’s biography, actions, and thoughts to a description of one’s mistakes, was a regular requirement for Chinese citizens after 1949. Self-criticism by Party executives and public confessions of all kinds remain current practices.

81. For example Philippe Gonzales, Que ton règne vienne. Des évangéliques tentés par le pouvoir absolu (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2014); Émir Mahieddin, Faire le travail de Dieu. Une anthropologie morale du pentecôtisme en Suède (Paris: Karthala, 2018); Yannick Fer, L’offensive évangélique. Voyage au cœur des réseaux militants de Jeunesse en Mission (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2010); Philippe Gonzales and Joan Stavo-Debauge, “Politiser les évangéliques par le ‘mandat culturel.’ Sources, usages et effets de la théologie politique de la Droite chrétienne américaine,” in Religieux, société civile, politique, ed. Jacques Ehrenfreund and Pierre Gisel (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2012), 241–76.