This book, coauthored by a historian and an anthropologist, provides an impressive synthesis of the burgeoning literature on religion in China. The narrative ranges from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries and encompasses mainland China as well as other parts of the “Chinese world” such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. Throughout, the authors foreground a diversity of practices that are possible candidates to fall within the category of “religion.” In imperial China, this diversity existed by reference to the “religio-political state” as its “ordering center of gravity” (p. 3), holding the power to distinguish between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The book starts at the moment at which this center of gravity is fracturing, and shows how the various successors of the Middle Kingdom and their religious communities have tackled the process of rebuilding mutual relations under ever-shifting political conditions.

In their treatment of the late imperial and republican periods, Goossaert and Palmer present the emergence of the category of religion, and opposing terms such as “superstition” or “heretical teachings,” but not as a simple transposition of Western categories. Rather, they trace the complex dialogue in which Chinese intellectuals crafted their understanding of Western modernity and what it required of China, sometimes mediated through other Asian powers such as Japan, where the neologisms for religion (zongjiao) and superstition (mixin) came from (50). In the Chinese Republic, the need to build independent institutional structures to replace the imperial center and to prove the moral usefulness of various religious teachings led to the establishment of national associations of Taoists, Buddhists, Muslims, Catholics, and Protestants, foreshadowing the religious denominations that would be recognized in communist China.

Moving into the Maoist period, the authors show the Communist Party as a contradictory actor, committed to destroying religious life but also finding itself put in the position of arbiter of true and false religion. This continues in post-Mao mainland China, where religion is integrated into that country's unique blend of capitalism and communism: religious organizations are treated as analogous to work units (danwei) and expected to be economically self-sustaining (318–19), religious leaders hold positions in people's congresses of various levels, and body cultivation practices at the edge of religion and medicine, such as qigong, had wide popular followings before Falungong was banned in 1999 (337–42). A 1991 state council directive presents a hilarious example of how the communist state, by allowing religion to function publicly but continuing to regulate it tightly, is increasingly forced into a role of religious arbiter somewhat like that of the emperor. In reference to the institution of reincarnate lamas in Tibet, the council decrees, “Reincarnation is allowed, but not all can be reincarnated” (365).

By crafting a compelling narrative out of a vast number of specialized studies, the authors offer a point of entry into China's many “religious questions” that will be useful to area specialists and also to readers interested in China for purposes of comparison. To someone versed in Soviet religious history, this book is striking for the many similarities between the strategies of both ruling parties. For instance, both parties initially were more tolerant of religious expression among ethnic minorities whose loyalty they needed to secure, sometimes through the help of religious leaders. But there also seem to be some common historiographical challenges to accounting for the effects militant anti-religious policies had on everyday practices. Like scholars who work on the early decades of the Soviet Union, Goossaert and Palmer largely tell a story of popular resistance to state-imposed anti-religious measures: elderly patients refuse to visit urban hospitals to avoid compulsory cremation laws (232); peasants bury their ancestral tablets, but recite the family genealogy while bowing to the portrait of Mao that has taken their place (165). This makes state measures seem superficial, with their impact fading once repressive enforcement stops. However, a fascinating chapter on “Filial Piety, the Family, and Death” ends with the tantalizing observation that with the one-child policy the traditional order of deference and veneration has been reversed, and grandparents have become “servants” of their grandchild (238). This hints at changes that run deep, and may tell us that when we work to account for secularization processes that occurred in socialist societies, religious policy is not always the most revealing place to look. Family policy, education, medicine, gender relations, and geographical mobility may be important areas through which to understand how initial resistance can turn into lasting change.