The politics of christian charity in translocal Wenzhou

Abstract

This paper examines the notion of charity among the Christian communities in the city of Wenzhou in southeast China. Wenzhou has become the largest urban Christian center in China, popularly known as “China’s Jerusalem.” It is also a regional center of the global market economy since the 1990s. As a densely-populated coastal port city, Wenzhou was one of the important and vigorous trading centers in southeast China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because of its trading links with the outside world, it has a long history of cross-cultural religious transmission. This paper pays particular attention to the rising entrepreneurial class of Christians in the post-Mao era who actively engage in practices of giving (e.g. public relief, church building, and gift-giving to poor migrants) and who conduct large-scale translocal religious and business activities. Through exploring the narratives and practices of these Wenzhou Christian entrepreneurs that revolve around charity, I show how charity is socially constructed, how it has become part of a larger moral discourse of modernity, and how it re-establishes a sense of locality for those who were once humiliated and described by the Maoist state as enslaved by imperialist economic, political and ideological forms.