The Price of Faith: Political Determinants of the Commercialization of Buddhist Temples in China
Theory
The market’s expansion into traditional non-market spheres often provokes fierce opposition. However, while past research has studied the way in which cultural barriers serve as a bar to market expansion, this paper considers the role of political forces in shaping the boundaries of markets. We argue that there are institutional contradictions not only between different schools of cultural thought but also between cultural understanding and the use of political power. Markets are often places of power struggles because they tend to centralize resources and generate revenues, and have unequal distributional consequences for different social actors (Fligstein, 1996). Therefore, markets are instruments that can be leveraged by social actors in their competition for the control of a society’s institutional structures. Market expansion and contraction are likely to work in a fashion that favors those in power. Because markets depend upon not only shared cultural understandings but also formal rules (Fligstein, 1996), culture and power can be competing sources of the establishment of norms and standards through market governance. While culture prescribes socially acceptable ways of acting or behaving and deviance from cultural norms results in social sanctions, regulatory norms have binding effects on the behavior of market actors and deviance from them tends to result in legal sanctions, such as fines or prison (Meyer and Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio and Powerll, 1991). Thus, when cultural norms and political power clash, power may trump culture in that socially unpopular commercial projects proceed under the pressure of power.
The study of political power can be seen to suggest Zelizer’s (2012: 163) call to “differentiate between top-down forms of monetary earmarking, such as those instituted by the state or other powerful agencies and bottom-up differentiations created by people’s everyday relations.” As she has keenly observed, economic life enjoys a “complex historical, cultural, and social structural variability,” and markets are characterized by not only by “invigorating voluntarism” but also “steely determinism.” She urged scholars to move beyond the divide between “cultural absolutism” and “structural reductionism,” through studying the relationship between micro and macro processes. In particular, investigating how micro interactions can be reconciled theoretically with “the existence of power, inequality, and domination” enhances our understanding of the constant negotiations of creative market actors with the constraints imposed on them by the environment.
Empirical Context and Findings
In this paper, we answer Zelizer’s (2012) call to study how political forces affect the construction of moralized markets, through investigating the commercialization of 141 nationally prominent Buddhist temples in China from 2006 to 2014. The commercialization of Buddhist temples in China provides a good research context, because temples, as sacred sites enabling religious adherents to connect with the divine, are normatively separated from the sphere of commercial operations. Many of them, however, due to their cultural and historical significance, are also among the most popular travel destinations, attracting both devoted pilgrims and secular tourists who seek to satisfy their curiosity about these sacred places. Hence, they have great potential to contribute to local economic development by developing tourism businesses. The Chinese government has a particular motivation for promoting economic growth, because the creation of jobs and the improvement of people’s standard of living that are typically associated with economic growth are an important means for the state to legitimize its rule. The pursuit of economic growth leads to a state policy that considers local economic development as its primary criterion for political promotion, thus turning local government officials into “public entrepreneurs.” These entrepreneurs, unlike their private counterparts, exercise control of political power and thus are able to push temples to commercialize despite resistance from the public. We find that local government officials’ rankings in the political promotion tournament are directly related to the commercialization of temples in their area. Although temples have of course generally attempted to maintain their religious identity, the economic and political environment in which they are embedded shapes the results of their negotiations with the local government.
Contributions
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber (1905) points to religion as a source of inspiration for the emergence of modern capitalism. In today’s China, however, the order of causality is reversed. China’s rapid economic growth has generated wealth and employment opportunities throughout the country, but it has also had certain social consequences. Since the state’s pursuit of legitimacy has made economic development its overriding project, government officials gaming the political system spare no effort to fuel the engine of the market. Such a development model facilitates the market’s relentless march into domains such as religion, transforming temples into money-making enterprises. Our findings have implications for the moralized markets literature, cultural and political accounts of markets, and the political economy of China.
This study contributes to the literature in a few ways. First, while prior studies of the market moralization process have examined the contradictions between different areas of cultural understanding, our paper shows that there is also a conflict between culture and political power. In addition, our study fills in the void of the lack of studies on the impact of the institutional environment on the expansion of moralized markets (Reich, 2014), and joins a small body of literature (e.g., Healy, 2006; Turco, 2012) that suggests that scholars need to look beyond the public’s resistance when examining determinants of the boundaries of moralized markets. Second, through studying how the political system affects the motivation and behavior of Chinese government officials, our paper sheds light on the relationship between micro and macro processes (Zelizer, 2012: 165), and shows a way in which the behavior of micro agents are related to the broader institutional contexts within which they exist. Third, while prior studies of market expansion in the moralized markets literature have primarily adopted qualitative methods, our study of Buddhist temples in China is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to quantify the factors that determine the boundaries of moralized markets based on a large sample of empirical data.