As an Associate Professor of Anthropology and one of the co-leads for the CSCC Meanings, Identities, and Communities Cluster at Duke Kunshan University, Keping Wu brings a rich perspective to her research on the intersections of religion, gender, urbanization, public good, ethnicity, and charisma. Her academic interests focus on the dynamics of boundary-crossing in relation to religious and ethnic identities against the backdrop of urbanization. In her teaching, Prof. Wu engages with topics such as the ethnography of China, understanding ethnic diversity, and the transformations in religious landscapes due to urban growth. Meanwhile, Prof. Wu has significantly contributed to her field through co-authored and edited publications that delve into the social dynamics of Chinese communities. One of her current projects, “Displacement and Its Discontents: Urbanization and Unruly Spirits in Contemporary China,” supported by the CSCC Faculty Research Product Grant, encapsulates her insights. This book, grounded in ethnographic studies from 2014 to 2019, investigates the repercussions of urban expansion in the Chefang Township area and its effects on local religious practices and community structures. It delves into these dual aspects of physical displacement and spiritual upheaval, offering a unique perspective on how urbanization can lead to both disruption and the creation of new forms of religious expression. Her analysis not only promises to enhance the theoretical frameworks that scholars use to understand cultural adaptation but also underscores empirical findings on community resilience in the face of transformative development. We are excited to have the opportunity to speak with Prof. Wu, exploring the depths of her research and forthcoming book to gain deeper insights into how cultures maintain their resilience amid the rapid urbanization of our era.
Hi Prof. Wu, could you share with us the central thesis of your book, “Displacement and Its Discontents: Urbanization and Unruly Spirits in Contemporary China,” and how it contributes to our understanding of cultural resilience?
This book examines the most significant social change in contemporary China – one driven by urbanization and displacement. Amid such rapid and large-scale disruptions, I am curious, as an anthropologist of contemporary China, about the transformations of life-worlds that have occurred and what has remained resilient. As we know, displacement creates conditions of discontinuity and rupture. Urbanization in China has produced a vast displaced and landless class that lives in the “meantimes.”[1]
Religious worlds, in contrast, are often viewed as the backbones of cultures and therefore more resistant or resilient to sudden, imposed changes. However, the question remains: how do religious traditions understand, respond to, and interact with forms of destruction that seem permanent—such as temples being demolished and deities buried?
This book explores the material, temporal, and spatial dimensions, as well as the human and non-human elements, among landless farmers whose villages were demolished to make way for the modern, international city of Suzhou Industrial Park. It argues that the state, religious institutions, spirits, places, and individuals—whether vulnerable or powerful—are entangled in a shared destiny.
What inspired you to explore the intersection of urbanization and the spiritual realm within the context of modern China, and how do you believe this affects our broader understanding of urbanization and displacement?
According to a recent World Bank study, China has by far the fastest urban growth rate in Asia, but only a very modest increase in urban population density.[2] This is possible because cities have physically expanded to overrun neighboring rural areas. While earlier studies of Chinese cities focused on the political economy, state, and civil society of the “urban” proper,[3] recent scholarship pays more attention to migrant populations, rural industrialization, and the land politics of urbanization.[4] As Li Zhang describes it, “a pro-growth coalition between local governments and real estate developers” has led to the transformation of rural land into profit-generating commodities.[5] This means the relocation of millions of graves and the removal of thousands of temples to make way for roads, industrial parks and commercial housing.
Nevertheless, the impact of urbanization on spiritual lives has been almost entirely overlooked. Despite the destruction during the Cultural Revolution, there had been a surge of temple reconstruction in post-Mao China.[6] The changing picture of religious life in the midst of “the great urban transformation” is a significant missing piece when we try to understand both popular religion and how social life has changed in the urban expansion. Our preliminary understanding suggests that Suzhou’s experiment with new temple construction has had complex implications, many not foreseen by the urban and religious planners. They deserve study because they may provide models for other parts of the country, and because they help us understand broader processes of adaptation to sudden change around the globe. The underlying policy issues are crucial: how do new urban spaces – both planned and unplanned – allow for social resilience after a major upheaval, and what kinds of resources can religious practices provide in the rebuilding of social and community life when their infrastructure has also been dismantled?
The majority of research on displacement falls within the realm of migration studies, both domestic and international. However, the people and what I call the “divine agents” in this book did not migrate away from their homeland. Instead, they are “exiled at home,” meaning they experienced the city closing in on them. This shift is just as life-changing, I argue, as migrating to an entirely new world, because everything has literally transformed before their eyes—without them ever leaving the land their ancestors occupied for generations. From the new relocation apartment complexes they are forced to move into, to the high-tech AI-driven city infrastructure surrounding them, everything feels alien and disorienting. I argue that ritual worlds, with their cyclical folding and unfolding, offer a reorienting experience for these landless farmers, helping them reclaim a sense of time and space in an increasingly disorienting world.
We are curious why you chose Chefang as the focal point for your ethnographic research. In selecting Chefang for your fieldwork, were there specific characteristics of the region or its culture that you believed were exemplary of urbanization’s effects on cultural resilience?
This book is my love letter to Suzhou, my cultural home and the home of DKU. Suzhou is the center of Wu culture, a significant source of Chinese cultural traditions since the Ming dynasty. Its ancient city still has well-preserved temples and gardens till today. On the other hand, it has also become one of most international and techno-economically developed cities in China in the past three decades. I chose Chefang as the field site to conduct the ethnographic research, because this is where the latest batch of roughly 10 administrative villages were demolished to expand the urban boundary of the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP) southwards by 5,000 acres, and the villagers’ memories of their village days were still clear in their minds. When their villages were demolished, so were the temples. Two official Daoist temples were erected 15 years after the SIP was established to house the deities from over 300 temples. Many other deities, especially female ones, were left enfolded underground. In Chefang, these memories were fresh when I began my field work, on the day of the inauguration of the new official temple.
Furthermore, the case of Chefang reflects broader patterns seen in villages across China amid urbanization and modernization. Despite being located next to one of China’s wealthiest cities, the villagers remained largely agricultural, following a traditional calendar of popular religious rituals. This case provides a lens through which to observe and understand the everyday lives of ordinary people within a shifting social landscape.
What are the most striking contrasts you have observed regarding the reception and adaptation of male deities versus female deities within these resettlement communities, particularly in the unfolding of post-displacement narratives?
As mentioned earlier, many female deities were buried and destroyed while their male counterparts were kept in the newly constructed Daoist temples. In most Chinese villages, the earth gods come in the form of a couple: tudi gong (husband) and tudi po (wife), whose birthdays are celebrated separately and with equal importance. When the earth gods’ temples were destroyed, the Daoists only remade the statues of the husbands (tudi gong) in the new temple. Therefore, those tudi gong suddenly found themselves widowed. However, under the leadership of spirit mediums, villagers living in the resettlement housing still try to celebrate the wives’ birthdays, and continue hosting rituals for Guanyin and Taimu, two other major goddesses.
Though men often occupy powerful positions, women spirits and spirit mediums dominate the world in this book. The kind of agency the women in these stories exhibit is dispersed, relational, and “anti-heroic agency”. They gain their authority by claiming a conspicuous loss of the heroic sort of agency and instead finding agency through their tight ties to deities and their relationships to the rest of their communities. This book offers a feminist reading of agency that challenges the individual as a bounded entity and situates them as the creators of the new in the folding and unfolding of time and space.[7]
Could you share some insights into the dynamics between local religious bureaucrats and state authorities, especially in the context of constructing and reconstructing religious spaces?
In two published articles, I wrote about the dynamics between local people, religious bureaucrats, and state authorities, as well as their roles in constructing and reconstructing religious spaces.[8] Despite the local government’s overall policy of “Smashing Small, Building Big” toward religious spaces, there are considerable grassroots variations due to the specific contexts at the county, town, and even village levels. Sometimes, charismatic individuals make a significant difference. In this sense, the diversity and variations exhibited in the greater Suzhou region also mirror the diversity one observes across greater China.
[1] Peter, Locke. “Meantime.” In João Biehl and Peter Locke, eds., Unfinished: The Anthropology of Becoming. (Duke: Duke University Press, 2017: 269-277).
[2] World Bank Group, East Asia’s Changing Urban Landscape: Measuring a Decade of Spatial Growth (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2015), https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/21159.
[3] Martin King Whyte, Urban Life in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Deborah S. Davis et al., eds., Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
[4] E.g., You-tien Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Helen F. Siu, “Grounding Displacement: Uncivil Urban Spaces in Postreform South China,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 2 (2007): 329–350; Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China’s Floating Population (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001); Gregory Eliyu Guldin, Farewell to Peasant China: Rural Urbanization and Social Change in the Late Twentieth Century (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997).
[5] Li Zhang, “Contesting Spatial Modernity in Late‐Socialist China,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 3 (2006): 462; Luigi Tomba, The Government next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014).
[6] E.g., Adam Yuet Chau, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Xiaofei Kang, The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender, and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Kenneth Dean, Taoist Ritual and Popular Cults of Southeast China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Yanfei Sun, “Popular Religion in Zhejiang: Feminization, Bifurcation and Buddhification,” Modern China 40, no. 5 (2014): 455–87; Selina Ching Chan and Graeme Lang, Building Temples in China: Memories, Tourism, and Identities (London: Routledge, 2015).
[7] For the idea of folding, please see, Robert Weller and Keping Wu, “Religion in the Folded City: Origami and the Boundaries of the Chronotope,” Comparative Studies in Society and History: 1-22.
[8] See Keping Wu,“‘Buddhification’ and ‘Daoification’ of Local Religions in Contemporary Suzhou”. Historical, Comparative, and Theoretical Perspectives: A Festschrift in Honour of Timothy Brook, (World Scholastics, 2024: 627-649) and Keping Wu, “Innovative State and Local Variations: Governing Religions in Greater Suzhou”, Handbook on Local Governance in China: Structures, Variations, and Innovations, edited by Ceren Ergenc and David S.G. Goodman. (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2023: 407–416).
