Boss Christians: the business of religion in the ''Wenzhou Model'' of Christian revival
Since the 1990s Wenzhou has gained fame as a regional center of global capitalism and as China’s Jerusalem, a center for Chinese Christianity. A new entrepreneurial class of Christians, known as boss Christians, has emerged and spearheaded local church development. Drawing on extensive ethnographic...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Print Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Chicago Press
2008
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| In: |
The China journal
Year: 2008, Issue: 59, Pages: 63-87 |
| Further subjects: | B
Religious identity
B Christianity B Population group B Economic development B Religiosity B Socioeconomic change B Religious practice B China B Volksrepublik China Wenzhou Religious organization Christen Christianity Religiöse Bevölkerungsgruppe Wirtschaftliche Entwicklung Sozioökonomische Entwicklung Urbanisierung Entrepreneur Religiöse Praxis Religiosity B Christian B Urbanization B Religious organization B Entrepreneur |
| Summary: | Since the 1990s Wenzhou has gained fame as a regional center of global capitalism and as China’s Jerusalem, a center for Chinese Christianity. A new entrepreneurial class of Christians, known as boss Christians, has emerged and spearheaded local church development. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores the intimate cultural linkage between the entrepreneurial outlook of the boss Christians and local church development. Wenzhou Christian entrepreneurial logic results in the capitalist consumerist production of church development and enables the refashioning of Chinese Christianity, a marginalized rural social institution in the popular imagination, into a modern urban institution. At the same time this upwardly mobile class of believers refashions their class identities, from village entrepreneurs with limited education to highly cultivated Christian leaders. Thus they convert economic resources into cultural capital. The cultural phenomenon of boss Christians provides a lens for understanding the desires, choices and actions of China’s new rich and sheds light on the formation of a new local elite in reform-era urban China. (China J/GIGA) |
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| ISSN: | 1324-9347 |
| Contains: | In: The China journal
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