Michael J. Walsh. Stating the Sacred: Religion, China, and the Formation of the Nation-State. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 272 pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-231-19357-3.
Reviewed by Peter Zarrow (University of Connecticut)
Published on H-Asia (December, 2020)
Commissioned by Bradley C. Davis (Eastern Connecticut State University)
In the conclusion to this book, Walsh states, “Territory, religion, citizen, and race—all can be used to produce the inviolate, the foundation of the modern nation-state saturated with mythos and violence” (p. 152). Actually, most of this book suggests that the key verb should be “are,” not “can be.” Walsh continues, “The inviolate conjures the sacred, and the state uses this sacrality to sacralize the nation.” Stating the Sacred is not a typical academic monograph but more a collection of six essays that digress here and there but always remain focused on the theme of the “sacred violence” inherent to a degree in all nation-states and to a very high degree in today’s China. Walsh speaks to issues in history, religion, and political theory.
This is a vigorously written work of thought-provoking scholarship that is theoretically informed, empirically based, and, while challenging, eminently readable. Walsh frames his work through an eclectic use of Giorgio Agamban, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Talal Asad, among recent thinkers, as well as Emile Durkheim, Hannah Arendt, and Max Weber. Aside from institutions of power and violence, constitutions, and armies, Walsh examines the links of such institutions to meaning-production, or to put it more precisely, how they constitute meaning-production. At the risk of reversing the normal order of reviews, I will begin my review by noting two problems. First, Wash tends to reify “the state”—it just is, like Jehovah, so to speak. Walsh has virtually nothing to say about where states come from, how they are constructed, what weaknesses they suffer from, or why in historical fact they often collapse. For a book about the “nation-state” as one state form, it has very little to say about other state forms, so sometimes Walsh seems to be speaking about particular nation-states, or sometimes the nation-state form, or sometimes any state. This is in fact the second problem: although Walsh does at times draw distinctions between different state forms and different degrees of state domination among nation-states, he does not distinguish among different types of nation-states and it is not always clear how far he wishes to press what amounts to a critique of the nation-state as such. Walsh elides the usual distinctions between autocratic and democratic, or capitalist and socialist states.
In his final chapter, Walsh asks us to try to think outside the constricting boundaries and oppressions of the nation-state, but whether nations are inherently evil (exclusionary) or whether states might in some form be secular, rational, and even liberatory—which would in some cases be living up to their professed ideals)—Walsh does not quite say. No one can doubt that nation-states operate on the basis of daily violence, but it seems to me worth noting that such violence works differently or is even abated under different conditions.
Stating the Sacred focuses on contemporary China, along with analysis of the roots of Chinese statism and nationalism in the late Qing and, to a degree, through the Republic. Walsh draws comparisons to apartheid South Africa as well as other places to show the essential ubiquity of sacred violence, the roots of modern statism in religion, and how, indeed, we must regard the modern nation-state as essentially religious in nature and function. That is, the modern nation-state demands “to be sacrificed to, celebrated, consecrated, worshipped, and sanctified” (p. xv). Its territory is sacred, marking land and people over which it has absolute sovereignty. It “makes citizens” not just through violence but “systemic violence,” not incidentally denigrating and excluding certain groups within the territory even if they are technically citizens. It seems to me that critics of nationalism and the nation-state sometimes profess admiration for the supposed acceptance of diversity found in empires. Walsh avoids the pitfalls of empire nostalgia, but does sometimes seem to imply that the violence of empires might have been less systematic, if no less sacred, than that of later nation-states.
Granting that the nation-state is a modern phenomenon seen first in sixteenth-century Europe, which came first, the state or the nation? For Walsh, roughly speaking at least, the answer is clear: the state came first. For it is “sacralization that creates the state; it is the state in turn that sacralizes the nation” (p. xviii). The lenses through which Walsh approaches this huge subject are (to cite his chapter titles): territory, constitution, religion, reincarnation, contact, and nativity. The modern nation-state claims clearly bounded sacred territory over which it has absolute sovereignty—while still seeking in many cases to expand. It has a constitution that claims its own inviolability and usually a brief statement of a founding myth, and thus, “the constitution as a mythos production makes it a religious text, where religiosity can be understood as a form of exchange, a form of action and transaction between the state and its populace” (p. 60). In guaranteeing religious freedom, the state assumes the right to define and ultimately control religion, as seen for example in the Chinese state’s command of traditional Tibetan reincarnation practices. In his penultimate chapter, on “contact,” Walsh highlights the cultural impact of Western imperialism. China’s modernizing elites adopted Western concepts to construct new categories of religion and, for that matter, a new nation-state. The link between birth and identity as defined by the nation-state defines its claims its sacrality and legitimates its control as representative of the national, as Walsh shows in his final chapter.
Walsh begins with “territory,” I think, because it is the true core of the nation-state, though I would add that land must be conceptualized as property before it becomes territory: “It is the spatialized territory of the state that is designated as sacred and thus inviolate. It is this inviolate, so intimately connected to territory, that is at the heart of the nation-state” (pp. 9-10). Of course, empires do not exist without territory, but before the invention of the nation-state, it was the monarch’s body that was inviolable and sovereign, not the mere land (or even peoples). The Chinese constitution, Walsh points out, treats China as “sacred territory” (shensheng lingtu 神聖領土) in so many words, encapsulating an entire mythic narrative of the land (and people). With territory comes boundaries. Walsh points to Chinese insistence on the sacrality of Taiwan, Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and other regions peripheral to the traditional Han core regions, but he also points to “a new form of neo-imperialistic territorialization” (p. 29) seen in the power that accompanies Chinese investments abroad. This strikes me as working like the American empire, but it may be better to distinguish neo-imperialism from territorialization, at least in the sense practiced by nation-states. Of course, as Walsh mentions, China does not have to insist on the inviolability of, say, Hubei, precisely because it is only the peripheral regions that are in fact disputed.
The nation-state project may have been a logical result of the centrifugal forces tearing apart empires clear through the twentieth century, but its promises are self-contradictory. In a careful reading of China’s constitution, Walsh points to its transactional religiosity—essentially, as I understand it, a kind of exchange whereby citizens are granted rights in return for duties, but sovereignty rests in the state, not the people, as long as the state defines the terms of these transactions. Walsh has much to say about “religion”—a nineteenth-century neologism—in modern China. It remains, in any language, difficult to define precisely. China’s recognition of (only) five religions, awkwardly combined with its ideological faith that religion will one day disappear, is a special case, but the distinctions between “normal religion” and the abnormal sort are common to most states, and the claim to the right to make those distinctions is simply inherent in the practice of sovereignty.
If modernity demands that we separate politics and religion into two distinct spheres, the one public and rational and the other private and at best semi-rational, then clearly we have never been modern. That said, Walsh cites Protestant missionaries who were convinced that Christianity and civilization were two sides of the same coin, thus justifying Western imperialism. While I agree that Westerners displayed a “type of colonial mentality shaped by nineteenth-century Christianity” (p. 118), I am not sure that premodern Chinese or Qing imperialism was so different, including as it did a kind of civilizing mission (jiaohua 教化). If we see the Opium Wars as a clash of empires, and if we further put aside the admittedly different rhetoric of each side, it seems both sides depended on military conquest to pursue cultural assimilation based (whatever the price in ideological consistency) on “othering” subjugated peoples.
Most people today are born citizens of nation-states, not subjects of monarchs. Walsh emphasizes two problems with modern citizenship. First, following Foucault, he points to the nation-state as a form of pastoral power, which has shifted to the state from whatever salvation premodern institutions promised. In China’s case, “After 1949 the state offered salvation to all, a release from the shackles of feudalism” (p. 133), and a salvation today virtually embodied in the father-like figure of Xi Jinping. Xi promises to take good care of the nation. To carry out this promise, the state must be able to “macro- and micromanage most if not all aspects of the lives of its citizenry” (p. 134). Thus, the biopolitics of the modern nation-state rests on sacralized violence, the danger clearly being the state’s abuse of its citizens justified precisely on the grounds of its duty to care for them. It can even justify caring more for some than others—a problem seen ever more starkly in Tibet and Xinjiang even in the short time since this book was published. The second problem is that the modern regime of citizenship leaves out refugees and the wholly stateless. Nationalism, if I understand Walsh correctly, exacerbates both these problems.
This book deserves to be read by scholars in the various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences, and from outside China studies altogether. Many readers will find much to disagree with and may wonder about topics this relatively short book fails to discuss (such as capitalism, the hukou system, resistance), but they will find their arguments with the author to be extremely productive.
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Citation:
Peter Zarrow. Review of Walsh, Michael J., Stating the Sacred: Religion, China, and the Formation of the Nation-State.
H-Asia, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55190
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