The “Wenzhou Model”: Ritual Economy, Religious Businesses, and a Critique of Weber’s Protestant Ethic for China

• In Event: Religious Economies in Late Imperial and Modern China

Abstract

The “Wenzhou Model” in China is often touted as a successful model of rural economic development and rural industrialization. Based on privatized household production, flourishing commodity markets, and rapid urbanization and industrialization, Wenzhou people have rapidly transformed themselves from one of China’s poorest rural areas in the 1970’s to one of its most prosperous today. This paper will focus on the “ritual economy” and religious businesses that are too often overlooked in studies of the Wenzhou Model. It suggests that Wenzhou’s prosperity owes as much to an indigenous development of ritual economy that traces back to the Song Dynasty commercial revolution, as it does to global capitalism coming from outside China. Wenzhou’s ritual economy includes a variety of ritual expenditures: life-cycle rituals, including weddings and funerals; divination and fengshui expenditures; donations to deity temples, Buddhist and Daoist temples, lineage organizations, and religious charities; religious processions and festivals; lineage ancestor rituals; and the logic of merit accumulation. What these components of the ritual economy all share is the relinquishing of a portion of one’s wealth for investment in the divine world of gods and buddhas, and in the Afterlife. Instead of the thrifty (or stingy) accumulation of wealth for economic re-investment and expansion in Weber’s notion of the Protestant Ethic, we find a quite different ethos of giving away wealth, which often reveals a counter-capitalist logic of competitive ritual expenditures and rivalrous generosity.

Author

• Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, University of California, Santa Barbara