The Postsecular Turn in Chinese Religious Studies. Article Review: Gao Q., Hopkins P., Ma X. (2025) Toward Postsecular Feminism: Intersectionality and the Religious Subjectivities of Women Migrant Workers in China. Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Vol. 115. No. 1. P. 167–183.

Abstract

This review introduces Russian sociologists, scholars of religion, and cultural studies specialists to the work of Chinese social researchers on postsecularity in contemporary Chinese society. This sociaty is marked by its official ideological commitment to Marxism and atheism. Despite this ideological framework, China has witnessed a notable religious revival in recent decades, which makes it an important case for revisiting classical secularization theory and for rethinking the configuration of the secular and the postsecular in non-Western contexts. These studies, significant in their findings, remain little known to the Russian academic community. The article by Gao Quan, Peter Hopkins, and Ma Xingrong, “Toward Postsecular Feminism: Intersectionality and the Religious Subjectivities of Women Migrant Workers in China” (2025), contributes to the ongoing debate on the applicability of Western theoretical frameworks to the study of non-European societies — namely, how postsecularity becomes possible under conditions of a capitalist economy, an officially secular ideology, and the leading role of the Party-state. The authors identify a range of articulations between religion, politics, and the economy that together constitute a distinctively Chinese configuration of the secular and the postsecular. To more fully reconstruct this research approach, the review also draws on the recent doctoral dissertation by Yu Xiaochen, “Investigating Postsecularity in Urban China: Christianity, Lived Religion, and the Intersectional Experiences of Migrant Christians in Shenzhen” (2025), which examines the media strategies of Protestant communities in Shenzhen during the 2020–2022 pandemic and under state regulation of the digital media environment. The article under review also offers valuable material on the everyday life of unofficial religious communities in contemporary China — communities that remain largely inaccessible to outside observers due to their unregistered status.