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This paper explores the social and economic implications of indigenous Christian discourses and practices in the Wenzhou Chinese diaspora in Paris, France. Popularly known as China's Jerusalem, the coastal Chinese city of Wenzhou is home to thousands of selfstarted home-grown Protestant churches and a million Protestants. Drawing on multisited fieldwork, this study provides an ethnographic account of a group of Wenzhou merchants who have formed large Christian communities at home, along with migrant enclaves in Paris. The study shows how these migrant entrepreneurs and traders have brought their version of Christianity from China to France and how they perceive and deal with issues of illegality, moral contingency, native-place based loyalty and national belonging. It highlights the thoroughly intertwined relationship between an indigenised Chinese Christianity and the petty capitalist legacy of coastal southeast China in a secularised, exclusionary European context, and suggests that Christianity provides a form of non-market morality that serves to effectively legitimate Wenzhou's premodern household economy in the context of market modernity.

this paper explores the intersection of spiritual renewal and grassroots nationalism within contemporary Chinese Christianity through the case of an emerging group of Christian businessmen who have spearheaded the growth of independent churches in the coastal Wenzhou area, called "boss Christians." prompted by their success in the new entrepreneurial world, these elite male Christians strive to gain spiritual prestige and moral superiority in the Chinese church by employing a spiritual narrative of their post-mao economic success and by articulating and spreading a new vision that they call "God's China vision." in active response to the Chinese state's nationalist discourse of modernity, they are convinced that China will rise not only in the economic sphere but also in the spiritual realm and will transform itself from a missionary-receiving country to a missionary-sending one. the paper links this grass-roots project of spiritual nationalism to a redemptive process in which elite Chinese Christians seek to address and overcome victimization and suffering inflicted by secular state modernity. it concludes that post-mao Christian development has come to be closely connected to national memories and nationalist imagination, countering the party-state's insistence on secular nationalism.