Renegotiating Locality and Morality in a Chinese Religious Diaspora: Wenzhou Christian Merchants in Paris, France

Abstract

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.

Merchants and missionaries: Chinese evangelical networks and the transnational resacralization of European urban spaces

“…8 See, for example, Brown (2018) on the presence and participation of Siri Lankan migrant clergy in the space and life of Italian Catholicism. 9 See Cao (2013) on how Wenzhou Christian merchants in Paris employ a fundamentalist religious language to sanctify their technically illegal practices and peripheral movements. They see legality not as a naturalized entitlement under state regulations but as a resource to be achieved.…”

New Developments in Christianity in China

“…France has the second largest Chinese church community in Europe, with around 40 Chinese churches and 10,000 church members, mostly concentrated in the urban districts of Paris. One important feature that distinguishes these Chinese Christians in Europe 2 See Cao (2013a) and Cao et al (2018) for two notable exceptions.…”

A Sinicized World Religion?: Chinese Christianity at the Contemporary Moment of Globalization

“…France has the second largest Chinese church community in Europe, with around 40 Chinese churches and 10,000 church members, mostly concentrated in the urban districts of Paris. One important feature that distinguishes these Chinese Christians in Europe 2 See Cao (2013a) and Cao et al (2018) for two notable exceptions.…”

“…In secularized Europe, evangelical Christianity can provide a normative and morally superior context for migrant Chinese to imagine their native place and a shared future of their cultural positioning in an increasingly exclusionary context (Cao 2013a). In France, more than in Italy, Chinese immigrant churches have developed in the direction of high tension with the secular culture of the host society, creating a parallel society and an enclave of identities, faith, and businesses.…”