Blind Eyes and Thin Disguises: Religion and Local Governance in China and Taiwan

This talk examines situations in which local people thinly disguise certain illegal activities while local officials avert their gaze. Examples range from religious rituals claiming to be athletic or agricultural competitions in Taiwan to large and public “underground” churches or extra-legal religious NGOs in China. This governance by turning a blind eye has grown increasingly common in China in the post-Mao period and was very common in Taiwan under the colonial and later authoritarian Nationalist regimes. As a form of responsive authoritarianism, blind-eye governance offers some advantages to both state and society in encouraging social self-organization, but it also carries its own forms of repression.