Conclusion

This book is an ethnography and cultural analysis of the Black Dragon
King Complex of Longwanggou. I have attempted to show how Long-
wanggou is not just a place of purely religious activities; more important,
it is a site of interaction between elements of popular religion, the social-
ist state, and agrarian society in reform-era China. By revealing the
process of bow the Black Dragon King Temple is revived and run, I have
hoped to answer, however partially, the question of how it is possible that
popular religion has revived in the past twenty or so years. I have tried to
provide a more nuanced understanding of the sociocultural processes of
ʻdoing religionʻ in today's China, and for that matter, ʻdoing religionʻ
in any other historical or cultural context. The many different facets of
Shaanbei popular religion I have described and analyzed show how inti-
mately embedded religious activities are in their social and political mi-
lieus, and how ʻreligious beliefsʻ are but a small part of what religion is
all about.
I have also hoped that the book would provide an antidote to the pre-
vailing trend in Western interpretations to view religious revival in China
as some kind of spiritual movement or a grassroots resistance against the
Communist party-state. These simplistic and overly enthusiastic interpre-
tations tell us more about Western observers' desires than Chinese reali-
ties ; they impute ʻspiritualityʻ and political intentions to a social land-
scape where things are in reality much more complicated and therefore
much more interesting. My study reveals how Chinese rural society has
changed to make doing popular religion ʻmaterially feasible, or politi-

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