This brief talk goes beyond the familiar story of suppression and destruction to examine how the Chinese Communist Party utilized religion to mobilize support and to construct a new form of legitimacy for its rule in the early Maoist times. In particular, the Communist propaganda used traditional ghost lore to develop a metanarrative of salvation to sacralize the Party-state and Mao. This historical discourse connects to what we see in today’s China and of the Soviet anti-religious discourse. Part of this talk has been previously published in an article, “Revising White-haired Girl: Women, Gender, and Religion in Communist Revolutionary Propaganda,” in Jinhua Jia, Xiaofei Kang, and Ping Yao, Gendering Chinese Religion: Subject, Identity, and Body (SUNY press, 2014).
