Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China: A Conversation with Ting Guo
Religion, Secularism, and Love as a Political Discourse in Modern China (Amsterdam University Press, 2025) examines how the language of love (愛 ai) has been appropriated and politicised by Chinese political leaders throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to legitimise authority, mobilise emotion, and shape state ideology. The book traces a genealogy from Sun Yat-sen’s idealistic articulation of bo’ai (博爱, universal love), through Mao Zedong’s emotionally charged re’ai (热爱, ardent love) that energised revolutionary commitment, to Xi Jinping’s deployment of parental love as a means of naturalising authoritarian familial nationalism. These evolving emotional discourses are situated within broader transitions across religious, secular, and postsecular frameworks. In addition to mainland narratives, one chapter turns to post-Handover Hong Kong, analysing how gendered tropes of motherly and fatherly governance are used to manage dissent and reinforce state power. This study offers a critical intervention in the cultural politics of emotion, affective governance, and political religion in modern China.
Yihuan Zhang: Your book offers a compelling genealogy of love as a political discourse, showing how notions such as bo’ai (博爱, referring to a morally idealistic and inclusive love, rooted in Mohist and Christian-socialist thought, used by Sun Yat-sen to articulate a cosmopolitan nationalism), re’ai (热爱, denoting an emotionally intense, sacrificial devotion, especially toward Mao and the revolutionary cause, functioning as the affective core of Maoist political religion), and parental love (a gendered, hierarchical metaphor that frames state authority as benevolent parenting, used in the Xi era to legitimise authoritarian governance through familial nationalism) have been mobilised to shape modern Chinese political authority through emotionally charged, quasi-theological narratives. What stands out is your demonstration of the deep entanglement of ostensibly secular ideologies such as nationalism, communism, and developmentalism and affective structures that closely resemble religious forms of devotion, sacrifice, and moral obligation. How does religious studies, especially ideas of secularism and post-secularism, inform your analytical framework and influence our understanding of the role of emotion in shaping modern political life?
Ting Guo: Secularism remains a prevalent framework across disciplines to define the fundamental characteristics of modern societies. The secular framework inherits the Enlightenment idea of intellectual progress, Max Weber’s notions of disenchantment and rationalisation, Peter Berger’s secularisation theory, and so on. In other words, it follows the development of Western society, Western Protestantism, and intellectual history in which religion is defined by the Western Protestant model. This model was brought to intellectuals and reformers around the world through imperial expansions, and certain belief systems began to be recognised as ‘superstitions’ while Indigenous expressions and understandings of religion were abandoned and marginalised.
As such, the secular framework is often applied in contrast with cultural Others—most notably Islamic societies that are considered not as modern, democratic, or civilised because they are not secular but religious (Islamic). Responding to what he considered to be challenges posed by Islam—both religious fundamentalism and the so-called ‘Muslim question’ in Europe—Habermas proposed the concept of post-secularism, suggesting that religious groups, particularly minorities, will continue to play a relevant role in Western secular democracies. This view of secularism and post-secularism has been challenged by scholars such as Edward Said and Talal Asad, and especially decolonial feminist Islamic scholars such as Lila Abu-Lughold and Saba Mahmood.
However, notions of religion and the secular in China also follow the Western Protestant genealogy and its discontent with cultural Others. In fact, the very discourse of ‘religion’ in East Asia (宗教 shūkyō or zongjiao)—which emerged during the nineteenth century as East Asia struggled under Western imperialism—was invented by diplomats, intellectuals, and reformers and developed alongside other Western concepts such as freedom, science, and democracy. ‘Religion’ has since come to be recognised almost exclusively as Protestant Christianity while native religious practices in East Asia, including those of ethnic minorities (Islam, for instance), are negated as incompatible with modernity. In the field of Chinese religions, recent scholarship has also shown that religion, in its diffused, customary, implicit forms, has been a core element of Chinese modernity and modern governance since the Nationalist regime (Nedostup 2010), communist revolutions (Kang 2023), and economic development (Yang 2020), offering refreshing decolonial and feminist perspectives.
Decolonial feminist Islamic studies resonates with me the most because I observe not only the Orientalisation and negation of Chinese religions by the West but also self-Orientalisaiton and instrumentalisation of Chinese religions in China today. The decolonial project in this context should be ‘double decolonisation’ (Guo 2024). So, bringing together decolonial feminist Islamic studies, the study of Chinese religions, and the recent affective turn in religious studies, my book tries to show that post-secularism should be conceptualised not chronologically as what occurs after secularism but as a critical reflection of how we have never been secular. Religion has played a central and complex role in processes of modernisation, democratisation, authoritarianism, and many dimensions of social and political life across many societies—even in those that appear secular or claim to be so. It is in this context that the book contributes to current debates on affective governance and religious nationalism around the world.
YZ: In your work, you trace how love has been continually redefined, evolving from a Confucian ethical relation to a revolutionary affect under Mao Zedong and, more recently, to a mode of nationalised sentiment, particularly under Xi Jinping. What strikes me is the dual function that ai has come to serve: both moralising and mobilising. It shapes gender norms, regulates private emotions, and reinforces state authority. This leads me to wonder to what extent the affective vocabulary of ai retains the capacity for resistance or rupture. In other words, can love in China today still function as a subversive force?
TG: Thank you so much for the insightful summary and question. I was only able to touch upon this slightly in the conclusion, and it eventually became a separate article, entitled ‘Sisters, Friends, Strangers: Queering the Political Discourse of Love’ (forthcoming in the International Feminist Journal of Politics). Precisely because the state has been emphasising a language of love based on and for the promotion of heteropatriarchal ethnonationalism, love has remained a powerful political discourse. Ordinary citizens have adopted and reinterpreted this discourse in their own ways, using it to make sense of their political and social realities, and to either support or challenge official policies. In so doing, they have generated new, creative, and ever‑evolving visions of love—such as sisterhood, local and transnational solidarities, and alternative forms of political belongings.
We saw this most strikingly during the White Paper Movement of 2022, when a poster that appeared on the campus of the University of California, Irvine stated: ‘Love not the nation but ourselves, our friends, our chosen family, the Great Earth, and freedom; Not your patriot; Stand with Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hongkongers, Taiwanese, Iranians, Ukrainians; Stand with people of the whole world against autocracy, oppression, and violence.’ We also saw it in Hong Kong during the Occupy Central movement of 2014, when the official name of the Occupy Central movement was ‘Occupy Central with love and peace’, and then again since 2019, when ‘We fucking love Hong Kong’ (我哋真係好撚鍾意香港 ngo die zan hai hou len zung ji heung gong) became a popular protest art and Internet meme. Note that in the second case, the expression in Cantonese uses a different word for love, 鍾意 (zung ji), rather than ai. As Gina Anne Tam points out in her Dialect and Nationalism in China (2020), Mandarin represents a unified official language and a homogeneous Chinese identity, and the conscious choice of using a ‘dialect’ rather than the ‘official language’ to express their love for Hong Kong was an act against ai, an inherently political discourse.
In my forthcoming article, I use queering love as a framework to emphasise not only the social bonds of activists through a discourse of love that subverts top-down heteropatriarchal politics and state-sanctioned expressions of love, but also the constant movements, negotiations, divergences, and differences within such subversions and among activists themselves.
YZ: Your second chapter offers a compelling account of Soong Ching-ling’s lifelong devotion to socialism, portraying it as both an intellectual conviction and a deeply emotional, embodied commitment, which you describe as a labour of love. I was especially struck by your framing of Soong’s socialism as rooted in a personal, affective ethic of bo’ai, even when it diverged from the official line of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This raises a broader question: to what extent can political legitimacy be grounded in love, care, or emotional attachment rather than formal institutional authority or ideological conformity? Building on that, is bo’ai, as both a theological and a political language, still a viable framework for imagining political belonging and resistance in contemporary China, or has it been fully absorbed into state discourse?
TG: Although not exactly in the expression or language of bo’ai, but the essence of this concept, ‘universal love’, still provides a viable framework for contemporary political belonging and resistance in two ways: the collaborations and solidarity among different groups within China, and the transnational connections across different societies. Contemporary social movements are often transnational. The #MilkTeaAlliance, #MeToo movement, and @queers_feminists_4_palestine are all excellent examples.
In their practice of bo’ai, contemporary feminist and queer activists transform the fraternal interpretation of solidarity and the abstract sameness of the May Fourth Movement and early communist renditions of bo’ai by engaging with personal stories in relation to each other, to reorient the conversation in a way that serves meaningful solidarity, rather than coming together only on points of agreement. Compared with forms of internationalism in the early twentieth century that aimed to abolish the state and the bourgeoisie in a socialist-versus-capitalist approach, feminist and queer activists recognise the source of oppression in authoritarianism, heteropatriarchy, and ethnonationalism in both socialist and capitalist states, since imperialism can manifest in multiple forms today as China asserts itself as a global power. In other words, they have queered internationalism as contemporary transnational alliances by claiming intersectional identities from multiple, collaborative forms of oppression with emotional reparation.
This intersectional aspect of bo’ai also attends to minor transnationalism, including the transnationally marginalised individuals and communities under Western and non-Western powers as shown in the White Paper Movement and the grassroots transnationalism of migrant workers. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the migrant solidarity committee, autonomous 8a (2022) highlighted the transnational nature of Sinophone societies in terms not of global capitalism but of domestic migrant workers’ networks of care. The voices of migrant workers draw attention to the frequently overlooked bottom-up transnationalism of Sinophone societies facing authoritarianism and the continuous transnational effort to dismantle not only political hegemonies but also the global capitalist economy, racial hierarchy, and gendered social and labour relations.
YZ: Your analysis highlights how both Mao and Xi have employed the discourse of love in their political governance, each with distinct inflections and strategies. From a gender perspective, could you elaborate on how Mao’s use of love within the revolutionary collectivist framework compares with Xi’s reinvention of ‘parental love’ grounded in Confucian patriarchy? How do these different constructions of love influence political authority and subject formation, particularly in relation to gender roles and expectations? Furthermore, in what ways does Xi’s framing of love as filial obedience and familial harmony reinforce or transform gendered power relations differently from Mao’s more mobilising, yet still gendered, revolutionary rhetoric?
TG: While both leaders’ use of love is paternalistic, Mao’s political discourses of love, even though rooted in traditional religions, had socialist and revolutionary undertones. Xi, however, is the first Chinese leader to incorporate traditional rhetoric into official speeches—a practice I describe in the book as ‘reinvented traditionalism’. This occurs in a neoliberal, post-socialist China, where ideas about feminism and gender equality have also undergone significant transformation.
Mao’s discourse of love (re’ai) drew on deeply gendered vernacular symbolism and traditional beliefs, framing political love as a form of spiritual salvation bestowed by a leader who embodied a cosmic force. This use of familiar religious language and imagery made the CCP’s revolutionary agenda more accessible and rendered affective political devotion to Mao more intuitive for the masses. Ironically, the Maoist era was marked by revolutionary campaigns to dissociate traditional religion and Confucian morality from peasant life and to establish a new national myth of liberation under the leadership of the CCP. However, these campaigns did not necessarily accomplish the Party’s supposed goals of eradicating superstition and achieving secularisation but relied on the same language and gender imagery embedded in traditional Chinese religions to construct a new political religion.
Xi has added a human touch to the Maoist personality cult—the human touch of familial love. President Xi is celebrated in official propaganda as a loving husband, a family man, a filial son, as well as the supreme leader. Xi’s restoration of the Confucian patriarchy has occurred in a digital era that celebrates the romanticisation and commercialisation of personal relationships. The digital strategy that presents Xi Dada as the ideal husband and perfect leader is occurring at a time when the language of love has become commonplace in both the private sphere and state propaganda. The traditionalist discourse of love also reconfigures and reinterprets the official Marxist ideology in the neoliberal, non-revolutionary context, justifying China’s trajectory of development as distinct from the West with a cultural explanation that also conveniently legitimises ethnonationalist, patriarchal politics towards women, ethnic minorities, and dissidents.
YZ: Your book highlights how the political discourse of love in modern China is closely linked to authoritarian parental governance, rooted in Confucian filial ethics, and shaped into a heteropatriarchal nationalism under Xi Jinping’s leadership. In Hong Kong, this manifests through gendered narratives in which leaders assume parental roles to frame citizens as children in need of discipline and control. Could you elaborate on how this gendered discourse functions within Xi’s model of familial nationalism? Specifically, how does this notion of parental love shape political subjectivities in Hong Kong, particularly among gendered and marginalised groups? Within this framework of care and control, how do Hongkongers resist or redefine their political identity beyond the role of obedient children of the nation?
TG: The reinvented traditionalism in contemporary China demands a patriarchal norm under a traditional cultural framework in which a strongman should lead the family, community, and nation. Women and all sorts of minorities feel such changes more acutely, whether it’s the mandatory cooling-off period before divorce, the one-child, two-child, and three-child policies, the crackdown on feminist, queer, labour, and other grassroots activism, or women being exoticised to showcase China’s ethnic harmony or even subjected to sexual violence. Such policies and politics are justified by the familial framework as the official discourse celebrates the state as a family for all, saying that people should love the leader and the nation as parents and women should return to the family.
Familial nationalism is certainly not unique to China. For instance, Queen Elizabeth II was widely referred to as ‘the nation’s grandmother’ or even ‘everyone’s grandmother’—a phenomenon critiqued as ‘familial imperialism’ (see, for instance, Gullace et al. 2023). In authoritarian contexts however, familial nationalism permeates and dominates the public sphere by means of what I call ‘parental governance’. In the case of China, this type of governance employs a Confucian framework to justify casting political relationships in familial terms, thereby constructing political actors as either filial dependants or firm but benevolent parent-officials. Critiques of the state therefore put dissenters in the position of juvenile dependants appealing for parental recognition.
The politics of love in Hong Kong manifests in regional leaders’ parental discourses of their relationship to citizens as children requiring discipline. It is also evident in slogans incorporating the language of love such as ‘Love China, love Hong Kong’ (愛國愛港) and ‘Patriots administering Hong Kong’ (愛國者治港). Coming from a place of familial intimacy, such discourses justify and reinforce the heteropatriarchal nature of authoritarianism under the discourse of love. For instance, Hong Kong’s former Chief Executive Carrie Lam most (in)famously referred to herself as a mother who loved her children too much to indulge their demands when addressing the 2019 protests (see Guo 2022). Hong Kong’s current Chief Executive, John Lee, also shed tears for the ‘sacrifices’ of his wife at the speech he gave upon his appointment, which coincided with Mother’s Day (Sing Tao Daily 2022). On that occasion, he stated that he considered himself as ‘representing all fathers and husbands in Hong Kong’ in ‘shouldering the responsibility for the family’—this family being all Hong Kong. Lee’s explicitly parental and patriarchal analogy was similar to those used by Xi. He has also remarked that he would introduce women to young men from mainland China to help them get married, have children, and settle in Hong Kong.
The parental analogy has been further extended to the relationship between Hong Kong and the mainland, as Lee has repeatedly said in public speeches that Hong Kong should act as the filial child of China. Following his example, Hong Kong’s current Cabinet has also been using this analogy. The chairperson of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council (TDC) described Hong Kong as ‘a beautiful daughter’ to China, with ‘numerous advantages’ such as adherence to common law, the free flow of capital, and a low-tax regime. In a similar manner, the Chief Secretary for Administration, commenting on how members of the prodemocracy camp were not allowed to qualify as candidates in the new district council elections, stated that individuals who had previously engaged in ‘anti-China’ activities in Hong Kong could still have a chance to run for election if they genuinely repent: ‘When a child makes a mistake and apologises to their parents, the parents need to observe whether the child has truly reformed over a long period’ (TVB News 2023).
Such a patronising tone met with strong reactions from people who were uncomfortable and unfamiliar with this kind of political language. Carrie Lam’s tearful parenting analogy was deemed ‘clumsy’, and at least 44,000 women signed a petition demanding an apology. Large rallies were organised to protest Lam’s patronising tone as well as the police brutality unleashed under her leadership, with the demonstrators calling for a responsible and accountable leader rather than a mother.
To challenge the patronising hegemony inherent in official discourses on love and family, protestors also reclaimed love for Hong Kong in their own language instead, such as the aforementioned Cantonese cursing slang ‘We fucking love Hong Kong’. Love remains a versatile and powerful political discourse to re-enchant affective politics for local and transnational activism and redefine community, identity, and belonging.
References
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