Analyze Communal Temple From The Perspective Of Good Governance

Since the beginning of the opening up policy, the Chinese society have gone throughtremendous changes, the policy for the development of popular religion has become muchloser, and the needs of the rural residents to spiritual culture have expanded and grow to morediversified. Especially in the circumstance that the rural religion is transforming from thetraditional society to the modern society, this will bring a lot of troubles to the rural residentsin the forms of their lives and their psychological status. This phenomenon encourages therebuild and reconstruct of the communal temples and at the same time promote them todevelop in a prosperous manner. However, a sound social environment could only provide thepossibilities of the development of communal temple, in the micro perspective, whether thecommunal temple could progress in a healthy and ordered manner will concern multiplelevels of social lives, and will be the outcome of the combined actions of a number of factors.In this thesis, we take the Jinxian temple at Niecun Village, Wugong Town, Shaanxi Provinceas an individual case, and conduct empirical research on the village temple and its templefairs activities through the semi-structured interviews and the non-participatory observation.The existing researches about popular religion and communal temple tempt to take thecollective ceremonies of the temple festival as the point of penetration, and then discuss thecommunal temple from the angle of political thought, religion and culture, tourism andeconomy respectively. At the same time, many sociology, religious, anthropology scholars aredoing researches in the area from the perspective of cultural capital, the state power, socialmemory and regional tradition etc. those scholars have gained a huge amount ofaccomplishment, but, however, we can still find out that the researches concerning aboutanalyzing the development of communal temple and its influence to the country and societyfrom the perspective of management theory are not enough.In this paper, I will start from describing the location, natural environment, history andcultural background of Jinxian temple, to demonstrate the abundant cultural resource ofpopular religion in Jinxian temple. It is a huge question to the temple committee of Jinxian Temple about how to utilize the plentiful cultural history resource. This paper is not merelyabout the religious belief or anthropology study, it will also introduce the management andorganization of the Jinxian Temple, its relationship with the local government and grass-rootautonomous organizations as well as other temple committees. We could observe themanagement talent and management art of the rural residents through the description of theduty, the constitution and the operating mechanism of the temple committee. At the same time,the revival of communal temple has a strong correlation with the interaction of cooperation ofthe communal temple, the grass-root autonomous organization and basic-level government:the revival of communal temple is the outcome of countryside good governance and also willpromote the governance of rural community.At last, we cannot deny that, there do exist some negative elements of communal temple andpopular religion, especially the feudal superstition activities represented by witchcrafts, theywill do harm to the harmonious society and the construction of modernization. But we couldalso observe in our field investigation that most of the superstitious activities are disappeared,some are fading and even lost their mysterious color. Through the investigation in Niecunvillage and Jinxian temple, we find out that the revival of communal temple has a strongcorrelation with the governance of rural society, and is important to the development andorganization of rural community. Therefore, in the process of constructing new countryside,we should still work together to construct a well-developed mechanism, to manage andregulate the progress of popular religion and communal temple to let it grow into a culturalconcept which will serve for the rural residents.