Divine Justice Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture.pdfVIP

212 THE CHINA JOURNAL, No. 63 applications of postsocialist social theory, one based on his own research on the “political potentialities” of Christianity among women in Shandong and another on citizenship and immigration, in which he argues against the Marxist-inspired attempts to foreground class or “neoliberalism” in immigration studies, and instead suggests taking the concept of citizenship itself as the central object of theoretical investigation. Kipnis’s ambition is to drive a theoretical stake into the heart of Marxism and slay it once and for all, and in the same stroke dispatch the “overpoliticizing” and capitalism-critiquing quasi-Marxism of the fellow travelers as well. In doing so, however, he reduces Marxism to the same type of caricature that he accuses leftists of constructing with regard to capitalism: an “all pervasive” force that “controls” (or wants to control) “everything” in the affected societies, and which “define[s] evil” (p. 107). The notion that Marxism can attain a level of sophistication beyond the handful of putatively essential characteristics that he has derived seems beyond the pale for him. So, too, apparently, is the notion that scholars might fruitfully employ a concept of capitalism—which, even if non- omnipotent, may have deleterious effects open to critique—in a work of honest scholarly analysis, rather than a performance of leftist political identity. Saul Thomas University of Chicago Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture, by Paul R. Katz. London: Routledge, 2009. xiv + 224 pp. £70.00/US$140.00 (hardcover). Divine Justice is not only a good exampl