Kṛṣṇa Becomes Real: Conversion and Contagious Faith in Contemporary China

Making use of previously neglected English- and Chinese-language sources, including hundreds of hours of archived recordings, and interviews conducted over nine months of ethnographic fieldwork (July 2022–May 2023), this paper explores (1) how and why, since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, various citizens of the People’s Republic of China have come to embrace lives of devotion centered on the Hindu deity Kṛṣṇa, and (2) how, despite the social and political challenges they face as religious actors in China, devotees manage to maintain and even strengthen their faiths. In grappling with the former, this paper reveals a combination of factors—ideology, “religious capital,” social bonds, and “direct rewards”—which draw and facilitate the conversion of Chinese to Hinduism. In dealing with the latter, it expands upon anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s theory of “real-making,” arguing that practitioners can become more certain of Kṛṣṇa’s existence through, among other things, affective synchronization.