This presentation examines how spirit cults work not only as a form of popular religion but also a form of rural discourse as they capture and recognize the rapidly disappearing and destabilizing subject position of “peasant” in the urbanization of Chinese rural area. Today rural villagers massively migrate to cities to find jobs and opportunities. At the same time existing rural villages and farmlands rapidly transform into highways, industrial parks and towns with shopping malls. Folk religion in this new urbanizing rural space is no longer a traditional body of unchanging knowledge and practices. Dr. Wu suggests to see folk religion now constitutes a new form of rural discourse, which enables the urbanizing rural subject, who is increasingly distanced from knowledge and practices specific to rural areas, labor, and communities, to once again locate his or her “rural” identity and belonging. Dr. Wu takes spirit cults as that major site through which rural norms, values, dispositions and desires are not only displayed and enacted, but de facto produced. Spirit cults generate those social condition and social happenings that enable the (re)emergence of a new rural subject, even a surrogate one.