Religion in Contemporary China


Book Description

This book provides a wide-ranging and in-depth survey of contemporary religious practices in China. It explains how recent economic reforms and concurrent relaxation of religious polices have created fertile ground for the revitalization of a wide range of religious practices and relates this to larger issues of social and cultural continuity and change.




Religion and Media in China


Book Description

This volume focuses on the intersection of religion and media in China, bringing interdisciplinary approaches to bear on the role of religion in the lives of individuals and greater shifts within Chinese society in an increasingly media-saturated environment. With case studies focusing on Mainland China (including Tibet), Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as diasporic Chinese communities outside Asia, contributors consider topics including the historical and ideological roots of media representations of religion, expressions of religious faith online and in social media, state intervention (through both censorship and propaganda), religious institutions’ and communities’ use of various forms of media, and the role of the media in relations between online/offline and local/diaspora communities. Chapters engage with the major religious traditions practiced in contemporary China, namely Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, and new religious movements. Religion and the Media in China serves as a critical survey of case studies and suggests theoretical and methodological tools for a thorough and systematic study of religion in modern China. Contributors to the volume include historians of religion, sinologists, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and media and communication scholars. The critical theories that contributors develop around key concepts in religion—such as authority, community, church, ethics, pilgrimage, ritual, text, and practice—contribute to advancing the emerging field of religion and media studies.




Christianity in Contemporary China


Book Description

Christianity is one of the fastest growing religions in China. Despite its long history in China and its significant indigenization or intertwinement with Chinese society and culture, Christianity continues to generate suspicion among political elites and intense debates among broader communities within China. This unique book applies socio-cultural methods in the study of contemporary Christianity. Through a wide range of empirical analyses of the complex and highly diverse experience of Christianity in contemporary China, it examines the fraught processes by which various forms and practices of Christianity interact with the Chinese social, political and cultural spheres. Contributions by top scholars in the field are structured in the following sections: Enchantment, Nation and History, Civil Society, and Negotiating Boundaries. This book offers a major contribution to the field and provides a timely, wide-ranging assessment of Christianity in Contemporary China.




The Religious Question in Modern China


Book Description

Recent events—from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe—vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity, from 1898 to the present. Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at different religions in different contexts, but by writing a unified story of how religion has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, modern Chinese society. From Chinese medicine and the martial arts to communal temple cults and revivalist redemptive societies, the authors demonstrate that from the nineteenth century onward, as the Chinese state shifted, the religious landscape consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms. The Religious Question in Modern China integrates historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives in a comprehensive overview of China’s religious history that is certain to become an indispensible reference for specialists and students alike.




Religion in Chinese Society


Book Description

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1961.




Handbook of the History of Religions in China I


Book Description

This book is part of an initiative in cooperation with renowned Chinese publishers to make fundamental, formative, and influential Chinese thinkers available to a western readership, providing absorbing insights into Chinese reflections of late, and offering a chance to grasp today’s China. In their influential book Handbook of the History of Religions in China, Zhongjian Mou and Jian Zhang present a panorama of the religions existing in China through time. In their fascinating History, they delineate the emergence and development of Daoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity and explore the roles they played in Chinese society and the interrelations between them. In China, also due to the encompassing Confucian idea of “living together harmoniously while maintaining differences,” religions—including newly arrived ones—came closer together than anywhere else in the world and reached a unique level of peaceful societal coexistence. Despite many frictions and conflicts, communication and reconciliation were indisputably predominant in China throughout history. Buddhism was peacefully introduced into China and, later on, a harmonious, symbiotic syncretism of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism developed—an exemplary process of how a diverse set of different religions can complement each other and contribute to a better life.




Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies


Book Description

Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies explores the interaction between religion and nationalism in the Chinese societies of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. On the one hand, state policies toward religions in these societies are deciphered and their implications for religious freedom and regional stability are evaluated. On the other hand, Chinese Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam and folk religions are respectively analyzed in terms of their theological, organizational and political responses to the nationalist modernity projects of these states. What is new in this book on Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies is that the Chinese state has strengthened its control over religion to an unprecedented level. In particular, the Chinese state has almost completed its construction of a state religion called Chinese Patriotism. But at the same time, what is also new is the emergence of democratic civil religions in these Chinese societies.




Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850 - 2015 (2 vols.)


Book Description

The last of four two-volume sets on the key periods of paradigm shift in Chinese religious and cultural history, this book examines the transformation of values in China since 1850, in the “secular” realms of economics, science, medicine, aesthetics, media, and gender, and in each of the major religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity) as well as in Marxist discourse. The nation and science are the values invoked most frequently, with the market and democracy a distant second. As in previous periods of fundamental change in Chinese history, rationalization and secularization have played central roles, but interiorization nearly disappears as a driving force. Also in continuity with the past, the state insists on an exclusive right to define and adjudicate orthodoxy. Contributors include: Daniel H. Bays, Sébastien Billioud, Adam Yuet Chau, Na Chen, Philip Clart, Walter B. Davis, Arif Dirlik, Thomas David DuBois, Lizhu Fan, David Faure, Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Ji Zhe, Xiaofei Kang, Eric I. Karchmer, André Laliberté, Angela Ki Che Leung, Xun Liu, Richard Madsen, David Ownby, Ellen Oxfeld, Volker Scheid, Grace Yen Shen, Michael Szonyi, Wang Chien-ch’uan, Xue Yu




De Jiao - A Religious Movement in Contemporary China and Overseas


Book Description

De Jiao ("Teaching of Virtue") is a China-born religious movement, based on spirit-writing and rooted in the tradition of the "halls for good deeds," which emerged in Chaozhou during the Sino-Japanese war. The book relates the fascinating process of its spread throughout Southeast Asia in the 1950s, and, more recently, from Thailand and Malaysia to post-Maoist China and the global world. Through a richly-documented multi-site ethnography of De Jiao congregations in the PRC, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand, Bernard Formoso offers valuable insights into the adaptation of Overseas Chinese to sharply contrasted national polities, and the projective identity they build with relation to China. De Jiao is of special interest with regard to its organization and strategies which strongly reflect the managerial habits and entrepreneurial ethos of the Overseas Chinese businessmen. It has also built original bonding with symbols of the Chinese civilization whose greatness it claims to champion from the periphery. Accordingly, a central theme of the study is the role that such a religious movement may play to promote new forms of identification with the motherland as substitutes for loosened genealogical links. The book also offers a comprehensive interpretation of the contemporary practice of fu ji spirit-writing, and reconsiders the relation between unity and diversity in Chinese religion.




Atlas of Religion in China: Social and Geographical Contexts


Book Description

The speed and the scale with which traditional religions in China have been revived and new spiritual movements have emerged in recent decades make it difficult for scholars to stay up-to-date on the religious transformations within Chinese society. This unique atlas presents a bird’s-eye view of the religious landscape in China today. In more than 150 full-color maps and six different case studies, it maps the officially registered venues of China’s major religions - Buddhism, Christianity (Protestant and Catholic), Daoism, and Islam - at the national, provincial, and county levels. The atlas also outlines the contours of Confucianism, folk religion, and the Mao cult. Further, it describes the main organizations, beliefs, and rituals of China’s main religions, as well as the social and demographic characteristics of their respective believers. Putting multiple religions side by side in their contexts, this atlas deploys the latest qualitative, quantitative and spatial data acquired from censuses, surveys, and fieldwork to offer a definitive overview of religion in contemporary China. An essential resource for all scholars and students of religion and society in China.