Modern China Religion

9 Key excerpts on "Modern China Religion"

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  Making Religion, Making the State

  The Politics of Religion in Modern China

  • Yoshiko Ashiwa, David L. Wank(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Stanford University Press

    (Publisher)

  Many of these religious sites are fronts for tourism and museums and contain few har 1  Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank “real” temples and churches, while the numerous unregistered churches that are thriving are not visible in the state’s official statistics. We see the statistics in a rather different way, which is the main theme of this volume. The statistics reflect the state representation of the extent of religion in China today in terms of the state’s definition of “modern religion” as well as the efforts of believers, clergy, and worshippers to ac-commodate the modern definition of religion. Our point, therefore, is that the situation of religion in China is not simply a history of conflict between state and religion but rather processes of interactions among mul-tiple actors that comprise the making of modern religion and the modern state over the course of the past century. To understand these processes, it is fruitful to briefly leave the Chinese context and think about the state and religion in the broader context of modernity. Recently, some arguments have been raised about the con-cepts of modernity and religion. It has been argued that “religion” is a modern concept that is seen most sharply in colonial interactions from the late nineteenth century (Asad 1993 ; van der Veer 2001 ). Talal Asad’s discussion is in the context of Christianity and Islam while Peter van der Veer focuses on India and England. In these interactions colonizers pre-sented ideal images of themselves as modern because state power was sep-arate from religion. The state was defined as the political authority and religion as individual belief. To enlightened elites in non-European coun-tries, “being modern,” therefore, required the simultaneous reform of in-digenous practices to appear as “religion” and the institutionalization of religion as a category within the state’s constitution and administration.

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  Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies

  • Cheng-tian Kuo(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Amsterdam University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, none of these religious reforms would appease Chinese atheists who aimed to eliminate all religions, including Christianity, which allegedly came to China under the aegis of Western imperialism. As the following sections demonstrate, the modernity approach continues to influence the academic analysis and religious policies in contemporary Chinese societies. 13 In retrospect, the modernity approach is only partially correct in terms of empirical evidence and normative implications. Recent scholarship on religion-state relations argue that the traditional Chinese state was a ‘reli-gious state’ (or ‘religio-political state’), the Chinese society was a ‘religious society’, and the state sponsored a ‘state religion’ of Confucianism. 14 Even when the Chinese state (e.g. the powerful Ming Dynasty) tried to control 12 Anderson (1991); Gellner (1983); Hobsbawm (1992). 13 Wang (1977); MacInnis (1989). Ashiwa and Wank’s book (2009) applies Talal Asad’s seculariza-tion thesis to modern Chinese religion-state relations and is another exemplar of the modernity approach. Mayfair Yang’s book (2008) tries to distance itself from the modernization theory by emphasizing the modernity’s discursive process between the modern Chinese state and religions. Although its major arguments are closer to the revisionist school, I would still put Yang’s book in the modernity school because it underestimates the mutual influence (albeit asymmetrical) of state and religion in both traditional and modern China. 14 These ‘revisionist’ works include: Chau (2011); Goossaert and Palmer (2011); Lagerwey (2010); Dean (2009); Platt (2007); Yang (1961); Yang (2012); Yu (2005). INTRODUCTION 19 religion, its ef forts were short-lived and inef fective. In Chinese history, vari-ous religions permeated Chinese politics from the basic political/religious unit of family up to the imperial court. Religious freedom and tolerance were largely maintained in the dynastic government and in society.

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  Tracing The Way

  Spiritual Dimensions of the World Religions

  • Hans Küng(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Burns & Oates

    (Publisher)

  And even Chinese Marxists today recognize that the religions are not just 'opium for the people' but highly complex, long-lived phenomena. With both deep ethnic roots and an international dissemination, the religions manifestly form an indispensable ingredient also of Chinese culture, which CHINESE RELIGION 127 in turn cannot be understood without Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism. LATENT RELIGION BREAKS THROUGH The religious sensitivity of the Chinese has remained; however, their perception of the holy has at all times been bound up with this world. And in the face of the moral vacuum left behind by Communism it is under-standable that people are again concerning themselves with the most varied forms of traditional Chinese religion, indeed that something like a 'religious fever' has broken out in China. People are flocking to the Christian churches, both the official church and the 'underground' church. The veneration of ancestors is still alive, and it would be illuminating to investigate how far in China, as in Singapore, the rites and customs have tacitly adapted to modern conditions instead of disappearing. In some places people are rebuilding the Daoist or Buddhist temples destroyed by the Cultural Revolution, or are building new ones. And if no popular religion is practised every day in China, as it is in Singapore, Hong Kong or Taiwan, in the People's Republic, too, thousands upon thousands of people are making pilgrimages to the famous pilgrimage places. And even if they are indifferent or sceptical tourists, there they are confronted with the old religious traditions. Religious objects and of course a good deal of kitsch are on sale along long stretches of the main roads, like those leading to Taishan.

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  The Law and Religious Market Theory

  China, Taiwan and Hong Kong

  • Jianlin Chen(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  2 JINGHAO ZHOU, CHINESE VS. WESTERN PERSPECTIVES: UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY CHINA 134–136 (Lexington Books 2014); Anna Xiao Dong Sun, The Fate of Confucianism as a Religion in Socialist China: Controversies and Paradoxes, in STATE, MARKET, AND RELIGIONS IN CHINESE SOCIETIES 229, 232–233 & 236 (Fenggang Yang & Joseph B. Tamney eds., Brill 2005). See DAI LIYONG, 现代性与中国宗教 [MODERNITY AND CHINESE RELIGION], at 279–287  accommodation traces its origin to a historical political compromise between these three factions driven by unsavory power struggles and even if competitive tension continues between these three religions. 3 The establishment of the P.R.C. by the ostensibly atheistic C.P.C. represents a significant turn of events for religions in China, 4 but it was the Cultural Revolution that radically recalibrated the religious land- scape. During the tumultuous decade spanning the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, there was the attempted eradication of religion—one of the perceived undesirable social elements of the old world that had to be purged—through widespread persecution of religious adherents and the destruction of religious premises. 5 Since then, China has witnessed a rapid increase in religious adherents among the population, 6 though estimated figures vary widely given that a large portion of religious activities are conducted in the grey area of the law where local government officials turn a blind eye without officially con- doning such activities, leading to a lack of information in this regard.

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  Intellectual History of Key Concepts

  • Gregory Adam Scott, Stefania Travagnin, Gregory Adam Scott, Stefania Travagnin(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Concepts continue to evolve and to regenerate itself. Herein lies its inherent ambiguity. In the following pages, I will explore the ambiguity of the religion concept in modern Chinese history and argue that underneath the much-emphasized atheistic ideology there exists an undercurrent of conceiving religion as a valu-able instrument for social and political mobilization. Throughout the twentieth century, China ’ s modernizing states adhered to an atheist stance and shared a record of making sustained attempts to control or even suppress religion. Social elites in general subscribed to the conviction that religion shackled the human mind and should be eliminated from society if possible. Religion for them was an obstacle to progress. In spite of the permeation of the atheistic outlook of modernity, however, it has never been so predominant to totally stamp out the alternative appraisal. Side by side with being conceived as a re-gressive force, religion continued to be understood as a powerful way of evok-ing social affects and actions, with magic power that none of the secular institutions such as the political party and the nation-state could easily repro-duce. This alternative conception of religion was most frequently invoked by religious groups to justify their existence and to resist the top-down imposition of restrictive regulations. Facing hostile policies, believers defended themselves further by narrating themselves into a value-free affective force that could po-tentially make contributions to secular causes, from modernization, nation-building, to social stability. Even the state at times invoked this conception to explain its lenient policy towards religion. Seemingly antithetical to the pre-dominant atheism, this alternative conception is a different product of the same process of secularization and articulated religion ’ s value in secular terms.

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  The Anthropology of Religion, Charisma and Ghosts

  Chinese Lessons for Adequate Theory

  • Stephen Feuchtwang(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Each of these major policy reconsiderations are acknowledgements of the flourishing of ritual and religious activities and the need to make ad-justments to their government. They are manifestations at the highest level of state of something repeated at every lower level: different, often conflicting governmental interests in the economy and politics of religious life. Recognition that religions can be compatible with socialism was first made by a survey and report published in 1987 by the Institute of Reli-gious Studies of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (Luo Zhufeng et al Zhongguo Shehuizhuyi Shiqide Zongjiao Wenti (Problems of reli-gion in the period of Chinese socialism). Shanghai Shehui Kexue Yuan). The decade that followed saw a flurry of publications by academic policy researchers equating religion not with belief and therefore with false or reactionary ideas but with culture, something more substantial and multiple, like nationality, opening religion to sympathetic treatment as custom and tradition that need to be understood and expounded (Yang Fenggang 2005 pp 27 – 8). For instance, positing Christianity as culture of the West and Bud-dhism as culture of the East, Chinese social scientists have engaged in the-ology and in positive accounts of both Christianity and Buddhism (Yang Fenggang 2005: 28). Some have argued tacitly that a better way of coun-tering Falun’gong, the religious exercise ( qigong ) sect condemned to force-ful suppression in 1999, would be to encourage conventional religions (Yang Fenggang 2005: 35). With the provision that the religion is of Chapter 11 ‘Religion’ in the government of the People’s Republic of China 181 China, puts country first, and can be part of China’s standing in the world, religion is not just tolerated. In some instances it is officially pro-moted. This mix of protection and threat affects the ritual activities to which I have most paid attention and which are not categorisable into the slot of ‘religion’.

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  Official and Popular Religion

  Analysis of a Theme for Religious Studies

  • Pieter Hendrik Vrijhof, Jacques Waardenburg, Pieter Hendrik Vrijhof, Jacques Waardenburg(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  This topic is suggested as it were by the close relation that has grown from the time of the Han-dynasty between the Confucianist teachings and the 388 R. Ransdorp political organs of authority. The topic, furthermore, offers the opportunity of dealing with the three religions combined, namely in so far as they are related to each other. We shall see that Confucianism will attain the status of an official state doctrine, one which to some ex-tent regulates and controls Taoism and Buddhism, both of which are more interwoven with the lives of the common people. On the basis of the actual relations among the three religions it will be possible to draw some con-clusions about the nature of each of them separately. When Confucianism lost its dominant position and was finally rejected as the ideology of the state, the coexistence of Chinese religions that is to be discussed here came to an end. The question as to the extent to which Maoist teachings as official state doctrine have taken over the former functions of Confucianism, or as a popular movement possibly constitute a 'continuation' of re-volutionary, religious popular movements that once derived their impulse from Buddhist and Taoist cir-cles, is certainly a legitimate one. However, it seems to us difficult to deal with this questions within the scope of a study on Chinese religions. After dealing briefly with the coexistence of the 'three Chinese religions' in a political-historical perspective, we will make some summary and additional remarks. 1. Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism; A Brief Histo-rical Sketch (4) The class of lettered men, which from the Han-dynasty onwards exercised a direct influence on Chinese state politics, has, as a social grouping, a long history prior to the Han-period. According to Hu Shih (5) the 'Ju' are originally Chinese Religions 389 those who after the fall of the Shang-dynasty (ap-prox. 1513-1028 B.C.) continued its religious rites and practices during the following Chou-dynasty.

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  China's Ethical Revolution and Regaining Legitimacy

  Reforming the Communist Party through Its Public Servants

  • Shaoying Zhang, Derek McGhee(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Modernity, as a component of the China Dream discourse, should be understood as the realization of three dreams: a strong state, a wealthy nation and a prosperous individual—in that order (Yan 2010: 507). In this context, China overturned the classical view that Confucian culture is incompatible with modernization (Wheeler 2005: 4). It seems Chinese traditional culture can play an important role in national cohe- sion and creativity, in international power competition and the growing demand by the Chinese public for greater access to a variety of cultural pursuits (Edney 2012: 908). The renewed interpretation of Confucianist values is expected to provide rich supplements to China’s unique modern- ization project: “first, that some core traditional Confucian values are con- ducive to modernization; second, that, notwithstanding, Weber, 1 Chinese culture did include the kind of tension (as discussed above) with the world that Weber thought necessary for modernization; and third, that China has selectively assimilated ideas from the West” (Wheeler 2005: 14). It was in the 1980s that the revitalization of Confucian values, norms and responsibilities began to emerge along with China’s reform policies (Holbig 2009: 51). The narratives of modern Chinese history had since THE CHINA DREAM, HISTORY, RELIGION AND MODERNIZATION 22 shifted from rebellions and revolutions to modernization and reforms (Li 2010b: 337). Dirlik suggests that the processes of colonialism and impe- rialism have in turn “domesticated” Chinese modernity, the result being that revolution has been replaced from the centre to the margins of history (2002: 27).

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  A Secular Age beyond the West

  Religion, Law and the State in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa

  • Mirjam Künkler, John Madeley, Shylashri Shankar(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  62 Zhe Ji the trinity of religion, education, and politics in traditional china Taylor defines “religion” in terms of “transcendence” (2007: 20), which involves belief in a good higher than human flourishing, in a higher power than secular authority, and a view of life as going beyond “this life.” This definition is highly abstract. One can certainly find the concept of trans- cendence in Chinese religious traditions, for example in the Confucian notion of “Heaven” (tian 天), as Taylor has rightly claimed (see Taylor 2007: 50; 152). However, a closer observation of the “social imaginaries” of religion in China shows that Chinese literati did not conceive religion first and foremost in terms of the objects or contents of belief, but rather by the manner in which belief was systematically stimulated, justified, maintained, and transmitted. This is probably why “education/teaching” gained primacy in the Chinese notion of religion. In fact, both religion and education were conceptualized in traditional China by the same term: jiao; there is no explicit semantic distinction between them. The fusion of religion and education in the Chinese language has been noted by James Legge (1815–1897), one of the first Western students of Chinese classics. In the introduction to his translation of collected Taoist texts published in 1891, he reminded readers that the so-called “Three Religions” – Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism – actually mean in Chinese “‘the Three Teachings’ of systems of instruction, leaving the subject-matter of each ‘Teaching’ to be learned by inquiry” (Legge 1891: 1). In fact, in pre- modern China there was no Confucianism, Taoism, or Buddhism, but rather the knowledge taught by Confucius and his successors, the perceptions and practices of the Tao, and the instructions given by Buddha. Such a fusion is also true on the level of social organization in religious and educational domains.

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