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Unlike during the Ming dynasty, the political situation in northern Asia became comparatively stable during the Qing dynasty, leading to the development of a considerable commercial network, with Guihua City being an important node of this network. Within the city, guilds, called hang or she and organized by Shanxi merchants, formed the core of local society. Previous research has largely depended on local gazetteers or oral records to analyze these merchants, and has only been able to provide a piece of the complete picture. However, utilizing the inscriptions on stone tablets found within the city, my research reexamines the relationships between these guilds through social network analysis. This article is comprised of three parts. The first clarifies the characteristics of hang and she, as well as how these guilds encompassed religious activities. Second, I reestablish the social networks between these groups and evaluate merchant donations to temples, placing these practices into observable, quantifiable conceptions such as "religious groups" or "interactional points". In the final section, I present the shifts in commercial activities in Guihua City by comparing the interactions between these guilds in different time periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To construct our religious property system, we must first define its purpose and function, and then clarify the connotation, subject, and capacity of religious property, the premise of which is to scientifically understand the nature, purpose and function of religions. The"religious purpose"of the religious property system is different in its appeal to different subjects: The state, religious groups and believers. For different types of property, religious purposes differ in directness and indirectness, but they are unified in the realization of the basic religious policy of the Party and the state.

One of the issues in the Buddhist-Taoist debate during the Southern and Northern Dynasties ... period involved the Buddhist critique of Taoism. This issue has not drawn particular attention from scholars of Taoist history probably because Taoists did not respond directly to the Buddhist attack at that time. The focus of this critique was what Buddhists referred to as Zhang Daoling's "Jun Jiang Li Bing," which was a method for instructing disciples in the writing of Taoist charms. In the early Zheng Yi occult system, the status of Taoist converts was determined to a large extent by the number of generals and soldiers they could summon from the spirit world. In this article, I argue that the characteristics of this imaginary spirit world reveal the aspiration of early Taoists to unify religion with the state and military. Due to dual pressure from ideological and ethical traditions, however, Taoists gradually transformed "Jun Jiang Li Bing" into a method of invocation the existed only in ritual and the imagination. Moreover, the original religious organizations, manifested mainly in the form of tightly structured local religious organizations such as "Zhi" ... or "Fang" ... , evolved into more loosely structured religious groups centered around mythological geographical concepts of "Dong Tian Fu Di" ... and Taoist temples. In the present study, I use concrete historical examples to discuss the gradual decline of the early Taoist ideal of the unity of state and religion. Moreover, I also attempt to provide insight into the processes through which early Taoism gradually succumbed to the pressures of ideological and moral traditions and became integrated into ancient China's mainstream culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]