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This paper seeks to investigate China's response to the crisis of survival in the early twentieth century through the lens of rainmaking, a ritual practice that connected with the transcendental nature of religious ideas, yet refused to be categorized primarily as Buddhism or Daoism. The time-honored ritual, straddling China's transition from a monarchy to a republic, was enmeshed in a web of local and national crises with multiple dimensions. Its struggle for a place in the age of reason and rationality speaks volumes about the agonizing process by which the Chinese reconstructed their cultural identity in order to conform to a preconceived global narrative. Adapting rainmaking to the discourse of modernity set the stage for conflict and negotiation between the forces of social transformation and social conservation. The boundary between these forces is difficult to define, but their dynamic equilibrium shaped and reshaped the historical contour of rainmaking, illuminating the strength of China's social inertia that could withstand the revolutionary force of a regime change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reveals the contemporary Chinese state's active role in shaping the country's religion-related intangible cultural heritage (ICH) safeguarding, through a systematic review of China's official inventories of national representative ICH projects and extensive investigations of relevant local practices and initiatives. Although China is ruled by a political party officially embracing an atheist ideology, various elements of the contemporary Chinese state have been proactively involved in safeguarding religion-related ICH. The Chinese state's involvement in de facto religion-related ICH safeguarding predates its adoption of explicit ICH safeguarding narratives. Still, the Chinese state's practices and initiatives in safeguarding religion-related ICH flourished after ratifying the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2004. Since then, China's central government has established a nationwide framework to recognise representative ICH items, including religion-related ones. Beyond Beijing, various local state agencies have also developed noticeable enthusiasm for supporting the safeguarding of religion-related ICH. In addition to engaging directly with ICH safeguarding, the contemporary Chinese state has also shaped China's religion-related ICH by working closely with some academics and religious groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we conducted an empirical analysis of the reasons for belief in Christianity in Wuhan, China. The data in this paper is from Chinese Urban Research Center for Ethnic and Religious Affairs Management, collected in 2015. We focus on the group characteristics of Christians in urban areas, and its influencing factors. It is found that the Christians in Wuhan are typically older, female, and less educated. Other patterns we have found include powerful influence by family members and friends, pragmatic reasons for following Christianity, family parties as a common way of religious assembly, and discretional admission and exit. Logistic regression is employed here to analyze the determinants of Christian belief. Gender, age, marital status, average annual income, education degree, and health conditions have significant effects on believing in Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) abolished its total ban on religious activities in 1982. However, the distrust that the CCP feels for religions remains obvious today, and the religious restrictions in contemporary China remain tight. Conventional wisdom tells us that the official atheist ideology of Marxism-Leninism is the main reason behind the CCP's distrust for, and restriction of, religion. However, taking a historical institutionalist perspective, this paper argues that the religious restrictions in contemporary China are in fact rooted in the fierce political struggles of the country's two major revolutions in the first half of the twentieth century. Without the support of religious groups, the Nationalist Republicans would have found it difficult to survive and succeed in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty during the Chinese Republican Revolution in the first decade of the twentieth century. Likewise, without cooperating with a wide range of religious groups, the CCP would have struggled to defeat the Nationalist regime and the Japanese invaders in the Chinese Communist Revolution between 1920s and 1940s. Thanks to the collaborations and struggles with various religious groups during the two revolutions which lead to its eventual ascent to power, the CCP thoroughly understands the organisational strength and mobilising capability embedded within religious groups. The tight restrictions on religious affairs in contemporary China is therefore likely to stem from the CCP's worry that prospective competitors could mobilise religious groups to challenge its rule through launching, supporting, or sponsoring collective actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the cult of Assunta Pallotta, an Italian Catholic nun who died in a north China village in 1905, to critique the existing literature on missionary medicine in China. She was recognized as holy because of the fragrance that accompanied her death, and later the incorrupt state of her body, and her relics were promoted as a source of healing by the Catholic mission hospital, absorbed into local folk medicine, and are still in use today. By focusing on Catholics, not Protestants, and women, not men, the paper suggests similarities between European and Chinese traditional religious and medical cultures and argues that instead of seeing a transfer of European biomedicine to China, we need to think of a single globalized process in which concepts of science and religion, China and the West were framed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholarship on religion in Early China (pre-220 BCE) has been predominantly concerned with the issue of ritual and has tended to be more concerned with placing this within the framework of Chinese history than that of religious studies. As such, other topics, such as deities, have either been neglected or subject to untested claims—often that deities do not exist and that Early China represents an atheist society, an argument that makes little sense in light of contemporary scholarship on religion in the field of cognitive science. This paper addresses the issue of deities in Early China by looking at how the High Deities of Early Chinese societies are represented in pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) texts through statistical analysis of the corpus of texts and close readings of selected passages featuring High Deities. This paper shows that in contrast to some earlier appraisals of an absence of such agents, these texts are rife with depictions of the High Deities, and that they are often represented as moralizing agents that punish vice and reward virtue in others, something that is argued to be expected in evolutionary psychology. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The work of Theravāda Buddhist monks is often understood as being focused on two different areas or “burdens”: the burden of books and the burden of insight. In other words, monks (and novices) are supposed to be either studying or meditating. While no one can deny that monks do in fact engage in these activities, this paper argues that these activities comprise only a small portion of the work performed by monastics, a fact that scholars have tended to ignore. On the basis of fieldwork conducted in a Theravāda community in Southwest China, in this paper I argue that we need to have an expanded view of what we should think of as appropriate monastic labor, to include activities that are not usually or necessarily seen as religious. It is only by seeing this wider variety of activities that we can begin to fully understand monks as social actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper addresses the changing dynamics of Protestantism in contemporary urban China through the lens of the Christian discourse of quality (suzhi). Linking suzhi with processes of identity and subject formation in the Chinese Protestant community, the paper shows that the religiosity of today's Chinese Protestants is not so much related to acts of spiritual seeking in a state-centred political framework as it is shaped by desires and practices of self-making among neoliberal individuals under rapid marketisation. It also demonstrates that Chinese Protestantism has undergone not just a quantitative increase but also a qualitative change that counters the one-dimensional representation of Christian religiosity in the post-Mao era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I develop a detailed consideration of ways in which Chinese religious practitioners, including Daoists, Christians, and spirit mediums, deploy syncretism in complex fields of practice. Rather than focusing on doctrinal blending, this study emphasises the ways in which these practitioners combine elements from diverse religious traditions through the media of ritual performance, visual representation, story, and landscape. After considering the diverse ways in which syncretic processes may be deployed in a field of practice, the paper investigates three ethnographic cases, exploring ritual co-celebration at Wudang Mountain in South-central China, charismatic Christian practices in Singapore, and the recent development of Holy Mount Zion as a Christian pilgrimage site in Taiwan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the rise of a group of affluent urban Christians in the post-Mao market transition to shed light on China's church-state relations in the reform era. Based on ethnographic data collected in Wenzhou, the most Christianized Chinese city and a pioneer in developing China's current market economy, this study portrays how local believers, many of whom are private entrepreneurs, engage postsocialist state power. It shows that these Christian entrepreneurs actively seek the state's recognition and renegotiate the boundaries of religion and politics in the context of development. They have adopted their modern capitalist cultural logic in the production, management and consumption of religious activities. Adding to the post-Weberian literature on religion and capitalism, this paper argues that regional capitalist development enabled by post-Mao reforms has largely depoliticized and promoted local practices of faith. Challenging the unidirectional view of China's church-state relations that focuses on state dominance and church resistance, this paper also contributes to a reconceptualization of Chinese Christian studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of proselytism as an active practice of shaping other people's identities. Specifically, it looks at the identity discourse promoted by ethnic Chinese evangelicals and compares it to that of Jehovah's Witnesses. Both Christian churches proselytise among contemporary transnational migrants from the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Europe, each making use of a sophisticated organisation adapted to the transnational practices of these migrants. Yet while evangelicals promote a transnational ethnic identity quite compatible with the secular discourse of the global Chinese migrant, Jehovah's Witnesses promote an anti-secular, non-ethnic cosmopolitanism. As a result, global Chinese evangelical ties more easily become part of global migratory and business networks. The paper is based on fieldwork among Chinese evangelical organisations and Jehovah's Witnesses in Italy, Hungary, Russia, and the United Kingdom, supplemented with interviews in the United States (the headquarters of many Chinese evangelical organisations) and a survey of printed and online resources used in proselytising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the Compassion Relief Foundation, a charity organisation originating from Taiwan, and tries to understand how it has managed to provide relief to victims of natural disasters for more than ten years in nineteen provinces, autonomous regions, and special municipalities of the People's Republic of China, despite the vicissitudes of cross-Straits relations and amidst recent bouts of religious persecution. The essay starts with an introduction to Compassion Relief: it presents its history as a charity organization, and then situates its activities in the PRC within the context of tense relations between China and Taiwan, as well as economic reforms in the PRC. The paper then questions three hypotheses advanced to explain the acceptance of Compassion Relief's activities by the Chinese government. It discusses the view that such approval results from political calculations directed at Taiwanese; the argument that it heralds change in the Chinese state's approach towards the social role of religion; and the claim that it signals the emergence of an autonomous civil society free of government interference. The essay expresses reservations about these views and concludes that the activities of Compassion Relief in the PRC rather suggests the existence of a symbiotic relationship between society and state officials at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hair embroidery was a particular technique practiced by lay Buddhist women to create devotional images. The embroiderers used their own hair as threads and applied them on silk to stitch figures. This paper will analyze the religious connotation of hair embroidery, the ritual process and the techniques for making hair embroidery in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. By tracing its appearance in both literary texts and actual surviving objects, this essay will ask how and in what circumstances human hair was applied to embroidery? What was the significance of transferring one's own hair onto an icon? How did hair embroidery combine women's bodies (their hair) with a womanly skill (embroidery) to make a unique gendered practice in late imperial China? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When analyzing contemporary Chinese religious life and religious policy of the Chinese state, the starting point should be to understand the context in which the term religion was introduced in China and to recognize the tools that the Chinese state has been using for handling religious expressions in society. These issues are rooted in the long history of the relationship between religion and the state in China; however, they are perceived through modern terminological and theoretical discourse. In fact, it is modern European science (humanities) that has defined the historical role, function, and form of religion since the late 19th century. With extensive help from the Chinese intellectual elite, the humanities have also interpreted various manifestations of religion in modern as well as in traditional Chinese society. Indeed, science, both domestic Chinese and Western, has played an important role in the introduction of the theoretical concept of religion into Chinese society and its subsequent use for specific political goals. This paper focuses on the origins of the concept of religion in the Chinese reality; it traces these origins in modern European thought and, in particular, the cultural and structural patterns that are unfamiliar to traditional (pre-modern) Chinese culture and society. It also attempts to outline problems that arise from the penetration and acculturation of the concept of religion into Chinese society and describes how these problems are reflected in the academic environment, especially in the Euro-American area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the place of Chinese food, identity, and everyday religion in the Canadian rural Midwest. Through a discussion of an annual grave custom to honor the earliest Chinese Canadian settlers in a small community, it develops the argument that Chinese cafes signify complex and efficacious public and private identities. Intersecting cafes both connect and attract Chinese people from hundreds of miles away to celebrate public festivals, rites of passage, and private achievements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role played by the Quanzhen Daoist Xuanmiao monastery in the defense of Nanyang (Henan) during the Taiping rebellion. It shows that Daoist loyalty to the Qing state and to the local community did not just stem from the abbot's personal hatred of the Taiping; it also mirrored the monastery's established pattern of collaboration with the imperial state since the early Qing and its long history of ritual service to and economic involvement in the local community. Because of its wealth and cultural and political influence the Xuanmiao monastery functioned as a vital and dynamic actor in shaping the history and society of late nineteenth-century Nanyang. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines both the revival of religious organisations and practices in China and what could be coined the "exit from religion" exemplified by the loss of religious basis for social togetherness and the instrumentalisation of religious organisations and discourse. It argues that "revival" and "exit" taken as a twofold phenomenon facilitate an understanding of the evolving and often disputed nature of China's religious sphere throughout history as well as the socio-political stage that the country is entering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jewish studies develops fast in contemporary China. In a land which is neither Christian nor Muslim and where Judaism and the animus against it never developed substantial roots, what are the perceptible orientations within Jewish studies? What kinds of issues may Chinese scholars encounter when teaching and writing about Jews and Judaism? Does the unique context in which Jewish studies is emerging have a bearing upon Chinese practioners? And in what way is Chinese Jewish Studies different from that produced in other quarters of the world? Through a holistic review of Chinese Jewish Studies and three glimpses of Chinese Jewish scholarship with regard to the Jewish diaspora in China, the Holocaust and Biblical Studies, this paper tries to reflect on these questions in a comparative perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents results from a four and one-half year participant observation study of conversion at a Chinese Protestant church. It was found that a variety of helping behaviors held important consequences for conversion. Church members were found to provide favors and gifts in ways that are unusual in Chinese society (e.g., anonymously, to perfect strangers, with no expectation of return, and to persons of lower status). These patterns of giving confound the traditional Chinese manner of building social networks and instead bind individuals to a larger society of Chinese Christians. These findings suggest that under certain conditions, examination of microsociological interaction rituals may complement other explanations of church growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

-Under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, the scholarship of religious research in China has changed from virtual nonexistence in the first thirty years (1949-1979) to flourishing in the reform era (1979-present). Moreover, the predominant view on religion has moved away from militant atheism to a more scientific, objective and consequently more balanced approach to religion. This paper attempts to trace this intellectual history in China and to examine the role of academia in the religious scene. There are three distinct periods in this development: the domination of atheism from 1949 to 1979, the birth of religious research in the 1980s, and the growth of the scholarship in the 1990s, despite political restrictions. Religious research was intended by the government to serve atheist propaganda, but it grew into an independent academic discipline responsive to the desecularizing reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore the historical background and the semantic underpinnings of a central, if marginally treated, metaphor of enlightenment and transmission in Chan discourse, "silent accord" 默契. It features centrally in Essentials of the Transmission of Mind 傳心法要, a text that gathers the teachings of Chan master Huangbo Xiyun (d. ca. 850), a major Tang dynasty figure. "Silent accord" is related to the concept of mind-to-mind transmission, which lies at the very core of Chan Buddhist self-understanding. However, Chan historiography has shown that this self-understanding was partially a product of the Song dynasty lineage records, historically retroactive syncretic constructs produced by monks and literati as efforts towards doctrinal and political recognition and orthodoxy. There are thus lacunae in the history of Chan thought opened up by the retrospective fictions of Song dynasty, and a lack of reliable, dateable documents from the preceding Tang dynasty era, possibly fraught with later additions. We situate the metaphor "silent accord" in the history of Chan thought by searching for its origins, mapping its functions in Chan literature, arguing for its influence and thereby its role in helping to bridge the ninth century gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper investigates the significance of visual and auditory metaphors as used in the main Daoist classics the Laozi 老子 and Zhuangzi 莊子. While both works disparage the role of the senses, they nonetheless employ a large number of metaphors related to the sense experience. It is the contention of the author that examining these metaphors against the backdrop of the main modern theories dealing with characteristics of vision and hearing is crucial for a better understanding of how the authors of both works envisioned the ideal relation between man and the Way (dao 道) as well as their views on authority and authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the moral community thesis in the secular context of China. Using multilevel logistic regression, we test (1) whether both individual- (measured by affiliation with Islam, Buddhism and Christianity) and aggregate-level religiosity (measured by the number of mosques, Buddhist temples, and churches per 10,000 people in province) are inversely related to law and rule violations at the individual level and (2) whether province-level religiosity enhances the inverse relationship between individual religiosity and deviant behaviors. Results from the 2010 China General Social Survey and the Spatial Explorer of Religions provide some support for the moral community proposition that contextual religiosity affects deviance at the individual level. Specifically, we find provincial as well as individual level of Islam to be inversely related with the violation of the law and rules. However, we find that neither the provincial level of Christianity and Buddhism nor cross-level interaction is related to deviance. The only exception, cross-level interaction involving the individual and provincial level of Islam, is in the opposite direction (i.e., positive, not negative). The implications of our findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates the mainstream healthcare narrative that frames human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as a chronic disease, and triangulates it with the lived experiences of people with HIV in Singapore. It also examines how HIV patients reconstruct their identities after the diagnosis of HIV. Four HIV patients (two males and two females) were interviewed in depth by an experienced medical social worker. Findings revealed that even as the illness trajectory of HIV has shifted from a terminal condition to a chronic one, living with HIV continues to be fraught with difficulty as society, especially in the Asian context, perceives HIV with much fear and disapproval. The participants had an overwhelming sense of shame when they were initially diagnosed with HIV and they had to reconstruct a liveable identity by containing the shroud of shame, reinforcing their normative identities and constructing new ones. These strategies help them to keep their shame at bay. This paper also unpacks nuanced insights of shame experienced by Chinese HIV patients in an Asian city dominated by Confucian values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]