Religion and Development in China: Innovations and Implications (original) (raw)

2015, ARI Inter-Asia Roundtable proceedings

The Inter-Asia Roundtable held at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute (ARI) on 17-18 October 2013, brought together scholars from China and around the world to discuss such innovations in the field of religion and development in China. Their contributions to this volume comprise significant new contributions to our evolving understanding of the implications of these complex developments for the re-configuration of religious communities, the re-negotiation of state-religion-society relationship, the re-imagining of models of civic engagement, and the re-shaping of new kinds of subjectivities in contemporary China. Questions explored in these papers address the extent to which the involvement of religious individuals and institutions in development leads different levels of state authority to reconsider their own responsibilities for social welfare and their governance of religious organizations. The contributions to the discussions collected here also examine factors affecting the involvement of diverse institutions in social service provision and inform particular ways of conceptualizing what it means to be needy, and who are worthy recipients of aid? The complexities of this can be seen, for example, in the ways in which particular programs either accept, negotiate or contradict the state discourses of social welfare, popular religious understandings of charity and merit accumulation, and/or ‘global’ discourses on poverty, inequality, and development. Through engaging these issues, the discussions of contemporary case studies presented in this volume critically explore the changing faces of religious giving in China, and the broader social, religious, institutional, and political implications of these ongoing transformations.