Chinese Religions on the Edge: Shifting Religion-State Dynamics (original) (raw)
2018, China Review-an Interdisciplinary Journal on Greater China
Not unlike in the modern Western world of Europe and the United States, the rise of the modern Chinese nation-state has led to the construction of "religion" as an autonomous institutional category distinct from secular state order. Since the end of the 19th century and the early 20th, the modern Chinese state's insistence on secularization and on de ning and framing acceptable religion has o en made religion an anomalous "question" in social and political life. 1 Perhaps more than in any other countries, state-driven secularization and modernization in China resulted in violent and tragic consequences inflicted by state authorities and modernity on traditional religious culture and practices. 2 While the unexpected resurgence of religious life in the post-Mao era defies the historical narrative of secularization in the West, Chinese government policy toward religion has, for the most part, sought to relentlessly enact the classic version of secularization thesis into reality to make religion irrelevant to public life. On the one hand, state-approved religious forms and contexts always play a dominant role in structuring religion's central, normative properties. On the other hand, there are also
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Chinese Religion on the Edge: Shifting Religion-State Dynamics
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Not unlike in the modern Western world of Europe and the United States, the rise of the modern Chinese nation-state has led to the construction of “religion” as an autonomous institutional category distinct from secular state order. Since the end of the 19th century and the early 20th, the modern Chinese state’s insistence on secularization and on de ning and framing acceptable religion has o en made religion an anomalous “question” in social and political life.1 Perhaps more than in any other countries, state-driven secularization and modernization in China resulted in violent and tragic consequences inflicted by state authorities and modernity on traditional religious culture and practices.2 While the unexpected resurgence of religious life in the post-Mao era defies the historical narrative of secularization in the West, Chinese government policy toward religion has, for the most part, sought to relentlessly enact the classic version of secularization thesis into reality to make religion irrelevant to public life. On the one hand, state-approved religious forms and contexts always play a dominant role in structuring religion’s central, normative properties.
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