Religion in Chinese Society

The development of local government

The religious economy model predicts that when encountered with competition, loosely organized religions will fail or will be transformed into congregational religions. Over time, competition will drive congregational religions to establish an extended relationship with their consumers by generating exclusivist claims and exclusivist socialization. And thus exclusive religion tends to occupy the biggest market share. This model, however, has rarely been tested empirically. By analyzing religious trends in Taiwan after the deregulation of the late 1980s, we find that state suppression contributed to the weakness of organized religion while enhancing the popularity of unchurched congregational religions in Taiwan. We also find that deregulation is associated with the rise of organized and congregational faiths. But whether or not these newly organized religions become exclusive or not needs further studies. Implications of the findings for future research are offered.

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Deregulation and The Religious Market in Taiwan: A Research Note

The author proposes a dialogue between recent literature on the history of Chinese popular religion and recent sociological debates about secularization theory, asking whether a better understanding of concepts, theories and evidence from one field may be productive in interpreting those of the other. The author suggests on the one hand that certain elements of secularization theory can be useful tools in understanding the modern history of religions in China and on the other that thinking about what secularization has meant in China is crucial to a comparative global history of religion and modernity. He also argues that attention to secularization both as a historical process and as a political ideology may help us to better understand the religious policies of the People’s Republic of China today.

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Secularization Theories and the Study of Chinese Religions

The decade between the first and second united fronts, from the KMT-CCP break-up in mid-1927 to mid-1937, was a time of disaster, trial and tribulation for the Communist movement that brought it close to extinction. By the end of 1927 there appeared clearly two streams of communism in China - the rural Soviets and the urban leadership; the former had to be led by the latter, else the whole movement might have sunk into the traditional pattern of Chinese peasant rebellions. The theoretical framework of the CCP's strategy in this period was laid out in Wang Ming's famous pamphlet, The two lines, of July 1931 which made much of the crisis of postwar capitalism in its third stage of development, when the contradictions among imperialist powers became increasingly acute. Since the creation of the rural Soviets, tension as well as cooperation had developed between the 'white area' work and the land revolution.

The Communist movement 1927–1937

This chapter looks at the external context of twentieth-century Chinese history, beginning naturally with the collapse of the old order. Certain patterns of Ch'ing response to encroachment may be seen all around the periphery of the empire. Instead of recognizing Outer Mongolia as a sovereign state open to international relations, Russia continued to recognize Chinese suzerainty. For Japan, the First World War provided the opportunity to stabilize its imperialist interests. The chapter lists the Japan's Twenty-One Demands. In less than half a year, the whole of Manchuria had fallen to the Japanese army and been severed from China. Japan had become the primary concern of Chinese foreign policy. Within less than a generation, a mere two decades, the East Asian regional order of the Ch'ing dynasty, the international legal order envisaged by the Washington Conference treaty powers, and the world revolutionary order dreamed of in Moscow, had all proved unavailing as an international matrix for the Chinese Republic.

Religion in Chinese Society

Citations

The development of local government

Deregulation and The Religious Market in Taiwan: A Research Note

Secularization Theories and the Study of Chinese Religions

The Communist movement 1927–1937

China's international relations 1911–1931

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