What has happened to religion in China since the Communist revolution? Against all the odds of eradication measures dictated by the atheist ideology and secularization effects of modernization, ...religion has survived and has been reviving and thriving despite Communist rule. This book presents a comprehensive overview of Chinese versions of Marxist atheism, evolving religious policies, and the religious change in China under Communism. It presents a fresh definition of religion for the social scientific study that classifies the religious and religion-like phenomena into a clear order. Working within the new paradigm in the sociology of religion that explains religious vitality instead of secularization, the book adopts a political economic approach. It contends that the dominant “supply-side explanations” in the new paradigm is not suitable to explain the religious change in China. The author articulates the triple religious market model in a
shortage economy of religion under heavy regulation, which is very much a demand-driven economy of religion. Moreover, China is only one case of religious oligopoly, where a selected few religions are sanctioned by the state. Oligopoly is the most common type of religion-state relations in the world today. What has happened to religion in China may be indicative of religious dynamics in other oligopoly societies under heavy regulation.
This essay is based on the Presidential Address at the East Asian Society for the Scientific Study of Religion Inaugural Conference on 3–5 July 2018 in Singapore. It discusses some aspects of the key ...concepts, some of the distinct characteristics of religion in East Asia, and some implications for the social scientific study of religion in general.
The revival of folk (popular) religion in China in the last three decades has been noted in many publications and documented in ethnographic studies. However, until now there has been no quantitative ...study that provides an overall picture of Chinese folk-religion practices. This article is a first attempt to draw the contours of Chinese folk religion based on three recent surveys conducted in mainland China and Taiwan. Three types of folk religion are conceptualized: communal, sectarian, and individual. Different types of folk religion may have different social functions and divergent trajectories of change in the modernization process. At present, in spite of the dramatic social, political, and cultural changes in modern times, the adherents of folk religion still substantially outnumber the believers of institutional religions in Chinese societies.
The economic approach to religion has confined its application to Christendom in spite of the ambition of the core theorists for its universal applicability. Moreover, the supply-side market theory ...focuses on one type of religiosity-religious participation (membership and attendance) in formal religious organizations. In an attempt to analyze the religious situation in contemporary China, a country with religious traditions and regulations drastically different from Europe and the Americas, I propose a triple-market model: a red market (officially permitted religions), a black market (officially banned religions), and a gray market (religions with an ambiguous legal/illegal status). The gray market concept accentuates noninstitutionalized religiosity. The triple-market model is useful to understand the complex religious situation in China, and it may be extendable to other societies as well.
Protestant Christianity has been growing very fast in China under communist rule. This article shows that the converts are not all marginalized individuals deprived of material and social resources. ...An increasing proportion of the converts are well-educated young people in urban China. To explain this conversion to a nontraditional religion, the micro-level factors of individual crisis, individual choices, and personal bonds are inadequate. The meso-level institutional factors of organizational strengths and competitiveness are important, but religious organizations are severely constrained by restrictive regulations in China. I argue that the macro-level contextual factors are very important to understand the phenomenon of large-scale conversion to Christianity in China today. The crucial contextual factors are the increasingly globalized market economy under political repression. Christianity provides peace and certainty in facing wild market forces. The Christian faith is liberating amid a stifling political atmosphere. McDonald's is a prominent symbol of the globalized market, which, like Christianity, is perceived as modern and cosmopolitan within the Chinese context.
Our study examined the respective relationships between two components of higher education in mainland China—science education and political indoctrination—and the religiosity of university students. ...Using a cross-sectional, representative sample of about 1700 college students in Beijing, we found first that students studying natural/applied sciences were less likely to perceive Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam as plausible and less likely to have supernatural belief, relative to students in humanities/social sciences. In addition, the more students positively evaluated the political education courses—which indicates students’ acceptance of political indoctrination—the less likely they reported Protestantism and Catholicism as being plausible. Nevertheless, neither science education nor political indoctrination was associated with the perceived plausibility of Buddhism and Daoism or the worshipping behavior of students. We discuss the implications of these findings in light of the secularization debate and the research on education, religion, and state atheism.
This book is a collection of studies of various religious groups in the changing religious markets of China. These ethnographic studies demonstrate many shades of gray in the religious market and ...fluidity across the red, black, and gray markets.
A major goal of ideological education in China is to promote loyalty to the party-state and to instill atheism among the people. How effective is this ideological education? This article examines the ...relationship between education and trust in government and trust in religion using data from the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey. We find that education is negatively associated with trust in government, while positively related to trust in religion. Our findings suggest that policies aimed at displacing religion in favor of the Communist ideology have largely failed to shape the public mindset; rather, the more educated, the more people tend to trust religion instead of the government.
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