This paper reviews research on the sociology of religion in China since the beginning of the new century. In terms of theoretical research, there are three main themes: first, research focusing on C. ...K. Yang's sociological study on religion, especially the theories of diffused religion and institutional religion; second, the dialogue with forefront issues such as the application of and controversies related to the rational choice theory of religion in China; and third, indigenous theoretical constructs, including “religious ecology theory” and the theory of the “Sinicization of religion”. In terms of quantitative research, this article reviews progress in the measurement of Chinese religiosity.
This paper offers an understanding of the spatio‐affective workings of religious organisations – and the marketplaces they operate in and through – that go beyond capitalist logics. We do so by ...examining how makeshift temples representing various forms of ‘Chinese religion’ survive in Singapore. Capitalist logics fail to explain how such marginal and precarious religious organisations, which might be ‘squeezed out’ by the market, nonetheless manage to survive amid competition. Moreover, scarce attention has been paid to how religion as a social‐affective system might mediate the functioning of a religious market. This paper fills the lacuna by bringing an understanding of the affective resonances of Chinese religious practices into conversation with religious market theory. Rather than treating the market as a universal mechanism that moderates patterns of competition, growth, and decline, we focus instead on the spatio‐affective conditions through which a plurality of ‘actually existing’ religious marketplaces is made possible. We argue that makeshift temples in Singapore create an alternative order of the religious market that is organised by the affective economies and interpersonal relationships within which different ritual service providers compete, cohabit, and cooperate. These temples dismiss the spatio‐religious boundaries and regulation that define the neoliberal religious marketplace of Singapore by carving out sacred niches instead.
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This paper offers an understanding of the spatio‐affective workings of the religious marketplace beyond capitalist logics. Makeshift temples in Singapore create an alternative order of the religious market that is organised by the affective economies and interpersonal relationships within which different ritual service providers compete, cohabit, and cooperate.
Daoism, at its core, is a religion: a way of interpreting the cosmos. Historically, Daoism evolved by incorporating elements of diverse religious traditions and maintained a dialectical relationship ...with Chinese society as a whole, affecting the worldviews, value systems and practices of all social classes. Daoist temples synthetically and syncretically embody the successive stages of Daoist history. This book studies the history of the eminent Tongbai Palace within its natural, cultural, religious and political landscape. It highlights what the temple owed to the significance of its location and the people and deities inhabiting it, while showing how, in turn, it increased their prestige.
Abstract
The Chinese, both in China and in an international migration setting, are commonly regarded as the world's most secular population. However, the relationship between Chinese people and ...Chinese Popular Religion is nuanced and survey data, more often than not, do not account for the plethora of religious activities Chinese people engage in despite simultaneously self-identifying as secular. This paper examines the supposed secularity of Chinese immigrant families living in Edinburgh. It asserts that although self-identifying as secular, these families engage in undeniable religious activity and possess religious beliefs. Crucially, there is a marked difference between the beliefs pertaining to secularity of the parents and their children, with the former being adamant in their secularity and the latter being more willing to acknowledge the complicated relationship between religion and the secular.
The continuing expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative (formerly known as One Belt One Road) has attracted considerable commentary, but little attention has been given to the formation of ...alternative networks in Southeast Asia or to the earlier history of trade and trust networks centred in the temples and regional association offices of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. This paper examines the formation and continuing expansion of a horizontal network of Chinese temples dedicated to the tutelary god (Earth God) of the port cities of Southeast Asia. The World Dabogong Federation was founded in 2017 and is now 5 years old. It currently includes over 160 temples from over 100 port cities. This paper explores the nature of this network and its relation to earlier temple and trust networks as well as its engagement with new media and technologies.
The rapid urbanization in China has had a profound impact on religious practices of rural communities, but few study has explored the relevant dynamics. This study provides an overview of ...urbanization’s impact on rural religious spaces, and compares the changes of religious spaces before and after urbanization. It aims at improving the understanding of religion in urbanized communities. Phenomenological methods were employed to analyze our transcriptions of 16 interviews which were conducted in the religious spaces of 11 urbanized communities in Jiangsu, China. We also investigated the worship circle mentioned by the participants through field surveys and map analysis. Based on these, four similar themes were sorted out, namely, worship circle and environment, aging and feminizing agents, ritual and secular life, as well as religious well-being. And the results showed that: (1) passive change of worship circles would bring new sense of belonging and identity to elderly residents; (2) the new religious spaces contained a lot of local knowledge and traditional characteristics, which were evolving continuously with sites sacredness maintenance and secularization function expansion; (3) female agents were of great importance to religious spaces preservation.
The article presents an ethnography of Buddhist practice groups in Wutong village, an urban village in the Shenzhen metropolis area, relating to the village's predicament through the 1990s and until ...2019. It discusses the relationship between two intertwined forms of soft power employed by the Chinese regime: 1) The push for cultural consumption within the framework of the re-development of urban villages. 2) The PRC’s re-definition of Buddhism as a culture instead of a religion. The author examines different lay Buddhist actors in the village, which operate within the current restrictive government policy towards religious groups. The ethnography of Wutong shows the non-dichotomic dynamic of suppression and support articulated by the state towards Buddhism's cultural and religious consumption. It focuses on the dynamic between state control and people's agency over their spiritual and religious realities, especially on the urban fringes. The article suggests that the urban art village can be understood as a sphere where lay Buddhists subvert state regulation by creating alternative Buddhist spaces for lay practice, in the form of cultural commodities. However, the article addresses the liminality of such urban spaces, which, aside from opportunities for religious entrepreneurship, also creates a state of precariousness for urban village inhabitants, including Buddhist practitioners.
Abstract The English term “Confucianism” may refer to three different concepts in the Chinese language: the school of Confucianism, scholastic tradition of Confucianism, and the religious tradition ...of Confucianism. From a sociological perspective, Confucianism as an official political orthodoxy no longer exists. However, Confucianism as a cultural tradition remains, and it is expressed in various aspects of the Chinese social life, which echoes the diffused characteristics of a typical Chinese religion. In this research, we try to demonstrate that the religiousness of Confucianism fulfills the cultural and ethical needs of the on-going new religious movement in China. Also, it helps modern people in their search for a life of meaning in times of cultural crisis and social anomie .
This paper explores the political ecology of death and the affective tensions of secularised burial rituals in Singapore. Although scholars have recently acknowledged the roles of biopower and affect ...in shaping environmental politics, religion and death as socio-affective forces have not been substantively engaged with by political ecologists. We argue that death is inherently both a spiritual and ecological phenomenon, as it exposes not only the spiritual geographies that structure how people see the natural world, but also the affective tensions and struggles over what counts as a “proper” form of burial in relation to religion and nature. First, we demonstrate how the Singapore state utilises a politico-ecological discourse to secularise Chinese death rituals, such that the death can be separated from the transcendent spheres and incorporated into the environmental biopolitics. Second, we focus on how people's variegated affective inhabitations of religion and secularity condition the political ecology of death. In doing so, this paper foregrounds the roles of religion, secularity and affect in rethinking the “political” of political ecology.
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