Notes
349 introduction 1. I wish to thank Prasenjit Duara, David Palmer, Peter van der Veer, and an anonymous reader for valuable comments on this Introduction. 2. The May Fourth Movement was triggered in 1919, when Chinese intellectuals , students, workers, and merchants protested the Versailles Treaty after World War I, which handed Shandong Province over to the Japanese. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, in public demonstrations and boycotts of Japanese goods, and in journals, novels, plays, and newspapers, these groups raised their voices against traditional Chinese culture and values, especially Confucian culture and popular religions, for their “backwardness” and irrelevance to modernity. 3. There have been many proposals to modify and salvage the secularization thesis, such as arguments that religiosity becomes deinstitutionalized in modernity, or retreats from the public sphere. See Ji Zhe’s chapter in this volume. 4. There have also been critiques of secularism, or the moral-political doctrine that secularization is socially necessary and politically desirable for modernization, such as William Connolly’s argument that a secular and rational public sphere lacks the compelling “visceral register of inter-subjectivity in moral and political life” (Connolly 1999:27). 5. For example, Falungong’s apocalyptic rhetoric describes the present era as the end of a kalpa (the Buddhist notion of an aeon), thus implying that postMao China does not represent progress, since the end of the world calls for the salvation of souls. Furthermore, Falungong members often staged mass public gatherings to protest criticisms of their claims by scientists and the media. The largest and most significant of these was in front of national Party headquarters at the Zhongnanhai in Beijing in April 1999 (David Palmer, personal communication, and 2007; N. Chen 2003a). 6. Anthony Yu shows that throughout much of imperial history, Buddhism Notes UC-Yang-rev.indd 349 UC-Yang-rev.indd 349 8/27/2008 1:02:23 PM 8/27/2008 1:02:23 PM 350 / Notes to Pages 12–26 and Daoism flourished only with the consent and patronage of the imperial court, and, along with sectarian religious movements, periodically suffered severe state persecution (A. Yu 2005). 7. I thank Cathy Chiu, librarian of UCSB East Asian collections, for helping me in the digital search of the Siku Quanshu (Complete Library in Four Branches of Literature). 8. Mi was combined with other terms to make compound words such as mihuo (迷惑, “to be confused or deluded”), mishi (迷失, “to lose one’s way”), and miwang (密惘, “to lose one’s sanity”). 9. See Hildred Geertz’s review of Keith Thomas’s book Religion and the Decline of Magic, which takes Thomas to task for implicitly seeing the decline of magic in Christianity not only as historical fact but as beneficial for religion in general (H. Geertz 1975). 10. It is significant that the first anti-superstition salvo, the edict of 1898, came from the highest level—the emperor himself—and from within the imperial state. Of course, the Empress Dowager Cixi and conservative court officials quickly blocked its implementation, and the edict was drafted by Kang Youwei, a prominent reformer (Spence 1990:224–230). Nevertheless, the fact remains that the earliest moves against religion in China were initiated first by the imperial state and then by the new nationalist state. The disastrous failure of the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 strengthened the anti-superstition sentiments of the elite and state campaigns against superstition. 11. Chen Duxiu used this doctrine of materialism, which privileges sensory perception, to disprove the existence of ghosts, spirits, and souls (Chen 1918a). Being a pragmatist, Hu Shi was less dogmatic and strident than Chen, and took a more constructive approach. In 1919, he published an article that sought to liberate the notion of “immortality” (buxiu) from its superstitious baggage of souls, spirits, and ghosts (Hu 1919). He proposed that the only true immortality was “social immortality,” in which a society lives on due to the accumulated contributions and actions of each and every human member. 12. For a brief biography of Ernst Haeckel and his ideas, see the website of discussions of evolutionary theory, maintained by the Museum of Paleontology at the the University of California, Berkeley: http://www.ucmp.berkeley .edu/history/haeckel.html 13. Julian Steward (1955) proposed the notion of “multilinear evolution,” giving due emphasis to the Boasian tradition of cultural relativism, diffusion, and historical particularism and contingency, and to the Darwinian notion of adaptation to the environment. 14. Beijing University anthropologist Wang Mingming remembers that as a college student studying anthropology...
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