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Introduction Mayfair Mei-hui Yang 楊 美 惠 1 At a conference at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2004, I gave a paper on the revival of popular religion based on my fieldwork in rural Wenzhou, on the southeastern coast of China (M. Yang n.d.).1 Afterward, a U.S.-trained Chinese scholar with an academic position in the U.S, but born and raised in China, asked why I was studying religion when it has never been very important in China and the Chinese people have always been pragmatic and secular, even in imperial times. This was a view familiar to me from the 1980s, in conversations with intellectuals and even with working-class people during two-and-a-half years of living in Beijing. It is symptomatic of the cultural amnesia that has beset China, rendering many Chinese unaware of the vast modern efforts to demonize and eradicate the rich religious life that was long an integral part of China. The Chinese sociologist C.K. Yang wrote that both Western sinologists and China’s own modern cultural elites, including the journalist-reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and philosopher-essayist Hu Shi (1891–1962), held that religion was not an important feature of Chinese culture, and that what religious life there was, such as Buddhism and Christianity, had been introduced from foreign lands (C.K. Yang 1961; Liang 1981a). Yang explained that Western sinologists overlooked the richness of Chinese religious life because they focused on agnostic elite Confucianism and did not pay attention to popular religion. Chinese intellectuals, for their part, denied Chinese religion out of their sense of national humiliation and their need for “emphasizing the dignity of Chinese civilization in the face of the political and economic superiority of the nationalistically oriented Western world” (C.K. Yang 1961:6). Extending his insight, I suggest that the denial of Chinese religion among educated Chinese may have something to do with their internalization of three world orientations introduced from the UC-Yang-rev.indd 1 UC-Yang-rev.indd 1 8/27/2008 1:01:34 PM 8/27/2008 1:01:34 PM 2 / Mayfair Mei-hui Yang modern West: (1) a century of Western missionary contempt for Chinese “idol worship” and “superstitions,” (2) a sense of the superiority of science and modern rationality in the nationalist cause of China’s selfstrengthening , and (3) social evolutionist doctrines that arranged different cultures and religious systems of the world into a hierarchical progression whose teleological end was Western-style civilization. Indeed, under the pressures of a Western Protestant and secular outlook, even Confucianism, whose ancient texts were all about ritual practice, was deritualized and made over into a disembodied philosophy and moral system to accord with modern notions of civilized culture. This volume seeks not only to document the empirical changes that Chinese religious life underwent in modernity, which for China coincided with the twentieth century, but also to reflect upon, evaluate, and critique these changes. We need to ask: what were the self-understandings and historical discourses that propelled these changes in Chinese society, and what historical conditions gave rise to these discourses and collective actions? This collection of essays by historians, anthropologists, sociologists , and religious studies scholars provides a historical background to the vicissitudes of Chinese religious life in the twentieth century, a period of cataclysmic social change, warfare, trauma, and poverty, as well as economic growth at the end of the century. The essays published here document different phases of the transformation, persecution, decline, and resurgence of religious life in China and Taiwan, offering points of comparison with other periods in Chinese history as well as with other places in the world. The twentieth century in China was an unprecedented era, when ambitious social engineering almost succeeded in bringing a sudden end to cultural heritages accumulated over millennia. These momentous changes are too dramatic to merely document; their historical triggering mechanisms, discursive rationales, and political strategies must also be analyzed. The contributors to this volume seek new understandings and evaluations of the social consequences of radical state secularization in China, and an alternative approach to Chinese religious culture. Modernity, Secularization, and étatization: An Intertwined Process The term “modernity,” as employed by contributors to this book, both encapsulates and distances itself from the notion of “modernization.” In this book’s approach to modernity, the various socio-historical changes implied by “modernization” are acknowledged, such as urbanization, UC-Yang-rev.indd 2 UC-Yang-rev.indd 2 8/27/2008...

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