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The papers in this research dialogue section are the product of a project that examines intellectual life in China since the 1990s – chiefly the efforts by academic public intellectuals to rethink China’s past, present, and future in light of the excesses of Mao’s revolution, the challenges emerging from reform, and the rise of China to the status of world economic power. Chinese scholars, having benefited from China’s openness to the world and the relative relaxation of political pressure in China (until recently), have much to say about China and the world that merits our attention. Through creative collaboration between Chinese and international scholars, the articles collected here explore that intellectual public sphere since the late 1990s. The articles were written in Chinese by young PRC scholars and rendered into English through ‘collaborative translation’ teams that pair these Chinese with non-Chinese scholars based in Canadian universities. The net result, grounded on repeated conversations and revisions, is not a simple translation but a co-production of knowledge about China that aims to capture the discourse of Chinese scholarship in a way to make it meaningful to anglophone readers. The articles themselves are not traditional surveys of academic scholarship. Rather they map significant areas of an intellectual world and the arguments within it. Three widely accepted intellectual streams of thought (sichao 思潮) organize these soundings: liberals, New Left, and New Confucian. These reports explore connections between and diversity within and beyond each.
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The renewed embrace of Marxism has been a key element in "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era," added to China's constitution last year. But the Marxism that Xi and his propagandists are pushing is not what one would expect from a serious reading of the Manifesto. Nor is it the lumbering apparatus of the Stalinist state. The lessons of Marx, Xi declares, are that Marxism changes with the times, that it must be integrated with local culture in order to be effective, and that it needs a strong party and a great leader in order to succeed. This state Marxism is an attempt to unify the population behind a national ideology and shore up state authority, not to inspire class struggle.
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The Introduction to this edited volume explores the concept of sainthood in the context of modern and contemporary Chinese history, illustrating that the idea and the practice of sainthood remain vital in spite of the Chinese state’s consistent commitment to secularism as part of its strategy of state-building. In addition to providing necessary historical and historiographical contextualization, the Introduction also discusses the three main dimensions of sainthood—charisma, hagiography, and religious leadership—and provides examples of how the particular figures profiled in our volume both drew on tradition and innovated, and stood up to and compromised with political authorities. Chapter summaries are followed by a brief comparison with similar cases outside of the Chinese world. Throughout, emphasis is placed on the creativity and vitality of religious leadership, which seems generally undaunted by the frequent indifference and hostility of state actors.
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Li Yujie (1900–1994) was a walking contradiction: a student leader of the Shanghai May Fourth movement and a Guomindang member and technocrat in the Nanjing government, but also a cadre in Xiao Changming's redemptive society—the Heavenly Virtues Teachings—and eventually the founder of two redemptive societies in his own right (the Heaven and Man Teachings and the Heavenly Emperor Teachings). Through a biographical study of Li Yujie, this article examines the complex appeal of redemptive societies to parts of the educated elite during China's Republican period. The author focuses particularly on the period between 1937 and 1945, when Li retired to the sacred mountain of Huashan. There, with the help of Huang Zhenxia, a self-taught intellectual also employed by the Guomindang, Li sought to modernize the "White Lotus" teachings that he had received from his master by incorporating scientific insights received via spirit writing. Li believed that he was creating a new religion more adapted to the twentieth century. Both the texts produced on Huashan and the military and political elite that were attracted to these texts allow us to raise new questions about secularism and religion, traditional beliefs and science in the context of Republican-period China, thereby suggesting that the conflict between the modernizing state and traditional religious culture was not always as stark as we have believed it to be.
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Abstract. Making Saints in Modern China offers a new perspective on the history of religion in modern and contemporary China by focusing on the profiles of reli
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Abstract. Making Saints in Modern China offers a new perspective on the history of religion in modern and contemporary China by focusing on the profiles of reli
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This chapter argues that human rights discourse remains marginal to the politics of religion in China, despite the efforts of the United States and international organizations to bring it in. There has been a liberalization of religious practice in China since the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) and the country's economic opening since 1979. By all accounts, the number of religious adherents in the country is surging, particularly within different forms of Protestant Christianity. While tolerating this development, the government has sought to carefully manage it. China recognizes freedom of belief as a human right, as well as religious practice—as long as the latter unfolds within a government-approved framework. Religious communities must be organized on a national basis, reflecting ongoing suspicion of external religious actors, a legacy of the involvement of missionaries in the colonial enterprise. And they must register with the Religious Affairs Bureau, which oversees the construction of new religious buildings, the printing of religious literature, and systems of seminaries and monasteries. Within this structure, local struggles for greater religious freedom have not focused on international human rights.