Religion In Taiwan And China

Religion in Modern Taiwan takes a new look at Taiwan's current religious traditions and their fortunes during the twentieth century. Beginning with the cession of Taiwan to Japan in 1895 and the currents of modernization that accompanied it, the essays move on to explore the developments that have taken place as Buddhists, Daoists, Christians, non-Han aborigines, and others have confronted, resisted, and adapted to (even thrived in) the many upheavals of the modern period. An overview of Taiwan's current religious scene is followed by a comprehensive look at the state of religion in the country prior to the end of World War II and the return of Taiwan to Chinese sovereignty. The remaining essays probe aspects of change within individual religious traditions. The final chapter analyzes changes that took place in the scholarly study and interpretation of religion in Taiwan during the course of the twentieth century. Religion in Modern Taiwan will be read with interest by students and scholars of Chinese religion, religion in Taiwan, the modern history of Taiwan, and by those concerned with issues of religion and modernization. Contributors: Chang Hsun, Philip Clart, Shiun-wey Huang, Christian Jochim, Charles B. Jones, Paul Katz, André Laliberté, Lee Fong-mao, Randall Nadeau, Julian Pas, Barbara Reed, Murray A. Rubinstein.

This volume focuses on the intersection of religion and media in China, bringing interdisciplinary approaches to bear on the role of religion in the lives of individuals and greater shifts within Chinese society in an increasingly media-saturated environment. With case studies focusing on Mainland China (including Tibet), Hong Kong and Taiwan, as well as diasporic Chinese communities outside Asia, contributors consider topics including the historical and ideological roots of media representations of religion, expressions of religious faith online and in social media, state intervention (through both censorship and propaganda), religious institutions’ and communities’ use of various forms of media, and the role of the media in relations between online/offline and local/diaspora communities. Chapters engage with the major religious traditions practiced in contemporary China, namely Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam, and new religious movements. Religion and the Media in China serves as a critical survey of case studies and suggests theoretical and methodological tools for a thorough and systematic study of religion in modern China. Contributors to the volume include historians of religion, sinologists, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, and media and communication scholars. The critical theories that contributors develop around key concepts in religion—such as authority, community, church, ethics, pilgrimage, ritual, text, and practice—contribute to advancing the emerging field of religion and media studies.

This book explores how religion is and has been created, transmitted, embodied and changed in specific locations in late imperial, modern and contemporary Taiwan and China. Locating research not only on temples, mosques, churches, schools, tea houses, festival sites, burial grounds and shrines, but also cities, neighbourhoods, counties and districts, it explores the rich, and often overlooked, details that fill the lived experience of people doing religion. Seeking to focus on interactions between place, text and agency, this book aims to reflect on the layered and specific histories that develop as a consequence of this interplay. By reducing the scale of the studies to a specific locale, phenomena such as religious change, conversion practice, individual transformation and the transmission of texts, authority, and charisma, can be reappraised. The contributors to this volume explore questions such as: How do the particular circumstances of time and place shape religious experience? What is specific to a location that influences the nature of religious practice there? What religious power is embodied in a place? How are narratives created around a location? What is characteristic of the religious world in a particular place? In particular, and in different ways, they ask how and why individual texts or sets of texts are transmitted in a particular place at a particular time, how such specific circumstances influence the transmission of authority within a group (or help to disperse that authority), and how authority and charisma are related to specific locations.

“Religious Experience in Contemporary Taiwan and China helps social scientists and all religion scholars to rediscover the importance of religious experiences for multiple world religions. Combining a diverse array of survey items with thousands of candid narratives conducted in Taiwan, the authors provide a depth and breadth that can’t be matched by previous work. The nationally representative surveys for Taiwan and China offer a broad overview of how religion is experienced in the culture, how these experiences vary for each of the many religious (and even non-religious) groups, and how they vary between China and Taiwan.” From the Preface by Roger Finke

Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies explores the interaction between religion and nationalism in the Chinese societies of mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. On the one hand, state policies toward religions in these societies are deciphered and their implications for religious freedom and regional stability are evaluated. On the other hand, Chinese Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam and folk religions are respectively analyzed in terms of their theological, organizational and political responses to the nationalist modernity projects of these states. What is new in this book on Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies is that the Chinese state has strengthened its control over religion to an unprecedented level. In particular, the Chinese state has almost completed its construction of a state religion called Chinese Patriotism. But at the same time, what is also new is the emergence of democratic civil religions in these Chinese societies.

Table of contents

More than 700 established Chinese folk religious temples on the island of Taiwan today give ample evidence of the fact that they are not strictly just Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucian, but rather a combination of these three religions plus other elements of a magico-religious nature, thus in practice blurring the line between the "sacred" and the "profane." In her present study, the author ventures into the field of Chinese folk religion with a wider anthropological, historical, and sociological perspective, presenting its philosophical and religious content, domestic religious practices, the symbolism of gods and goddesses, and other related aspects. Eleanor B. Morris Wu's study provides a starting-point for those interested in these fascinating and colourful facets of Chinese religions as they are lived and practiced in Taiwan today. Contents: Introduction - Historical Parameters of Modern Taiwan in an Anthropological Context Early History and Anthropology of Taiwan to the Succession to the Japanese From the Succession of Taiwan to the Japanese to the Retrocession to the Chinese Nationalists From China to Taiwan. Agricultural, State, and Industrial Involution in a Lineage Context The Philosophical and Religious Content of Chinese Religion The Historical Background of Three Taiwanese Folk Temples The Symbolic Structure of Three Taiwanese Chinese Folk Temples Chinese Roots of Taiwanese Sectarianism An Overview of the Varieties of Religious Practices in Taipei Bibliography

Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China, co-edited by Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein and Christian Meyer, investigates the transformation of China’s religious landscape under the impact of global influences since 1800. The interdisciplinary case studies analyze the ways in which processes of globalization are interlinked with localizing tendencies, thereby forging transnational relationships between individuals, the state and religious as well as non-religious groups at the same time that the global concept ‘religion’ embeds itself in the emerging Chinese ‘religious field’ and within the new academic disciplines of Religious Studies and Theology. The contributions unravel the intellectual, social, political and economic forces that shaped and were themselves shaped by the emergence of what has remained a highly contested category. The contributors are: Hildegard Diemberger, Vincent Goossaert, Esther-Maria Guggenmos, Thomas Jansen, Thoralf Klein, Dirk Kuhlmann, LAI Pan-chiu, Joseph Tse-Hei Lee, Christian Meyer, Lauren Pfister, Chloë Starr, Xiaobing Wang-Riese, and Robert P. Weller.