Abstract
The recent history of China demonstrates conclusively that, while secularization and modernity have not developed the normative relationship that students of nineteenth-century European societies predicted they would have, religious matters have been central to acts of political and cultural framing in self-consciously modernizing nation states. The transition to constitutional government, begun in the late nineteenth century, brought with it guarantees of religious freedom, but that very framework was predicated on a redefinition of religion itself that undermined the eclecticism of Chinese religious practice and elevated state interests. Thus, views of religion originating in Europe and America have combined with legal structures of similar origins to challenge free exercise and pluralism in China, more often than support it.
Portions of this material were adapted with permission of the Harvard University Asia Center from Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009), © The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2009. My gratitude to the conference participants and the editors of this volume for leading me to think anew about the matters in this essay.
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Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) and The Clash of Empires: the Invention of China in Modern World Making (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); the most detailed studies to date of the formulation of the modern category of religion as a result of treaty negotiation in an East Asian country are for Japan:
Trent Maxey, “The Crisis of ‘Conversion’ and the Search for National Doctrine in Early Meiji Japan,” in Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity, ed. Dennis Washburn and Kevin Reinhart (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 3–26;
Jason Ananda Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
Talal Asad, “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,” in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, id. (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 40–41.
As Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 20 comments, “The modern discourse on religion and religions was from the very beginning... clearly a discourse of othering,” as well as a secularist enterprise.
Thomas David Dubois, “Hegemony, Imperialism, and the Construction of Religion,” History and Theory 44 (December 2005): 113–31 offers several examples of the ritual component of colonial law (e.g., of the British in Burma).
Trent Maxey, “The Crisis of ‘Conversion’ and the Search for National Doctrine in Early Meiji Japan,” in Converting Cultures: Religion, Ideology, and Transformations of Modernity, ed. Dennis Washburn and Kevin Reinhart (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 3–26; Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan, Chapter 3; Suzuki Shūji, Nihon Kango to Chūgoku: kanji bunkaken no kindaika [China and the Chinese Language in Japan: Modernization in the Cultural Sphere of Chinese Characters] (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1981), 129;
James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 41;
Helen Hardacre, Shintō and the State, 1868–1988 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 63.
Anthony C. Yu, State and Religion in China: Historical and Textual Perspectives (Chicago: Open Court, 2005), 14–15.
Ya-pei Kuo, “Before the Term: Christianity and the Discourse of “Religion” in late Nineteenth-Century China,” Comparativ——Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung 20, no. 4 (2010): 98–113; “‘Christian Civilization’ and the Confucian Church: The Origin of Secularist Politics in Modern China,” Past & Present 218, no. 1 (2013): 235–264. Kang spoke of jiao as being in mutually destructive competition as early as 1891.
Vincent Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?” Journal of Asian Studies 65 (May 2006): 307–335;
Eric Reinders, Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004);
Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 318–319.
Mixin also had origins in classical usage. Sakai Tadao “Chūgoku shijō no dōkyō to meishin hihan” [Daoism and the Criticism of Superstition in Chinese History], in Chūgoku no shūkyō, shisō to kagaku [Religion, Thought, and Science in China: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Ryūkai Makio on his Seventieth Birthday] (Tokyo: Kokusho kankō kai, 1984), 157–172, esp. 159 points out that from at least the Later Han dynasty on, critics of Daoist mysticism had been complaining that such practices “misled” or “bedazzled” people (migan). A precursor to mixin can be found in the Buddhist phrase mi er xin zhi, “to be deluded and thus believe it,” but the true compound did not appear until 1889, however, when the Japanese term meishin was used to mean “believe mistakenly.” In 1901 the poet Doi Bansui applied the term as a noun to describe ideas that contravened modern science and rationalism (Nihon kokugo dai jiten, 2nd ed., 2000, s.v. meishin). Liang Qichao used the term the following year in “Baojiao fei suo yi zun Kong lun” [How “protecting the faith” is not the way to honor Confucius], 1902, in Liang Qichao xuanji [selected works of Liang Qichao], ed. Li Huaxing and Wu Jiaxun (Shanghai: Renmin, 1984), 304–14, esp. 305).
Respectively, Liang Qichao, “Baojiao”; and idem, “Lun zongjiao jia yu zhexue jia zhi changduan deshi” [On the strengths and shortcomings of religious thinkers and philosophers], in Yinbing shi wenji [Collected works from the Yinbing Studio] (Taipei: Zhonghua shuju, 1960), 28, 52–56. For a more thorough analysis, see Marianne Bastid-Brugière, “Liang Qichao yu zongjiao wenti” [Liang Qichao and the problem of religion], Tōhō gakuhō 70 (1998): 162–73.
S. A. Smith, “Introduction: The Religion of Fools? Superstition Past and Present,” Past and Present 199 (2008): 7–55, 8.
Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 51.
Hsi-yuan Chen, “‘Zongjiao’: yige Zhongguo jindai wenhuashi shang de guanjian ci” [Zongjiao: a keyword in modern Chinese cultural history], Xin shixue 13, no. 4 (2002): 37–66.
Hsi-yuan Chen, “Confucianism Encounters Religion: The Formation of Religious Discourse and the Confucian Movement in Modern China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1999); idem, “Zongjiao”; Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism and the Columbian Exposition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 71–72.
Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); related, Christian Meyer demonstrates the critical importance of Chinese Christian intellectuals in the making of the field of religious studies in the early twentieth century (“‘Religion’ and ‘Superstition’ in Introductory Works to Religious Studies in Early Republican China,” Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 33 (2009): 103–128.)
Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes; Shuk-wah Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900—1937 (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2011);
Liu Xun, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian monographs; Harvard University Asia Center, 2009).
David Ownby, “A History for Falun Gong: Popular Religion and the Chinese State Since the Ming Dynasty,” Nova Religio 6, no. 2 (2003): 223–43;
David A.Palmer, “Heretical Doctrines, Reactionary Secret Societies, Evil Cults: Labeling Heterodoxy in 20th-Century China,” in Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation, ed. Mayfair Mei-hui Yang (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 113–134.
Cen Dezhang and Zhang Rongxi, eds., Zhonghua minguo xianfa shiliao [Historical documents on the constitutions of the Chinese Republic] (1934. Reprinted—Taipei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1981);
Yin Xiaohu, Jindai Zhongguo xianzheng shi [The history of constitutionalism in modern China] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, 1997).
Qu Haiyuan (Chiu Hei-yuan), “Zongjiao xinyang ziyou de xianfa jichu” (The constitutional basis for freedom of religion), in Taiwan Zongjiao bianqian de shehui zhengzhi fenxi [A socio-political analysis of religious transformation in Taiwan], id. (Taipei: Guiguan tushu gongsi, 1997), 409–438, 421–423;
Zha Shijie, “Minchu de zheng jiao guanxi: jian lun jindai Zhongguo zheng jiao guanxi san moshi” (Church and state in the early Republican period, 1911–19, and three models of the relationship between church and state in China), in Zhongguo jindai zheng jiao guanxi guoji xueshu yantao hui lunwen ji [Proceedings of the First International Symposium on Church and State in China: Past and Present], ed. Li Jifang (Taipei: Tamkang University, 1987), 244–265; Cen Dezhang and Zhang Rongxi, Zhonghua minguo xianfa shiliao, 17: 2; Yin Xiaohu, Jindai Zhongguo xianzheng shi, appendix; Ch’ien Tuan-sheng. The Government and Politics of China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 448. The 1931 congressional sessions that produced the Draft Constitution in fact saw one last nationwide effort from the opponents of religion as “a tool of imperialism” to eliminate the religious freedom clause entirely.
Lifa yuan, Zhonghua minguo xianfa caoan xuanchuan weiyuanhui, ed., Zhonghua minguo xianfa caoan shuoming shu [Companion to the Draft Constitution of the Republic of China] (1940. Reprinted—Taipei: Chengwen, 1981), 16. The standard college textbook on constitutionalism used in Taiwan, where the 1946 Constitution is still in force, observes that in the ROC, legal exceptions to the freedom of religion have extended not only to criminal behavior but to “immoral” (bu daode) conduct as well (Li Jidong, Zhonghua minguo xianfa zhutiao shiyi [Clause-by-clause interpretation of the Constitution of the Republic of China] (2nd rev. ed., Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1985), 199.
Karl Reichelt, The Transformed Abbot, trans. G. M. Reichelt and A. P. Rose (London: Lutterworth Press, 1954), 45; Gao Zhennong. “Shanghai fojiao gaikuang” [Buddhism in Shanghai], in Shanghai de zongjiao (Shanghai’s religion), ed. Shi Hongxi, (Shanghai wenshi ziliao xuanji, no. 81. Shanghai: Shanghai shi zheng xie wenshi ziliao bianji bu, 1996.5), 1–14;
Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 41. On
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© 2013 Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Joachim Gentz
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Nedostup, R. (2013). The Transformation of the Concept of Religion in Chinese Modernity. In: Schmidt-Leukel, P., Gentz, J. (eds) Religious Diversity in Chinese Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318503_12
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