Abstract
As human beings we create boundaries all the time. We create them cognitively when we map the world into categories: beauty or ugliness, legality or corruption, anthropology or sociology. We create them socially as well through the division of labor, ethnic labels, religious choices, and an infinity of other distinctions. As a result, the problem of pluralism—how we deal with the many differences that separate us—affects all societies.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
This is an extremely abbreviated summary of a book that Adam Seligman and I have written on the issue: Adam B. Seligman and Robert P. Weller, Rethinking Pluralism: Ritual, Experience, and Ambiguity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966).
See, for example, the essays in Pamela Kyle Crossley, Helen F. Siu, and Donald S. Sutton, Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity, and Frontier in Early Modern China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006).
Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006).
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
Ronald Grigor Suny, “The Empire Strikes Out: Imperial Russia, ‘National’ Identity, and Theories of Empire,” in Ronald Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 23–66;
Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge & the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).
See, for instance, Gu Jiegang’s arguments with the KMT ideologue Dai Jitao, in Tze-Ki Hon, “Ethnic and Cultural Pluralism: Gu Jiegang’s Vision of a New China in His Studies of Ancient History,” Modern China 22, no. 3 (July 1, 1996): 315–339.
Thomas Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010).
Xiaojun Yan, “Regime Inclusion and the Resilience of Authoritarianism: The Local People’s Political Consultative Congress in Post-Mao Chinese Politics,” China Journal 66 (July 2011): 53–75.
Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010);
Prasenjit Duara, “Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaigns against Popular Religion in Early 20th-Century China,” Journal of Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (1991): 67–83. See also
Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
See, for example, the work of Steve A. Smith, “Talking Toads and Chinless Ghosts: The Politics of ‘Superstitious’ Rumors in the People’s Republic of China, 1961–1965,” American Historical Review 111, no. 2 (2006): 405–427. Current field research by Xiaoxuan Wang is showing similar religious maintenance in southern Zhejiang in the 1950s.
The first example is from a dissertation in progress by Wu Hsin-chao at Harvard, and the second from Chen-Yang Kao, “The Cultural Revolution and the Emergence of Pentecostal-style Protestantism in China,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 24 (May 2009): 171–188.
Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Stalinist Central Asia, 1st ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 67.
For a further development of this approach, see Robert P. Weller, “Responsive Authoritarianism and Blind-Eye Governance in China,” in Dorothy J. Solinger and Nina Bandelj (eds.), Socialism Challenged, Socialism Vanquished: China and Eastern Europe, 1989–2009 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 83–99.
We do not yet have a lot of work on these groups, but see Gareth Fisher, “Morality Books and the Regrowth of Lay Buddhism in China,” in Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation, ed. Adam Yuet Chau (London: Routledge, 2011) and
Alison Denton Jones, “A Modern Religion? The State, the People, and the Remaking of Buddhism in Urban China Today” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2010).
Yanfei Sun, “Religious Dynamics in a Fragmented Authoritarian State: Explaining the Differentiated Growth of the Chinese Buddhist Establishment and the Newly Rising Jingkong Buddhist Force,” manuscript (n.p., 2011).
Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Fictions of Privacy: House Chapels and the Spatial Accommodation of Religious Dissent in Early Modern Europe,” American Historical Review 107, no. 4 (2002): 1031–1064.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Perry Schmidt-Leukel and Joachim Gentz
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Weller, R.P. (2013). Chinese Communist Thought and Practice on Religious Diversity. In: Schmidt-Leukel, P., Gentz, J. (eds) Religious Diversity in Chinese Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318503_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318503_13
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46208-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31850-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Religion & Philosophy CollectionPhilosophy and Religion (R0)