HKU Bulletin August 2010 (Vol. 11 No. 3)

34 The University of Hong Kong Bulletin 35 August 2010 “China is a laboratory for religion” is not a statement you would imagine applying to a country where religion was banned under Mao Tse-tung and still operates on shaky legal ground. But Dr David Palmer, Assistant Professor of Sociology, who has a new book on religion in China coming out, contends that a remarkable transformation has taken place there over the past 30 years. Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, local religions, new religions and re-invented ones are all operating and thriving in China today, in some cases with official blessing. “In China you now have every kind of religion you can imagine and all this growth and effervescence is occurring where, on the outside, it appears religion is highly controlled and restricted. That’s not necessarily the case, and of course it’s not necessarily not the case,” he says. “Partly because of these limits, groups have been forced to find creative ways to do things.” The qigong movement, for example, started out as a form of exercise then took on religious overtones as seen in the forceful example of the Falun Gong. Other groups have played down their religious status to secure official blessing. Communal folk religions, for example, increasingly are being revived and securing official designation and protection as ‘intangible cultural heritage’ from the Chinese government. “Very often what gets designated are the ritual traditions and even the local gods. It’s a kind of canonization of the gods as intangible heritage,” Dr Palmer says. Behind this revival of religion is a change in the role of religion in Chinese society. Traditionally it provided social cohesion through such things as ritual and festivals. It straddled and connected the spiritual, moral and material in ways that were not familiar in the West. But that function began to change about 120 years ago, when China came under attack from the West. “People were trying to figure out how Western countries had become so strong and they came up with two responses. One Macau: Channeling the god Jigong through spirit- writing, to commemorate his official canonization as ‘Intangible Cultural Heritage’ by the PRC Ministry of Culture. was that it was because of their Christian religion, which has institutions, churches that are distinct from other aspects of society, and which makes quite a strong distinction between the religious and the secular. The other was secularism, that the reason why the West was strong was because it had done away with superstition and adopted science.” “These are two very opposite presentations of the West but the one thing they have in common is they posit this distinction between the religious and the secular,” he says. Attempts were made to apply these approaches within China. Some tried to re-invent Confucianism as a church, some to secularize it. Some created new religions and others, like Mao, sought to ban religion. “Historically the three major religious traditions of Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism were weak institutionally and the modern period further weakened them, but it did not destroy the religiosity of the people. “Now it’s a wide open field, everything is possible in China. Whereas in North America you have the dominance of the Christian churches, and in post-communist Russia the Russian Orthodox church, in China there’s no dominant religion and so anything goes. The only dominant thing is the state, but even the state is very confused about how to deal with religion. There are so many bureaucracies and agencies dealing with it. Consciously or not, it’s a laboratory for religion.” The revival of religion has been uneven, though. In some places local religious traditions are thriving because they were handed down orally during the Mao era; in other places they have disappeared altogether. Most interestingly, the function of religion is changing. “The global trend is a privatization of religion, where religion is no longer the centre of social organization, and in that sense China is secularized. Both through deliberate policy and general social changes, religion has moved into the private sphere. People living in the cities, for example, are no longer attached to a clan or lineage or community, and they seek to find their private self, who they are as an individual. That question of ‘who am I’ didn’t really arise in traditional life where people’s roles were defined for them from the moment they were born,” Dr Palmer says. “As China has more prosperity, a lot of people are also asking, what’s the point of all this? They are looking for a moral foundation for life and for society that has been lost. The critical discourse on superstition and religion has faded and you have educated, urbanized people looking into more modern forms of religion.” That impulse for meaning may be finding an additional outlet. Dr Palmer has started investigating volunteerism, which is thriving in China in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the Olympic Games. The term ‘doing good deeds’, which is grounded in traditional Chinese religious culture, is now finding expression in modern forms of social service. The atheist Communist Youth League is actively promoting voluntarism – although when Dr Palmer recently went to interview volunteers providing social services at a temporary settlement for earthquake refugees in Sichuan, he found that all of the volunteer groups active in the camp were Christian and Buddhist. Dr Palmer is co-author of The Religious Question in Modern China, which will be published in early 2011. He is also co-editor of a forthcoming textbook on Chinese religion and a volume on Daoism. Xi’an: Worshippers at the Baxian Daoist temple Dr David Palmer THE EFFERVESCENT STATE OF religion in china Religion in almost every form imaginable is blossoming in China as practitioners find ingenious ways around restrictions, according to HKU anthropologist Dr David Palmer. Books