Richard Madsen

The Public Sphere, Civil Society and Moral Community A Research Agenda for Contemporary China Studies

&dquo;In its deepest sense, the end of Communism has brought a major era in human history to an end. It has brought an end not just to the 19th and 20th centuries, but to the modem age as a whole&dquo; (Havel, 1992: E15). These words of Vaclav Havel give voice to a widespread mood among intellectuals around the world, a feeling that we are in the midst of a world historical transition so fundamental that it renders

The Archipelago of Faith: Religious Individualism and Faith Community in America Today1

Through an interpretation of ethnographies of four very different religious communities, the author argues that there is a deep cultural commonality underlying the diversity of religious expression among the American middle classes. This commonality can be described in terms of religious individualism. But unlike previous accounts of religious individualism, this article emphasizes the ways in which it combines both “seeking” and “dwelling” and leads to both “progressive” and “orthodox” forms of religious expression.

Catholic Revival During the Reform Era

This article focuses on three distinctive features of the revival of Catholicism in China: its relatively slow rate of increase, compared with other forms of Chinese religiosity; its relatively intense internal and external conflicts; and its peculiar mix of antagonism and co-operation with the government. These are explained in terms of three interpenetrating layers of the Chinese Catholic community: its priestly, sacramental religious vision, its social embodiment in rural society, and the legacy of political conflict between the Vatican and the PRC government. Though intimately interconnected, these layers of the Catholic Church have each developed at different paces and in somewhat different directions. The effects of this are seen most clearly in the problems faced by Chinese priests.

From socialist ideology to cultural heritage: the changing basis oflegitimacy in the People's Republic of China

There has been a shift over the past generation in the moral basis for legitimacy of the Chinese state. The socialist state was legitimated by a sinified version of Marxism-Leninism, watered with the blood of revolutionary martyrs who fought on behalf of the Communist Party to defend the nation from external aggressors. However, at many levels of society, the Marxist legitimation is dead. Instead of claiming to represent the values of Communist revolutionary struggle in the twentieth century, the state is now presenting itself as the carrier and the defender of 5000 years of national cultural heritage. This undoubtedly arises partly from changes in moral attitude arising from the grass roots and partly from government initiatives descending from the top down. There is wide variation across China in the intermingling between the bottom-up and top-down moral impulses, and this is partially connected with different moral ecologies constituted by configurations of state and local political and economic institutions throughout China. In this paper, based on case studies from fieldwork carried out in several different locations in 2009, the author draws a broad map of these variations.

Individualism and the Tensions in American Culture@@@Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life

DOCUMENT RESUME

Secular Belief, Religious Belonging in China

A recent Gallup poll found that almost half of China’s people are atheists. However, surveys conducted by Fenggang Yang and others show that as much as 85 percent of the population periodically engages in religious practices. How can we reconcile reports of widespread atheism with those of widespread religious practice?An answer is to be found in the social nature of Chinese religion—it is more about belonging than belief. Rituals and sacred myths meaningfully anchor persons to families and communities. The collapse of the commune and danwei systems has made the search for non-state-controlled community forms more pressing than ever. These alternative forms are typically established through myth and ritual. This is true as much for Christian forms of community as for traditional Chinese folk forms. Belonging in China is religious even though, as a result of sixty years of Communist indoctrination, belief is secular. The contradiction between secular belief and religious belonging creates tensions, and in the long run it is unclear how they will be resolved.

The Third Globalization of Catholicism in Greater China

The fundamental aspects of Catholic theology and ecclesiastical structure may be the same throughout “Greater China,” but the forms of life engendered by the church have differed dramatically in different sociopolitical contexts. For illustration, we compare the development of Catholicism in the “Third Globalization of Catholicism” in the second half of the twentieth century in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. All of the areas of the Chinese world discussed here share the same basic Chinese traditional culture, but differences in their political, social and economic circumstances lead the same Catholic theology to be heard, practiced, and institutionalized in different ways. Global Catholicism is localized differently in the different localities of the Chinese world.

Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s FaithInventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith, by WuthnowRobert. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 247 pp.

university structure gave it opportunities to fund research endeavors pursued by intellectuals and social thinkers that as yet had no stable academic homes. Moreover, the Board, whose initial members were personally chosen by Lorén, had wide latitude when it came to dispersing the funds. Although the money lasted only about 15 years, Wisselgren argues that the Foundation’s influence nonetheless reached far into the future. By the end of its run, not only had several of the people supported by the Foundation secured leading university posts in newly established social science fields, but the social scientific gaze that the Foundation and its board members actively fostered had also come to penetrate both academic and political life. Wisselgren does not claim that the development of the social sciences in Sweden was significantly different from that of other nations, and he spends some time comparing the Lorén Foundation with some of its larger and more well-known siblings in other nations, especially the Fabian Society in England and the Verein für Socialpolitik (now the German Economic Association) in Germany. He does claim, however, that the particular context in Sweden, where ‘‘the institutional distance between the government, the academic world and the civic sphere was shorter’’ than elsewhere, produced a somewhat unique development of the social sciences (p. 225). While born in the social reform movements of the late nineteenth century, the scientific pursuit of the social question and subsequent institutionalization of the social sciences also meant that the radical potential of challenges to the status quo that the social question prompted was domesticated and held in check by the social scientific gaze. This is what August Strindberg had in mind when in a scathing satire, Svarta Fanor (Black Banners), he painted a portrait of a group of former middle-class ‘‘rebels and dissidents,’’ several of whom were modeled on people associated with the Lorén Foundation, who ended up trading their ideals ‘‘for influential positions of power’’ in the new ruling class (p. 226). As a study in the sociology of knowledge, this is an exemplary book. It is deeply theoretical, richly empirical, and engagingly written. But the book’s importance does not end there. In turning the social scientific gaze back onto its originators and practitioners, Wisselgren also encourages us, even if he does not do so himself, to reckon with our own scholarly endeavors and ambitions and examine how the gaze we use to understand the social world is directed by and entangled in who we are and where we come from.

29.95 cloth. ISBN: 9780190258900.

Christianity, especially evangelical Protestant Christianity, has undergone a remarkably rapid growth in the last generation in China. Although numbers are in dispute, it seems likely that there are at least fifty million Protestant Christians in China today, remarkable because prior to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, there were less than one million. Because of the political difficulties of studying this burgeoning population, we have had almost no in-depth ethnographic studies of Chinese Christian communities. Now in Nanlai Cao’s book we have an excellent one. There are many of different kinds of Christians in China today, flourishing in different social strata and geographical regions and enjoying different degrees of acceptance by the Chinese state. A common stereotype in the West is that the most dynamically growing segment of the Christian population is poor, rural, female, and Pentecostal. This may have been true at one phase of Christian development in the past thirty years, but Cao’s ethnography shows that it is not true today. The ‘China’s Jerusalem’ that he studies is Wenzhou, where the leaders of an extremely rapidly growing Christian community are wealthy, urban, and male*the newly rich entrepreneurs who have made Wenzhou into the most dynamic commercial economy in China. They prefer a ‘rational’ form of Christianity, leaving the ‘emotional’ forms to the women in their congregations. Their churches are not registered with the officially sanctioned Three Self Protestant Movement, but they have usually gained the tolerance of local officials. Wenzhou is a special place, protected by its geography from an excessive reach of the state for most of the history of the People’s Republic of China. Combined with the global connections of itinerant Wenzhou people, this relative insulation from the state has allowed Wenzhou to be an extraordinary incubator of commercial enterprise. But why are so many of its entrepreneurs attracted to Christianity? According to Cao, they see their faith as ‘modern, progressive, and productive’ (p. 33). Their model of modernity is Western society, which they think has gained its ascendency because of its ‘Protestant ethic.’ To be truly modern therefore is to take on Christianity. And because of their Christian zeal, they can be even more modern

Constructing China's Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou

Part I. Christianity and the Dynamics of Qing Society: 1. Catholics and society in eighteenth-century Sichuan Robert E. Entenmann 2. Catholic converts in Jiangxi province: conflict and accommodation, 1860-1900 Alan Richard Sweeten 3. Rural religion and village organization in North China: the Catholic challenge in the late nineteenth century Charles A. Litzinger 4. Twilight of the Gods in the Chinese countryside: Christians, Confucians and the modernizing state, 1861-1911 Roger R. Thompson 5. Christian missionary as Confucian intellectual: Gilbert Reid (1857-1927) and the Reform Movement in the late qing Tsou Mingeth 6. The politics of evangelism at the end of the Qing: Nanchang, 1906 Ernest P. Young Part II. Christianity and Ethnicity: 7. From Barbarians to sinners: collective conversion among plains aborigines in Qing Taiwan, 1859-1895 John R. Shepherd 8. Christianity and the Hua Miao: writing and power Norma Diamond 9. Christianity and Hakka identity Nicole Constable Part III. Christianity and Chinese Women: 10. Christian virgins in eighteenth-century Sichuan Robert E. Entenmann 11. Chinese women and Protestant Christianity at the turn of the twentieth-century Kwok Pui-Lan 12. Cradle of female talent: the McTyeire home and school for girls, 1892-1937 Heidi A. Ross 13. An oasis in a heathen land: St. Hildas school for girls, Wuchang, 1928-1936 Judith Liu and Donald P. Kelly 14. Christianity, feminism, and communism: the life and times of Deng Yuzhi Emily Honig Part IV. The Rise of an Indigenous Chinese Christianity: 15. Karl Gutzlaffs approach to indigenization: the Chinese union Jessie G. Lutz and R. Ray Lutz 16. Contextualizing Protestant publishing in China: the Wenshe, 1924-1928 Peter Chen-Main Wang 17. The growth of independent Christianity in China, 1900-1937 Daniel H. Bays 18. Toward independence: Christianity in China under the Japanese occupation, 1937-1945 Timothy Brook 19. Y. T. Wu: a Christian leader under communism Gao Wangzhi 20. Holy spirit Taiwan: Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity in the republic of China Murray A. Rubinstein Appendices Index.