Religion and Social Change in Reform-Era China

Abstract

Religion has indeed become big business, and sometimes the stakes are very high, with millions of Chinese yuan each year donated to a particular temple or earned through admission charges and other fees, not counting the money spent by visitors on lodging, food and souvenirs in the local areas. The party-state responded to the enthusiasm for religious revival during the reform era with much more relaxed religious policies, accepting as an irrefutable fact that religion has a wide mass basis and is a social reality better to be dealt with than to ignore or forcibly suppress. The fortunes of various religious groups waxed and waned in China’s long history, but taken together they constituted a significant social and political force in the late imperial era. The revival in the reform era of religious institutions and practices re-created the religious field, filling it with an increasingly diverse variety of social actors, institutions, interactions, communities, networks, ideas, desires, material culture and practices.