This book depicts the revival of Protestant Christianity among diverse groups of people in the commercially prosperous coastal city of Wenzhou, and shows how resurgent and innovated Christian beliefs and practices in the reform era reveal emerging patterns of power formation, place making and morality building in the context of a market-oriented, modernizing China..
An anthropological theorization of the unity and diversity of Christianity, this book focuses on Christian communities in Nanping, a small city in China. It applies methodological insights from Actor-Network Theory to investigate how the Christian God is made part of local social networks. The study examines how Christians interact with and re-define material objects, such as buildings, pews, offerings, and blood, in order to identify the kind of networks and non-human actors that they collectively design. By comparing local Christian traditions with other practices informing the Nanping religious landscape, the study points out potential cohesion via the centralizing presence of the Christian God, the governing nature of the pastoral clergy, and the semi-transcendent being of the Church.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Xiamen’s pursuit of World Heritage Site designation from UNESCO stimulated considerable interest in the city’s Christian past. History enthusiasts, both Christian and non-Christian, devoted themselves to reinterpreting the legacy of missionaries and challenged official narratives of Christianity’s troubled associations with Western imperialism. In this book, Jifeng Liu documents the tension that has inevitably emerged between the established official history and these popular efforts. This volume elucidates the ways in which Christianity has become an integral part of Xiamen, a Chinese city profoundly influenced by Western missionaries. Drawing on extensive interviews, locally produced histories, and observations of historical celebrations, Liu provides an intimate portrait of the people who navigate ideological issues to reconstruct a Christian past, reproduce religious histories, and redefine local power structures in the shadow of the state. Liu makes a compelling argument that a Christian past is being constructed that combines official frameworks, unofficial practices, and nostalgia into social memory, a realm of dynamic negotiation that is neither dominated by the authoritarian state nor characterized by popular resistance. In this way, Negotiating the Christian Past in China illustrates the complexities of memory and missions in shaping the city’s cultural landscape, church-state dynamics, and global aspirations. This groundbreaking study assumes a perspective of globalization and localization, in both the past and the present, to better understand Chinese Christianity in a local, national, and global context. It will be welcomed by scholars of religious studies and world Christianity, and by those interested in the church-state relationship in China.
The Jewish people and world Jewish leadership are facing critical dilemmas, opportunities and challenges. These create a need for systematic thinking to examine the range of decisions that may affect the standing of world Jewry in the decades to come. The Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI) was established as an independent think tank whose mission is to contribute to the continuity of the Jewish people and Judaism, and their thriving future. China and the Jewish People' is the first document in a series of strategy papers dedicated to improving the standing of the Jewish people in emerging superpowers without biblical tradition.China and Jewish People: Old Civilizations in a New Era by Dr. Shalom Salomon Wald, is a crucial book that addresses the Jewish people and their issues with China.
This pathbreaking volume will force a reassessment of many common assumptions about the relationship between Christianity and modern China. The overall thrust of the twenty essays is that despite the conflicts and tension that often have characterized relations between Christianity and China, in fact Christianity has been, for the past two centuries or more, putting down roots within Chinese society, and it is still in the process of doing so. Thus Christianity is here interpreted not just as a Western religion that imposed itself on China, but one that was becoming a Chinese religion, as Buddhism did centuries ago. Eschewing the usual focus on foreign missionaries, as is customary, this research effort is China-centered, drawing on Chinese sources, including government and organizational documents, private papers, and interviews. The essays are organized into four major sections: Christianitys role in Qing society, including local conflicts (6 essays); ethnicity (3 essays); women (5 essays); and indigenization of the Christian effort (6 essays). The editor has provided sectional introductions to highlight the major themes in each section, as well as a general Introduction.
This volume explores Chinese religions on a global stage so as to challenge the traditional dichotomy of the western global and the Chinese local, and to add a new perspective for understanding religious modernity globally. Contributors from four different continents aim at applying a social scientific approach to systematically researching the globalization of Chinese religions.
This major new study examines the history of Chinese theologies as they have navigated dynastic change, anti-imperialism, and the heights of Maoist propaganda In this groundbreaking and authoritative study, Chloë Starr explores key writings of Chinese Christian intellectuals, from philosophical dialogues of the late imperial era to sermons and micro blogs of theological educators and pastors in the twenty-first century. Through a series of close textual readings, she sheds new light on the fraught issues of Chinese Christian identity and the evolving question of how Christianity should relate to Chinese society.
Over the last thirty years, social entrepreneurship has boomed in the People’s Republic of China. Today there are hundreds of thousands of legally registered NGOs, and millions more unregistered, working in the areas of the environment, education, women’s issues, disability services, community development, LGBTQ rights, and healthcare. The rise of these Chinese NGOs and their implications for civil society merits the focus of significant scholarly attention. This book draws upon the personal stories of social entrepreneurs in China, as well as their supporters and beneficiaries, in order to examine what the rapid growth of social entrepreneurship reveals about China's complex and dynamic society in the 21st century. It discusses the historical, cultural, and political circumstances that allowed and inspired people to become social entrepreneurs and create new forms of democratic engagement. Examining what social entrepreneurship with Chinese characteristics looks like, the book explores how it is changing the relationship between Chinese citizens and the state, and goes on to explain the subsequent effect on Chinese society. Highlighting the importance of citizen activism in the PRC from an interdisciplinary perspective, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Chinese Politics, Civil Society and Sociology.
Christianity is one of the fastest growing religions in China. Despite its long history in China and its significant indigenization or intertwinement with Chinese society and culture, Christianity continues to generate suspicion among political elites and intense debates among broader communities within China. This unique book applies socio-cultural methods in the study of contemporary Christianity. Through a wide range of empirical analyses of the complex and highly diverse experience of Christianity in contemporary China, it examines the fraught processes by which various forms and practices of Christianity interact with the Chinese social, political and cultural spheres. Contributions by top scholars in the field are structured in the following sections: Enchantment, Nation and History, Civil Society, and Negotiating Boundaries. This book offers a major contribution to the field and provides a timely, wide-ranging assessment of Christianity in Contemporary China.
This much-needed volume explains who ethnic minorities are and how well do they do in China. In addition to offering general information about ethnic minority groups in China, it discusses some important issues around ethnicity, including ethnic inequality, minority rights, and multiculturalism. Drawing on insights and perspectives from scholars in different continents the contributions provide critical reflections on where the field has been and where it is going, offering readers possible directions for future research on minority ethnicity in China. The Handbook reviews research and addresses key conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues in the study of ethnicity in China.
