Religious Question in Modern China

Recent events - from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe - demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The "Religious Question in Modern China" highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity from 1898 to the present. Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at different religions in different contexts, but by writing a unified story of how religion has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, modern Chinese society. From Chinese medicine and the martial arts to communal temple cults and revivalist redemptive societies, the authors demonstrate that from the nineteenth century onward, as the Chinese state shifted, the religious landscape consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms.The "Religious Question in Modern China" integrates historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives in a comprehensive overview of China's religious history that is certain to become an indispensable reference for specialists and students alike.

"The Religious Question is an excellent work, and it makes an ideal textbook for both undergraduate and postgraduate classes on Chinese religion."-- "Etudes chinoises", "[Goossaert and Palmer's] book takes into account the huge wealth of insights into Chinese religion accumulated by the new research, and gives a very clearly written account of a truly remarkable event: the destruction of one of the world's richest religious traditions and its replacement by a congress of competing traditions, faiths, and beliefs."-- "New York Times Book Review", "A brilliant synthesis and update of the research undertaken by Chinese and Western scholars over the past two decades on the relationship between the political and the religious spheres in China since the Hundred Day Reform. . . . This book represents a masterful introduction to the complexity of Chinese religiosity, but it will also constitute a source of inspiration for many research agenda."-- "China Perspectives", "Indispensible for anyone seeking to understand the religious landscape and state-religion interactions in modern and contemporary China."-- "Choice", "The sheer scope of [the authors'] research and their ability to channel formidably diverse material into a cogent narrative make for a masterly summation of the changes in China's religious landscape over the past century."-- "Times Literary Supplement"

Vincent Goossaert is deputy director of the Groupe Societes, Religions, Laicites at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris. He is the author of The Taoists of Peking, 1800-1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics, among other books. David A. Palmer is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China, among other books.