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This paper looks at the Compassion Relief Foundation, a charity organisation originating from Taiwan, and tries to understand how it has managed to provide relief to victims of natural disasters for more than ten years in nineteen provinces, autonomous regions, and special municipalities of the People's Republic of China, despite the vicissitudes of cross-Straits relations and amidst recent bouts of religious persecution. The essay starts with an introduction to Compassion Relief: it presents its history as a charity organization, and then situates its activities in the PRC within the context of tense relations between China and Taiwan, as well as economic reforms in the PRC. The paper then questions three hypotheses advanced to explain the acceptance of Compassion Relief's activities by the Chinese government. It discusses the view that such approval results from political calculations directed at Taiwanese; the argument that it heralds change in the Chinese state's approach towards the social role of religion; and the claim that it signals the emergence of an autonomous civil society free of government interference. The essay expresses reservations about these views and concludes that the activities of Compassion Relief in the PRC rather suggests the existence of a symbiotic relationship between society and state officials at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of proselytism as an active practice of shaping other people's identities. Specifically, it looks at the identity discourse promoted by ethnic Chinese evangelicals and compares it to that of Jehovah's Witnesses. Both Christian churches proselytise among contemporary transnational migrants from the People's Republic of China (PRC) in Europe, each making use of a sophisticated organisation adapted to the transnational practices of these migrants. Yet while evangelicals promote a transnational ethnic identity quite compatible with the secular discourse of the global Chinese migrant, Jehovah's Witnesses promote an anti-secular, non-ethnic cosmopolitanism. As a result, global Chinese evangelical ties more easily become part of global migratory and business networks. The paper is based on fieldwork among Chinese evangelical organisations and Jehovah's Witnesses in Italy, Hungary, Russia, and the United Kingdom, supplemented with interviews in the United States (the headquarters of many Chinese evangelical organisations) and a survey of printed and online resources used in proselytising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hair embroidery was a particular technique practiced by lay Buddhist women to create devotional images. The embroiderers used their own hair as threads and applied them on silk to stitch figures. This paper will analyze the religious connotation of hair embroidery, the ritual process and the techniques for making hair embroidery in the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. By tracing its appearance in both literary texts and actual surviving objects, this essay will ask how and in what circumstances human hair was applied to embroidery? What was the significance of transferring one's own hair onto an icon? How did hair embroidery combine women's bodies (their hair) with a womanly skill (embroidery) to make a unique gendered practice in late imperial China? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This case study analyses religious and technological changes that occurred during the last seventy years of the Ming dynasty (1574-1644) around the Hedong Salt Lake, situated south of Yuncheng City in southern Shanxi province. Based on a close reading of inscriptions found on stone steles at the Temple of the God of the Salt Lake and of different kinds of gazetteers, the article documents the processes and analyses the factors that shaped the expanding pantheon of local salt-production-related deities during this period. I argue that these religious changes need to be understood in the context of a wider sociotechnical system around the Salt Lake, especially the emergence of new salt production methods that were introduced at this time under the increasingly affirmative leadership of local salt merchants, as well as the changing conditions of local labour management. The larger methodological point the article makes is about the necessity to take stone steles themselves in their spatial and material dimensions as evidence of historical processes: this will allow us to see that by means of these steles and their inscriptions the temple became an architectural discursive space that facilitated new forms of social participation and of administrative intervention, while offering simultaneously a nexus between the sphere of human intervention and the relevant 'natural' factors of the salt production at the Salt Lake. Accordingly, the article proposes novel ways to understand the role of religious institutions such as temples in their relation to 'natural' and 'technological' processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a textual history of Chinese author Hong Mai's massive compendium of anomalous events, the "Yijian zhi" (YJZ). It is a collection of what post-Enlightenment Western-trained scholars would call supernatural events, as well as newsworthy accounts and anecdotes, originally featuring 420 juan, or chapters. The collection focuses on contemporary religious ideas, and helps understand much about Song Dynasty's women's social status, Confucian scholars' religious tenets, the ruling elite's understanding of the fall of the Northern Song.

The article presents a commentary of the books "The Structure of Chinese Rural Society: Lineage and Village in the Eastern New Territories," and "Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China," by David Faure. For thirty years, Faure has worked at the deconstruction of an image of an eternal, unchanging China. China, according to that image, was a society dominated by Confucian literati from powerful lineages, the gentry.

This article discusses the religious career and self-immolation (which involved public acts of burning the fingers and body) of the sixth-century monk, Sengyai. The author discusses the sources for a study of his life, and translates the extant biographical materials. He demonstrates that self-immolation was a practice open to multiple interpretations, and that Sengyai's act was understood as one of cosmic significance in a religious milieu in which recent political events such as the fall of the Liang dynasty were interpreted as signs of the decline of the dharma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the nature and cultural meaning of agriculturally produced grains in late classical and early medieval China. Dietary regimens of practitioners during those periods to make them transcendents; Religious practices in offering sacrifices to the gods and spirits of grains in the country; Implication of cultivating and eating grains for the social status of dwellers in agricultural communities.

How far can wings of belief carry us? What kinds of new social and moral systems evolve out of transnational religious movements? The recent literature on globalisation has shown only little interest in religion, in spite of the cutting-edge global role of beliefs like evangelical Christianity. The literature has attended even less to the movement of non-Western traditions. We do, however, have numerous alternative models of how global ideas in general spread: they can seep through the cracks within and between systems of control based in nation-states; they can flow through mobile cosmopolitans with a global sense of belonging; they can reside in diasporas centred around the idea of a common homeland; they can exist in the institutions of transnational villages; and so on. These various images of global culture are not mutually exclusive, of course, and none of them alone captures the full complexity of the possibilities. Here I want to explore briefly just two dialectical relationships that characterise some of the features of the. transnational Chinese religions discussed in the essays collected here. The first is the relationship between global culture and the continuing institutional power of the nation-state. The second is the counterintuitive combination of universalising beliefs with a strong sense of rootedness in specific places or ethnicities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is based on largely uninvestigated archival material in the First Historical Archives in Beijing. It addresses the following issues: (1) How and why an internal office, the Nanfu, which was responsible for drama performances inside the palace, expanded its functions to become a monitoring organisation, the Shengpingshu, which exercised censorship over all the drama groups in the capital. (2) How political events were reflected in drama performed on both public and private occasions, thus shedding light on the inner world of individual emperors. (3) How these institutional changes led to the Qing court playing an active role in the transformation of a regional lower-class entertainment into Peking opera, a national art form appreciated by all classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the use of the label Ru among twentieth-century popular Chinese religious groups, specifically Confucianism. Ru in Taiwanese popular religion; Spirit-writing movement in Taiwan and on mainland China; Teachings of the Confucian tradition.

Argues that there is little evidence of anything resembling an independent or self-conscious Pure Land tradition in medieval China. Views on how scholars misconstrued the notion of 'Ch'an/Pure Land syncretism; Role of Amitabha's Pure Land in Chinese Buddhism.

Investigates Buddhist-inspired options that were offered to lay people and at people's motivations for making specific religious decisions in the Lower Yangzi region in China during the period from A.D. 1100 until 1340. Definition of a religious option; Origin of the important monastic Tiantai tradition of Buddhism; Factors contributing to the success or failure of beliefs and practices.