Buying One's Way to Heaven: The Celestial Treasury in Chinese Religions<i>Monnaies d'offrande et la notion de trésorerie dans la Religion Chinoise</i>. Hou Ching-Lang

In the long 20th century, modern China experienced perhaps the world’s most radical and systematic secularization process and the decimation of traditional religious and ritual cultures. This article seeks to account for this experience by engaging with postcolonial theory, a body of discourse seldom found relevant to China Studies. The article attempts a two-pronged critique of both state secularization and some aspects of existing Postcolonial Studies/theory. It shows the many ways in which nationalist elites in modern China unwittingly absorbed Western Orientalist discourse even as their words and actions were ostensibly anti-colonial, and much of the article examines the consequences of this native Orientalism upon Chinese religiosities. Finally, the article suggests that one cannot discuss governmentality in modern China without understanding how it is intertwined with a sovereign power that is both archaic and, at the same time, has experienced renewal and expansion in modernity.

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Buying One's Way to Heaven: The Celestial Treasury in Chinese ReligionsMonnaies d'offrande et la notion de trésorerie dans la Religion Chinoise. Hou Ching-Lang

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Literary Debts in Tang China

Literary Debts in Tang China

"If Man Works Hard the Land Will Not Be Lazy"

Postcoloniality and Religiosity in Modern China

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