Postcoloniality and Religiosity in Modern China

Abstract

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.

Revisiting religious higher education in China: comparative analysis of Furen University narratives

“…As Li (2013, p. 3), a United Statesbased Chinese historian, argued, a persistent challenge for historians in twentieth-century China was "how to reconcile their seemingly academic interest in objectively recasting the past with political inclinations that tend to twist their interpretations." The three popular arguments (Sinicization, secularization, and patriotism) reveal how historical narratives about Furen have been constructed within the party-state's dominant nationalist discourse, wherein the state promotes a secularization agenda (Yang 2011) and Chinese culture is interpreted as possessing enormous power to Sinicize and assimilate non-Chinese people and cultures (Schneider 2017). The grand nationalist discourse also includes the important theme of revolution, highlighting how Chinese people have engaged in a series of struggles against imperialism, which is interwoven into most PRC historical narratives (Li 2013).…”

A Failure in ‘Designed Citizenship’: A Case Study in a Minority-Han Merger School in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region

“…This check and restriction is particularly urgent given the fact that modern Chinese sovereign power has been persistently privileged as a result of a desperate desire for state-strengthening initially triggered by imperial threat and internal disorder. This desire has been put into practice at the cost of traditionally ‘individual rights, the rights of kin groups and religious communities, and local community self-government and autonomy’ (Yang, 2011: 12). This sovereign power in contemporary China is seen to be growing even stronger to form a new pattern of governance that combines ‘earlier Maoist socialism, nationalist and developmentalist practices and the discourses of the Communist Party with the more recent market logic’, against which an oligarchic corporate state or neo-socialism is emerging (Dickson, 2007; Nonini, 2008: 145; Pieke, 2009).…”

Chinese citizenship ‘after orientalism’: academic narratives on internal migrants in China

“…While the above understanding of the theory of Orientalism focuses on the EastWest relationship, there is also another way of looking at how the discourse of orientalism is being redistributed through mechanisms of modernity. For instance, Maifair Yang (2011) shows how Western orientalist discourse was absorbed in China with disastrous effects on local religiosities. She calls the process of appropriation of Western theories by Chinese elites and official classes 'colonization of consciousness' and explains how in result Chinese started viewing themselves through the lenses of Western orientalism, seeing anything non-modern as 'backward' and 'shameful' (Yang, 2011: 7,13).…”