Religion and Nationalism in Chinese Societies

Front matter

RELIGION AND SOCIETY IN ASIA

' Edited 4 by Cheng-tian Kuo ‘ tN ji i fiir il “ihe

4 mn

Table of Contents

Notes on Chinese Names, Terms, and Transliteration Preface

1 Introduction Religion, State, and Religious Nationalism in Chinese Societies Cheng-tian Kuo

Part! Chinese Religion and Nationalism before 1949

Index

Notes on Chinese Names, Terms, and Transliteration

This book adopts Chinese pin-yin transliteration. In most of the text, an English translation is provided first, followed by either Chinese pin-yin transliteration or (traditional) Chinese characters, or by both, when the Chinese characters first occur.

Some well-known Chinese names and places or those related to Taiwan and Hong Kong may use other spelling systems to accommodate local dialects; for instance, Sun Yatsen, Taipei, and Taiwanese authors of this book. In most cases, Chinese characters are provided after the transliteration.

All Chinese names retain the Chinese order of family name first, followed by the given name.

Chinese names and places use normal font; Chinese terms are italicized.

Standard academic transliteration is used for religious jargon of Islam and Tibetan Buddhism.

Preface

‘(Jesus) got up and rebuked the winds and the sea, and it became perfectly calm. The men were amazed, and said, “What kind of a man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey Him?”

Matthew 8:26-27; New American Standard Bible

Dense smog and cloud constantly hovered over Beijing all year long. But on 3 September 2015, the seventieth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s

Liberation Army, a ‘military-parade blue sky’ (yuebinglan lr 6 #5) was all over Beijing. Even though it lasted for only one day, the whole world was amazed: What kind ofa State is this, that even the winds and the smog obey Her? Cheng-tian Kuo

The above comparison illustrates a new pattern of religion-state relations called religious nationalism in China and its impact on those in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. It is no longer the state versus religion, but hybrid mixtures of religion and nationalism in these three Chinese societies.

Ona hot summer day in June 2015, I received a mysterious long-distance phone call from the Chinese government in Beijing. The official asked me whether I would be available to attend a conference in early September. I thought the conference would be the long-overdue National Religious Conference which had been held once every ten years. So I immediately said OK. Then, the officials whispered a sentence to conclude our short communication: ‘There will be a military parade!’ I cheerfully replied: ‘That’s great! I have never been invited to a military parade before.’ But why would the Chinese government hold a military parade in September, not onı October — National Independence Day - like they had always done? I wondered. It must be because of the National Religious Conference for which I have been invited, I naively thought. In the following two months, I did not receive any concrete confirmation about this secretive invitation until one week before my scheduled flight. One official solemnly gave me very detailed instructions about the security measures I should follow once I arrived in Beijing, because ‘the entire city will be under martial rule.’

I arrived in Beijing three days earlier so that I could do some interviews with my academic friends and give a talk at the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA). On the day of my arrival, the sky was packed with dense smog as usual, but the street traffic was unusually light due to the martial rule. All the shops were closed, including the beverage vending machines in the massive subway system. Governmental officials received last-minute orders to strictly limit their use of official cars during the week and to promptly leave town in the early afternoon of 2 September; otherwise, they would have to stay one long night in their office. My talk at the SARA was first postponed, then, canceled at the last minute. The entire central government in Beijing was almost shut down and ordered to do nothing else except to accommodate the military parade.

At five o’clock in the morning on 3 September, some other guests and I went through the waterproof security checks at the secluded hotel, boarded the designated buses to the parade platform, and waited for other distinguished guests to arrive. The sky began to reveal a golden light and crystal blue with only a few traces of white cloud. Everyone in the audience started to praise the blue sky as if they had the luck to see the aurora of the North Pole. Not for long, though. The next morning when I opened the curtains at my hotel, the sky was packed with dense smog and acid drizzle again; so was the next day and the next. On my airplane back to Taipei, I jotted down the verses from Matthew above and applied them to the ‘miracle’ of the military-parade blue. After all, the military parade was not just a secular ceremony but also a sacred religious ritual for the Chinese Communist Party-State in search of political-religious legitimacy. It is a religious ritual of the state religion, which I call ‘Chinese Patriotism’.

This book discusses the origin, development, content, and implications of religion-state relations in contemporary Chinese societies, i.e. mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. On the one hand, state policies toward religions in these societies are deciphered and their implications for religious freedom are evaluated. On the other hand, Chinese Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, Islam, and folk religions are respectively analyzed in terms of their theological, organizational, and political responses to the nationalist modernity projects of these states. What is new in this book on religion and nationalism in Chinese societies is that the Chinese state has strengthened its control over religion to an unprecedented level. In particular, the Chinese state has almost completed its construction ofa state religion called Chinese Patriotism. But at the same time, what is also new is the emergence of democratic civil religions in these Chinese societies, which directly challenge the Chinese state religion and may significantly transform their religion-state relations for better or for worse.

This book could not have been published without the compassionate support of the following persons and institutions, to whom I express my

PREFACE 11 most sincere appreciation. The International Institute for Asian Studies (ILAS) and the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China in Taiwan jointly sponsored a Taiwanese Chair of Chinese Studies program, which enabled me to convene the conference on New Religious Nationalism in Chinese on 21-22 April 2016 in Leiden, the Netherlands. Most ofthe chapters in this book are revised versions of these conference papers. Deputy Director Willem Vogelsang and staff members (in particular, Martina van den Haak and Sandra van der Horst) of the ITAS provided the most cozy and efficient working environment. The Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and the National Chengchi University provided additional funding to the conference to bring in more Taiwanese scholars than the previous Taiwanese Chair programs. It also generously funded the production of this book. Research assistants Huang Yuchia, Chang Chenghao and Huang Iwei added extraordinary warmth and comfort to the conference, like the tulip blossom in the Netherlands. Huang Iwei, Song Chunli, and Chen Li painstakingly corrected all the style problems in these book chapters. At Amsterdam University Press, Dr. Stefania Travagnin of the University of Groningen, Commissioning Editor Saskia Gieling, and copy-editor Roger Nelson patiently guided us through the laborious editing and publication process. Finally, on behalf of all the authors of this book, I express my most sincere gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers who provided very helpful and detailed comments on each chapter of this book.

Religion, State, and Religious Nationalism in Chinese Societies

Originating in the common responses to threats of modernity in the beginning of the twentieth century, three models of religion-state relations have respectively taken shape in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and each has important implications for both internal stability and external relations. In China, a totalitarian state religion of Chinese patriotism has been under construction and has almost fully established itself. In Taiwan, the initiation and consolidation of democracy after 1987 has contributed to the rise of a civil religion shared by many religions that provides for healthy checks-and-balances between the state and religion. In Hong Kong, there has been increasing confrontation between the totalitarian Chinese patriotism and a fragile civil religion.

Keywords: China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, religion, nationalism

Three models of religion-state relations in Chinese societies

Since modernity started threatening the Chinese nation at the beginning of the twentieth century, three models of religion-state relations have taken shape in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and each has had important implications for both internal stability and external relations. The ‘Rise of China’ has been fanatically propelled by a state religion called ‘Chinese patriotism’.’ An ‘imagined community’ of ‘China’ serves as the supreme God to be worshipped by all Chinese.” The core catechism of this state religion is a political Trinity: patriotism, socialism, and the rule by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). All other religions should be submissive to this state religion and integrate the Trinitarian political theology into their respective theologies. Freedom of religion, although in incremental

1 For the debate on the ‘peaceful’ rise of China, see Guo (2006). 2 Anderson (1991).

progress, remains confined within the glass ceiling of Chinese patriotism and is meticulously restricted to pre-approved clergy, time, and place.

In Taiwan, checks-and-balances between the state and religion have largely replaced the state’s dominance over religion. Taiwanese religious groups probably enjoy more freedom and autonomy than their counterparts in Western democracies.’ They also regularly exercise significant influence over state policies and in democratic elections. The Taiwanese state maintains effective legal instruments to curtail illegal activities of fanatic religious groups, at the same time promoting normal religious activities without ‘excessive entanglement or ‘discrimination’.* In turn, most religious groups have gradually adapted to democracy by integrating democratic values into their theologies and organizational structures. They begin to endorse a ‘civil religion’ which is not closely linked to either Chinese patriotism or Taiwanese nationalism.’ Harmony and cooperation, rather than conflict, characterize the relationships between not only the state and religion but also among religious groups in Taiwan.

By contrast, religion-state relations in Hong Kong are moving precariously between the Chinese model and the Taiwanese model. Emanating from the Christian community, a fragile civil religion is under construction by Christian leaders, intellectuals, independent mass media, and democratic parties. They also organize various democratic movements to challenge the Hong Kong government and the Chinese state. In response to these challenges to Chinese patriotism, the Chinese state and Hong Kong government have rapidly tightened their leash on Hong Kong’s Christian community and civil religion.

Inherited from the common responses to the threats of modernity, why have China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong developed such different models of religion-state relations? What has happened during the past one hundred years that may have caused these differences? And what are the practical and normative implications for religion-state relations, political stability, and external relations of these Chinese societies?

Before proceeding to the next section and to other chapters of this book, let me define the core concepts used in this book: religion, the state, nationalism, and religious nationalism. A common definition of ‘religion’,

3 U.S. State Department, Religious Freedom Report (Taiwan), annual issues.

4 Since Lemon vs Kurtzman (1971), these two criteria have been considered by the U.S. Supreme Court in cases related to violation of the principle of separation of state and religion.

5 ‘Civil religion’ refers to citizens’ strong commitment to democratic values and institutions, not necessarily linked to particular religions. The term was coined by French philosopher Jacques Rousseau but was made popular by Bellah (1967).

especially for Chinese religions, is the one offered by C.K. Yang, who put most Chinese religions into a continuum between ‘institutional religion’ and ‘diffused religion’. An institutional religion is ‘a system of religious life having (1) an independent theology or cosmic interpretation of the universe and human events; (2) an independent form of worship consisting of symbols (gods, spirits, and their images) and rituals; and (3) an independent organization of personnel to facilitate the interpretation of theological views and to pursue cultic worship’. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism as practiced by the Chinese dynasties, temples, and shrines fall into this category. A ‘diffused religion’ is ‘a religion having its theology, cults, and personnel so intimately diffused into one or more secular social institutions that they become a part of the concept, rituals, and structure of the latter, thus having no significant independent existence’. Various folk religions (including folk Confucianism, folk Buddhism, and folk Daoism) fall into this category.° Yang’s definition of religion is largely applicable to most Chinese religions but may encounter problems when some folk religions (e.g. Yiguandao discussed in Chapter 8 of this book) become institutionalized in response to modernity. Nevertheless, Yang’s definition appropriately directs our attention to the cores of any religion, namely, theology, ritual, and clergy, no matter how institutionalized or diffused they are.

The ‘state’ (sometimes, ‘government’) in the Chinese context refers not only to traditional dynasties or kingdoms before 1911 but also to the modern states of the Republic of China (ROC) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC), although this definition is not intended to imply China’s unification or Taiwan's independence. The Hong Kong government (not a modern state) was a colonial government of the United Kingdom before 1997, and a local government of the PRC since then. The core of a traditional Chinese state is the emperor and his/her royal family. A bureaucracy (including the military) is established to serve the interests of the royal family. The territory and subjects are regarded as the properties of the emperor, and are frequently subject to expansion or contraction because of war with other kingdoms. A modern state is defined by political scientists as a political entity consisting ofa fixed territory, a people (including different ethnic groups) living within the territory, a government governing the territory and the people, and the sovereignty of the government to govern its territory and the people without the permission of other states.

Adapted from the definitions provided by scholars of nationalism, a ‘nation’ (minzu FQ or guozu BYR) is defined as ‘an imagined political community’ bounded together by ‘imagined’ common history, people of ethnic ties, culture, religion, language, government, sovereignty, and territory.’ A nation is imagined because it does not necessarily meet, nor exclude, scientific evidence or international laws. Nationalism is thus an ideology that combines and elaborates these imaginations. Again, nationalist imaginations are different in kinds and degrees across temporal and spatial contexts. Furthermore, according to the above definition, the concept of nationalism is applicable to the nationalism of traditional kingdoms before the eighteenth century, whose people and territory frequently changed ownerships and definitions, as well as to the modern nationalism that originated in the early eighteenth century, which has distinctive components of people’s sovereignty and fixed territory.

As noted above, there are two Chinese translations of ‘nation’: minzu EG

WR or guozu BIYE. In Chinese politics, academics, and mass media, minzu has been the favorite term since it was invented more than one hundred years ago by Liang Qichao 22 AMEE to refer to the newly imagined ‘Chinese nation’ (zhonghua minzu; see Chapter 2 of this book for the origins of the Chinese nation). But Liang and most Chinese also use minzu to refer to the fifty-six ethnic groups, which together constitute the one and only Chinese nation. To differentiate a nation from an ethnic group, a growing number of the Chinese elite, including CCP Secretary General Xi Jinping, have employed guozu to refer to the Chinese nation and minzu to refer to any one of the fifty-six ethnic groups.*

The combined term of religious nationalism refers to the interpenetration, overlapping, or syncretism of religion and nationalism. It consists of two subcategories: a nationalism that incorporates existing religious elements or develops a new state cult in nationalist ideologies, state bureaucracies, public education systems, and national holidays; and a religion that incorporates nationalist imaginations in its theology, ritual, and religious organization. The former can be labeled as religious nationalism; the latter, nationalist religion. There are different kinds and degrees of religious nationalism as well as nationalist religion across temporal and spatial contexts. Unless specified, the concepts of ‘religious nationalism’ and ‘nationalist religion’ are used interchangeably in this book in order to emphasize the mutual influence between religion and nationalism in both traditional and modern

8 Kuo (2014, pp.10-13); Xi Jinping inaugural address (17 March 2013), http://lianghui.people. com.cn/2013npe/n/2013/0317/c357183-20816399.html.

China, as compared to the one-sided dominance of the state over religion described by the modernity approach discussed below.

Rogers Brubaker calls our attention to religious nationalism in the development and studies of state-religion relations. Most of the studies on state-religion relations belong to one of three types: those that treat religion and nationalism as analogous phenomena, those that use religion to explain nationalism, and those that treat religion as part of nationalism and analyze their interpenetration and intertwining. The emerging religious nationalisms in Algeria, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Pakistan, Turkey, and the United States, however, are different according to Brubaker. It is ‘a distinctively religious type of nationalist program that represents a distinctive alternative to secular nationalism’. In religious nationalism, religion ‘provides a distinctive way — or a distinctive family of ways — of joining state, territoriality, and culture’? Brubaker’s definition covers the first subcategory of religious nationalism used in this book but does not refer to the second subcategory of religious nationalism (i.e. nationalist religion). While consistent with Brubaker’s insights on religious nationalism, most chapters of this book keep a balance between these two subcategories.

Two theoretical approaches: Modernity and revisionism

Since John Locke started promoting the thesis of separation of state and religion four hundred years ago, the modernity approach has been the dominant explanation and prescription for religion-state relations in the world.” It postulates that the state should be free from the interference of religion in secular matters so that the state and society may mobilize their resources and talents more effectively to build up a modern nation-state. During the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant further degraded religion as something irrational and harmful to modernity; religion was better confined to the private sphere of families and religious compounds. Emile Durkheim similarly treated religion as superstition harmful to modernity and would finally be replaced by the development of rationality-based science."

The modernity approach deeply influences how major historians (re-) interpret the rise of nationalism in Western countries. Since modern state-building is regarded as scientific and religion is viewed as anti-scientific, the two cannot be compatible. Religion is treated either as anti-state-building or is totally absent from analyses. Instead, the modernity scholars prefer to focus their analysis on the factors of industrial revolution, military technology, printing, and rational bureaucracy, which allegedly contributed to modern state-building.”

Applying the modernity approach to religion-state relations in modern China, Chinese intellectuals and politicians around 1900 promoted various modernity programs to reform or to eliminate religions in order to build up a powerful Chinese state. Most folk religions in the countryside or religions of the ethnic minorities were regarded as superstitious and needed to be replaced by modern schools teaching science. This modernity program is almost as ‘colonizing’ and ‘missionizing’ as the Western powers, as Julia C. Schneider in this volume argues. Large institutional Buddhism and Daoism underwent reforms following the model of Western Christianity. Neo-Confucians made great efforts to ‘reimagine’ Confucianism as a secular and rational philosophy compatible with modernity programs. However, none of these religious reforms would appease Chinese atheists who aimed to eliminate all religions, including Christianity, which allegedly came to China under the aegis of Western imperialism. As the following sections demonstrate, the modernity approach continues to influence the academic analysis and religious policies in contemporary Chinese societies."

In retrospect, the modernity approach is only partially correct in terms of empirical evidence and normative implications. Recent scholarship on religion-state relations argue that the traditional Chinese state was a ‘religious state’ (or ‘religio-political state’), the Chinese society was a ‘religious society’, and the state sponsored a ‘state religion’ of Confucianism. Even when the Chinese state (e.g. the powerful Ming Dynasty) tried to control

12 Anderson (1991); Gellner (1983); Hobsbawm (1992).

13 Wang (1977); MacInnis (1989). Ashiwa and Wank’s book (2009) applies Talal Asad’s secularization thesis to modern Chinese religion-state relations and is another exemplar of the modernity approach. Mayfair Yang’s book (2008) tries to distance itself from the modernization theory by emphasizing the modernity’s discursive process between the modern Chinese state and religions. Although its major arguments are closer to the revisionist school, I would still put Yang’s book in the modernity school because it underestimates the mutual influence (albeit asymmetrical) of state and religion in both traditional and modern China.

14 These ‘revisionist’ works include: Chau (2011); Goossaert and Palmer (2011); Lagerwey (2010); Dean (2009); Platt (2007); Yang (1961); Yang (2012); Yu (2005).

religion, its efforts were short-lived and ineffective. In Chinese history, various religions permeated Chinese politics from the basic political/religious unit of family up to the imperial court. Religious freedom and tolerance were largely maintained in the dynastic government and in society. Furthermore, the authority and legitimacy of centralized Chinese dynasties were buttressed by various major religions. Chinese religions also provided political justification for the mobilization of rebellions against weak and corrupt dynasties. Therefore, religion is not necessarily anti-state-building but may become complementary to state building, which became the core of the modernity program in the Republican era. In this volume, Adam Yuet Chau describes how, in the early Republican era, the Chinese literati tried to incorporate ‘religion in the nation’ and ‘the nation in religion’. In fact, a nationalist program based purely on secular appeals may soon run out of steam, as Robert D. Weatherley and Qiang Zhang’s chapter in this volume demonstrates.

The normative and empirical validity of the revisionist approach gets a boost from the recent and fast developments in neurotheology, an interdisciplinary study of religious behaviors. Although still in its infancy of academic development, neurotheology has generated a vast amount of scientific evidence to support the theses that ‘rationality is a slave to emotion’ (an argument first proposed by David Hume), that religious/ spiritual thinking is part of human nature (just as rationality and emotion are), and that ‘religious (god) brain’ (or ‘religious circuits’ in the brain) may enhance or constrain human rationality and emotion.” This religious brain consists of various circuits connecting different functional parts of the brain to generate religious feelings, theological thinking, and images of transcendental gods. The thalamus receives incoming religious signals from sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin) and forwards these signals to different parts of the brain for response. The amygdala sends out quick emotional responses of anger, aggression, fear, and sexual desire to religious signals. The septum reinforces or regulates religious anger, fear, and pleasure generated by the amygdala. The hippocampus compares and learns new religious signals based on memory. The frontal lobe conducts rational thinking on religious signals and produces theological or moral arguments. The anterior cingulate generates a sense of peace, loving, and compassion associated with religion. And the parietal lobe enables humans to construct spatial and temporal dimensions of religion as well as of other

15 Barrett (2011); Fingelkurts and Fingelkurts (2009, pp. 293-326). Jeeves (2013); Newberg and Waldman (2009); Ramachandran and Blakeslee (1998).

transcendental ideologies, aliens, and mystical powers. It strengthens and prioritizes the thinking circuits related to these concepts as guiding principles to emotional and rational behaviors. Thus, humans get feelings of holiness and unity with supernatural powers when these concepts are stimulated by external signals.

Thus, neurotheology challenges the very foundation of the modernity approach, its zealous faith in rationality, and its empirical and normative controversies. For instance, the fundamentalism research project led by Martin Marty regards the rise of religious-political fundamentalisms around the world in the 1980s as temporary irrational responses to modernity that would be withered away by modernity.” But if rationality, emotion, and religious thinking are all interrelated and interdependent parts of human nature, then, the explanation and normative goals of any modernity program should be revamped, to include all these facets of human nature. If religion is a cause of the ‘clash of civilizations’, it should also be a part of the solution.”

Neurotheology puts emphasis on individuals’ religious behaviors. But individuals live in institutional settings and are molded by the institutions, such as family, clan, school, work place, and most important of all, religion and the state. Thus, in addition to neurotheology, empirical and normative claims of the revisionist approach get another boost from theories of institutions. The symbiosis of the state and religion is ubiquitous in human history.’ Anthropologists have traced the importance of religion to political leadership in primitive societies. The evolution of human societies from primitive tribes, ethnic groups, kingdoms to dynasties was accompanied and supported by the development of various religions. The rise of Western nation-states since the early eighteenth century, which was the core of the modernity program, also witnessed the symbiosis of the state and religion. No modern state was established without the support of a dominant domestic religion or without creating a new state religion for its own sake. For example, the Church of England independently created the religious/national identity of England; French nationalism claimed its origin in Joan of Arc’s divine calling to fight against the English; the United States established the first democratic state because most Americans

16 Marty and Appleby (1995).

17 Huntington (1996).

18 Classical works on institutionalism include North (1990), Powell and DiMaggio (1991); March and Olsen (1979). Ashiwa and Wank’s book (2009, pp. 6-12) applies this institutionalism to the analysis of state-religion relations in China.

believed it to be the ‘New Heaven and New Earth’ on earth; the Protestantturned-Eastern-Orthodox Catherine II transformed Russia into a modern state with the blessings of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Meiji reform installed the State Shinto for the very purpose of social and political modernization.” Even the atheist communist regimes in Eastern Europe transformed Marxism into a state religion in order to consolidate their legitimacy and to facilitate modernity programs.” Since the 1980s, the ‘Third Wave of democracy’ has contributed not only to the establishment of democracies but also ‘religious nationalisms’ in developing countries, which rebeled against secular nationalism and its modernity programs.” Finally, Robert Bellah points out the rise of a ‘civil religion’ in Western democracies, despite the general decline of Christian religiosity in these democracies. Citizens develop strong emotional commitment to democratic institutions and values through education, mass media, public museums, laws, and national holidays. According to Yang’s definition of religion discussed before, civil religion can be regarded as a ‘diffused religion’ merged into the political system, society, and institutional or diffused religion. Strengthened by theories of neurotheology and institutionalism, this chapter (and most chapters of this book) take various revisionist perspectives to reassess the interpenetration and interdependence of the state and religion in modern Chinese societies.

A revisionist interpretation of religion-state relations in modern China

Based on the neuro-institutional assumptions, a revisionist interpretation of the emergence of modern ‘China’ can be traced to one hundred and thirty years ago when modern nationalism was first introduced to China, or to traditional Chinese dynasties. The Chinese modernists would argue the impetus to the rise of Chinese nationalism and nation-state probably should not be traced back to any time earlier than 1900. A simple reason is that modern nationalism and the nation-state emerged in Western Europe only in the early eighteenth century and were not introduced in China until the late nineteenth century. But before then, as Chishen Chang says in this volume, there were already various dynasties (chaodai #{<) and

different interpretations of China (zhongguo FE), mostly of Han ethnic rulers governing flexible amounts of territories and subjects in East Asia. On the one hand, these dynastic governments were religious states in the sense that they maintained their legitimacy by mixing secular governance with various institutional religions: Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. On the other hand, local elites and the people regularly mixed their religious rituals and values into their secular lives, and constituted a diffused religious society. The Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), ruled by the Manchu ethnic group, was the last religious dynasty before the modern Chinese state (the Republic of China) was established in 191.

Chinese intellectuals and political leaders began to ‘imagine’ a political community called ‘China’ only in the late nineteenth century when the Qing Dynasty failed to stop the repetitive invasions by other modern states. The incompetent Qing Dynasty signed a series of unequal treaties with other modern states, and surrendered a significant part of its territory or sovereignty to them (Great Britain in 1840, 1858, and 1886; France in 1858, and 1884; Russia in 1858, and 1864; and Japan in 1872 and 1895). Together, these treaties shattered the traditional sacred image of the Chinese dynasty being the ‘central territory’ (zhongtu PE) or ‘all-under-heaven’ (tianxia K F).

Emulating the Japanese State Shinto modernity program, neo-Confucian reformers of the Qing Dynasty responded to external threats by promoting a State Confucianism in order to modernize the whole nation around a god-like emperor.” Bart Dessein’s chapter in this volume provides a detailed analysis of this State Confucianism as a state religion. At the same time, it aimed to reform, if not eliminate, folk religions that deviated from State Confucianism and were deemed as ‘evil cults’ (yinci ##4¥)).’4 But this modernity program, called the Wuxu Reform (wuxu bianfa KKEYK, 1898, also called ‘Hundred Days’ Reform’), flew in the face of the ambitions of Empress Dowager Cixi 24## who was the de facto supreme ruler of the dynasty but did not fit into the patriarchal neo-Confucianism. She found an alternative source of political and religious legitimacy in the traditional folk religion of White Lotus (bailian jiao HIZ% which worshipped the Mother of No Birth (wusheng laomu {3 ££) as the omnipotent creator of the universe. The Queen Mother staged a palace coup, terminated the neo-Confucian reform, and instructed the White Lotus to exorcize all foreign ‘demons’ out of the ‘central territory’. The White Lotus led the Boxer Rebellion (quanluan ERL) against the foreign demons from 1898 to 1900. In 1900, a military alliance