In the last 20 years religious traditions in many parts of China have revived their activities and organizations and rebuilt their temples, mosques and churches, despite decades of strict regulation and repression by the government. This revival is an aspect of the greater social freedom that has accompanied the economic development and diversification of that period.

This article examines the regulation of religion in China, in the context of changing social expectations and resulting dilemmas of regime legitimacy. The post-Mao government has permitted limited freedom of religious belief, subject to legal and regulatory restrictions on religious behaviour. However, this distinction between belief and behaviour poses challenges for the regime's efforts to maintain political control while preserving an image of tolerance aimed at building legitimacy. By examining the regulation of religion in the context of patterns of compliance and resistance in religious conduct, the article attempts to explain how efforts to control religion raise challenges for regime legitimacy.

This article demonstrates that the local communal religion of the villages of China, sometimes referred to as “popular religion,” has revived with great force in contemporary South-east China. In some areas, the networks of village temples have formed a second tier of local government, providing services, raising funds, and mobilizing entire communities to participate in collective rituals. The article is based on fieldwork in 600 villages of Putian, Fujian, but also discusses developments elsewhere in South-east China. The article concludes that local communal religious rituals are significant arenas for the negotiation of modernity in contemporary China.

This article deals with an example of local community religion in north China, the activities of a woman spirit-medium in a small village in Hebei province. This woman is believed to represent an ancient goddess, the Silkworm Mother (Cangu nainai), to whom people turn for healing illnesses not cured by Western or Chinese medicine. This study shows that local popular religion is very much alive in contemporary China.

Tik-sang Liu examines local religious practices in Hong Kong and Macau. He states that these constitute the foundation of local social organizations; they are the means with which local society is organized, local people are mobilized, communal activities are co-ordinated and people are prepared for their various stages in life.

This article explores the development of local religious traditions in post-war Taiwan, particularly since the ending of martial law in 1987. It focuses on the factors underlying the ongoing popularity of temple cults to local deities such as Mazu (originally the goddess of the sea, now worshipped as an all-powerful protective deity) and the Royal Lords (Wangye; plague deities now invoked to counter all manner of calamities). Special attention is devoted to the complex relationship between local community-based religious traditions and the state, including the loosening of restrictions on festivals, the use of temples as sites for political rallies during local elections, and the recent controversy over attempts to stage direct pilgrimages to mainland China. Other issues include debates over the “indigenization” of religious traditions in Taiwan and the growth of academic organizations devoted to the study of Taiwanese religion.

Drawing on Daoist Association sources, fieldwork and interviews, this article analyses some major aspects of Daoism in China today. It first presents the revival of destroyed Daoist temples, the return of liturgical activities in Daoist temples and the establishment of training classes for young Daoists. It also discusses the restoration of ordinations of Daoists at the Quanzhen monastery Baiyun guan and the Halls of Zhengyi Tianshi at Longhu shan. Based upon the National Daoist Association's statistics from 1996, there were about 20,000 “Daoist priests who live at home,” called sanju daoshi, who perform Daoist ritual outside monasteries in local communities across China. Despite the state's policy of controlling sanju daoshi, the revival of Daoist ritual tradition in village temples in China today reveals that Daoism is still very much alive in Chinese communities.

Based on fieldwork and studies of historical and contemporary materials, this article investigates several issues key to Buddhist life in the present-day PRC, focusing on Han Buddhists, especially the monastic tradition. It argues that many current practices take their shape from the innovations that transformed Chinese Buddhist life in the late Qing and Republican periods. While profound political, economic and social changes have occurred in the past few decades, some of the most pressing issues are extensions of questions raised at that time. The most significant question of the earlier period – what is the Buddhist monastic vocation, and what training and leadership are required to safeguard that ideal? – remains central to present-day activities and conceptions. To consider how to answer this question, or indeed how it is posed within present circumstances, three interconnected matters are investigated: current training methods, the economics of monasteries and the issue of leadership. In this context, Han–Tibetan interchange in the Buddhist field and the influence of overseas Chinese Buddhists on the mainland are also considered.

Many of the challenges China's Muslims confront remain the same as they have for the last 1,400 years of continuous interaction with Chinese society, but some are new as a result of China's transformed and increasingly globalized society, and especially since the watershed events of the 11 September terrorist attacks and the subsequent “war on terrorism.” Muslims in China live as minority communities, but many such communities have survived in rather inhospitable circumstances for over a millennium. This article examines Islam and Muslim minority identity in China, not only because it is where this author has conducted most of his research, but also because with the largest Muslim minority in East Asia, China's Muslims are clearly the most threatened in terms of self-preservation and Islamic identity. I argue that successful Muslim accommodation to minority status in China can be seen to be a measure of the extent to which Muslim groups allow the reconciliation of the dictates of Islamic culture to their host culture. This goes against the opposite view that can be found in the writings of some analysts, that Islam in the region is almost unavoidably rebellious and that Muslims as minorities are inherently problematic to a non-Muslim state. The history of Islam in China suggests that both within each Muslim community, as well as between Muslim nationalities, there are many alternatives to either complete accommodation or separatism.

This article focuses on three distinctive features of the revival of Catholicism in China: its relatively slow rate of increase, compared with other forms of Chinese religiosity; its relatively intense internal and external conflicts; and its peculiar mix of antagonism and co-operation with the government. These are explained in terms of three interpenetrating layers of the Chinese Catholic community: its priestly, sacramental religious vision, its social embodiment in rural society, and the legacy of political conflict between the Vatican and the PRC government. Though intimately interconnected, these layers of the Catholic Church have each developed at different paces and in somewhat different directions. The effects of this are seen most clearly in the problems faced by Chinese priests.

Protestant Christianity has been a prominent part of the general religious resurgence in China in the past two decades. In many ways it is the most striking example of that resurgence. Along with Roman Catholics, as of the 1950s Chinese Protestants carried the heavy historical liability of association with Western domination or imperialism in China, yet they have not only overcome that inheritance but have achieved remarkable growth. Popular media and human rights organizations in the West, as well as various Christian groups, publish a wide variety of information and commentary on Chinese Protestants. This article first traces the gradual extension of interest in Chinese Protestants from Christian circles to the scholarly world during the last two decades, and then discusses salient characteristics of the Protestant movement today. These include its size and rate of growth, the role of Church–state relations, the continuing foreign legacy in some parts of the Church, the strong flavour of popular religion which suffuses Protestantism today, the discourse of Chinese intellectuals on Christianity, and Protestantism in the context of the rapid economic changes occurring in China, concluding with a perspective from world Christianity.

Charismatic forms of healing can be found both in Chinese medicine and spiritual practices. This article examines how qigong healing sects in contemporary China became subject to state regulation and medicalization. Such a move was intended to eradicate masters who were viewed as promoting superstition (mixin) or heterodox spiritual practices. Yet, the rise of masters who intertwined healing with spirituality was facilitated by market reforms that enabled entrepreneurial forms of medicine. When other popular forms of healing emerged in the late 1990s, the previous state response to qigong facilitated containment practices which continue into the 21st century. Recent state policy towards sectarian organizations based on the promotion of science are compared with the regulation of qigong a decade earlier.

This is a well-researched and thoughtfully-presented work which seeks to combine an analysis of elite politics with developments in intellectual trends in the decade following the Tiananmen massacre in China. In so doing, Joseph Fewsmith examines several important strands of development in how this communist state, which was in crisis in 1989, avoided the fate of its East-European and Soviet fraternal states and turned itself into a developmental state that is also emerging as an economic powerhouse a decade later.

This latest addition to publisher M. E. Sharpe's Australian National University contemporary China books series comes with a blurb that sends a powerful message of intimidation to the weary reviewer. In it, Richard Baum insists that the book's contents amount to “the distilled wisdom and insight of three generations of distinguished China specialists.” Now, who would want to risk stepping on the toes of one's daughter's, one's own and one's mother's generations in ‘the field’ by saying no?

This useful textbook provides an overview of US–China relations between the late 19th century and the beginning of the 21st. It gives a clear chronology of events and covers the main events and issues in the relationship. It also embeds the description of these events and issues in the larger international and domestic contexts, allowing it to mesh easily with other textbooks that focus either on China's foreign relations in general or on its domestic developments.

This important collection of theoretically oriented essays on contemporary Chinese culture and politics is an updated and expanded version of a special issue of Social Text (Summer 1998). The selection is multidisciplinary (including history, political science, anthropology) but with an expansive conception of comparative literature at its core. It is more intellectually focused than many China anthologies, no doubt reflecting the strong guiding hand of editor Xudong Zhang, whose 75-page introduction sets an ambitious agenda.

This book about Chinese economic reform is written by an industrial and financial specialist. It examines the argument of China's moving from a centrally-planned economy to one with more market components, asking, in the author's words, “whether the iron rice bowl has already been broken.” There are seven chapters in total.

This book attempts to analyse one aspect of the 1994 fiscal reforms in China, namely the effects of fiscal decentralization on the fiscal relations of and between subnational government units, in particular the provinces. Unlike most other books on fiscal reforms or the fiscal side of state–local relations, Finanzausgleichspolitik in der Volksrepublik China makes use of the toolkit of economics to cut through the different forms and stages of fiscal reforms and to offer an analytical form by which the effects can be assessed.

Randall Peerenboom has become one of the most prolific specialists writing in English about the legal system of post-Mao China. In his latest book, Peerenboom provides a summary overview of the development of the post-Mao legal system, drawing on a number of his previously published works on issues such as lawyers, globalization, human rights, and legal theory.

Talk of ‘Asian values’ seems to have abated. Those who promoted such ‘values’ in order to license disregard for international human rights standards touted the ‘logic’ that ‘anything originated in Western culture is only valid in countries of Western cultural heritage and should not be applied elsewhere; human rights originated in Western culture. Therefore, they should not be applied in Asia.’