HARVARD EAST ASIAN MONOGRAPHS
Cover: Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity, from Harvard University PressCover: Superstitious Regimes in HARDCOVER

Harvard East Asian Monographs 322

Superstitious Regimes

Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity

Product Details

HARDCOVER

$49.95 • £43.95 • €45.95

ISBN 9780674035997

Publication Date: 04/01/2010

Text

450 pages

6-1/8 x 9-1/4 inches

11 illustrations, 4 maps

Harvard University Asia Center > Harvard East Asian Monographs

World, subsidiary rights restricted

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We live in a world shaped by secularism—the separation of numinous power from political authority and religion from the political, social, and economic realms of public life. Not only has progress toward modernity often been equated with secularization, but when religion is admitted into modernity, it has been distinguished from superstition. That such ideas are continually contested does not undercut their extraordinary influence.

These divisions underpin this investigation of the role of religion in the construction of modernity and political power during the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937) of Nationalist rule in China. This book explores the modern recategorization of religious practices and people and examines how state power affected the religious lives and physical order of local communities. It also looks at how politicians conceived of their own ritual role in an era when authority was meant to derive from popular sovereignty. The claims of secular nationalism and mobilizational politics prompted the Nationalists to conceive of the world of religious association as a dangerous realm of “superstition” that would destroy the nation. This is the first “superstitious regime” of the book’s title. It also convinced them that national feeling and faith in the party-state would replace those ties—the second “superstitious regime.”

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