China Cracks Down on Hong Kong Evangelists
A 2014 survey of more than 1,000 Protestant churches in Hong Kong by the Hong Kong Church Renewal Movement gives some insight into their activities.
Media
07.21.15
China: The Best and the Worst Place to Be a Muslim Woman
A woman’s solitary voice, earthy and low, rises above the seated worshipers. More than 100 women stand, bow, and touch their foreheads to the floor as a female imam leads evening prayers at a women-only mosque during the first...
China Says Thousands Forced to Flee Myanmar Fighting
The Yunnan government said that since Feb. 9 there had been more than 30,000 trips by border residents both into and out of China.
Features
02.04.15
The City of Urumqi Prohibition on Wearing Items That Mask the Face or Robe the Body
A Proclamation from the Standing Committee of the Urumqi People’s Congress
The “Regulation banning the wearing of items that mask the face or robe the...
The China Africa Project
01.15.15
Religion Among African Immigrants in China
Nestled in apartments and offices throughout the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou are dozens of improvised churches that cater to the region’s Pentacostal Africans, largely from Nigeria. These churches not only serve the community’s religious...
The NYRB China Archive
12.29.14
Pope Francis’ China Problem
from New York Review of BooksChina-watchers, friends of Tibet, and admirers of Pope Francis were amazed and disappointed last week when the Pope announced he would not be meeting the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan leader’s visit to Rome. The Dalai Lama was there with other...
Dalai Lama Concedes He May Be the Last
Exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama has said he realizes that he may be the last to hold the title. But he told the BBC it would be better that the centuries-old tradition ceased "at the time of a popular Dalai Lama".
Pope Francis Denies Dalai Lama an Audience Because of China Concerns
The Dalai Lama, in Rome for a meeting of Nobel peace prize winners, told Italian media he had approached the Vatican about a meeting but was told it could create inconveniences.
China Arrests 1,000 Members of Banned Religious Cult 'Eastern Lightning'
State news agency Xinhua said that the group, which Beijing regards as a dangerous doomsday cult, cheated people, illegally collected money and "violated the law under the guise of religion."
Media
08.07.14
Beards and Muslim Headscarves Banned From Buses In One Xinjiang City
A city in China’s remote western Xinjiang region has temporarily banned men with beards and women with Muslim headscarves from taking public...
22 Attackers Shot Dead in Xinjiang Violence as Extremists Wielding Axes Targeted Civilians
Attack on government office and police station follows series of violent incidents in restive province.
Deadly McDonald’s Attack Highlights Fears About Cults in China
The perpetrators were six members of a religious cult, including a middle-age man, his two grown daughters and his 12-year-old son, who became angry when refused a phone number.
China Denies Declaring War on Christians After Mega-Church is Razed
Communist Party officials have rejected claims they have launched an orchestrated campaign to slow the spread of Christianity in China, after the razing of a church in a city known as the "Jerusalem of the East".
The NYRB China Archive
03.24.14
Chinese Atheists? What the Pew Survey Gets Wrong
from New York Review of BooksEarlier this month, I came across a fascinating opinion survey by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. The report asked people in forty countries whether belief in God is necessary for morality. Mostly, the...
The NYRB China Archive
03.06.14
The Brave Catholics of China
from New York Review of BooksLike most pilgrimage sites in China, the shrine in the village of Cave Gulley in Shanxi province is located partway up a mountain, reachable by steep stairs that are meant to shift worshipers’ attention from the world below to heaven above....
China’s Way to Happiness
The return of collective religious traditions is part of Chinese people's search for meaning and stability.
The NYRB China Archive
02.04.14
China’s Way to Happiness
from New York Review of BooksRichard Madsen is one of the modern-day founders of the study of Chinese religion. A professor at the University of California San Diego, the seventy-three-year-old’s works include Morality and Power in a Chinese Village, China and...
In Pictures: Chinese New Year Around the World
A Chinese folk artist performs at the opening ceremony of the Spring Festival Temple Fair in Beijing, one of millions of people around the world celebrating ahead of Chinese, or Lunar, New Year.
China’s Kaifeng Jews Rediscover Their Heritage
In Kaifeng, where Sephardic Jews from the Silk Road settled in the 12th century, their descendants are rediscovering long-last religious practices and petitioning Israel for recognition.
Will China's New Leaders Change Tibet policy?
Xi Zhongxun, father of China's new president, Xi Jinping, was a former leader known for a more conciliatory approach to Tibetans.
U.S. Rights Official Faults China on Tibetan Suppression
Navi Pillay says she's disturbed by reports of detentions, disappearances and the excessive use of force.
Sinica Podcast
06.08.12
Morally Adrift?
from Sinica Podcast
It’s easy to get depressed about China’s apparent drift toward amorality: the kind of pervasive screw-your-neighbor approach to getting ahead (or even just getting by) that seems increasingly common on the mainland. The news is full of horrific...
Amnesty Internation Annual Report—China
Amnesty International
Amnesty International surveys the landscape of human rights in China during 2011 and finds that China’s economic strength during the global financial crisis increased the country’s leverage in the domain of global human rights—mostly for the...
Books
04.24.12
The I-Ching
The I Ching originated in China as a divination manual more than three thousand years ago. In 136 BCE the emperor declared it a Confucian classic, and in the centuries that followed, this work had a profound influence on the philosophy, religion, art, literature, politics, science, technology, and medicine of various cultures throughout East Asia. Jesuit missionaries brought knowledge of the I Ching to Europe in the seventeenth century, and the American counterculture embraced it in the 1960s.
The NYRB China Archive
12.22.11
China Gets Religion!
from New York Review of BooksThis autumn, China has been marking the one hundredth anniversary of the collapse of its last imperial dynasty, the Qing, with a series of grand celebrations. The government has released an epic film showing how the revolution of 1911 prepared...
Books
04.15.10
Superstitious Regimes
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.
Books
03.01.10
Spectacle and Sacrifice
This book is about the ritual world of a group of rural settlements in Shanxi province in pre-1949 North China. Temple festivals, with their giant processions, elaborate rituals, and operas, were the most important influence on the symbolic universe of ordinary villagers and demonstrate their remarkable capacity for religious and artistic creation. The great festivals described in this book were their supreme collective achievements and were carried out virtually without assistance from local officials or educated elites, clerical or lay.
The NYRB China Archive
12.20.07
The Amazing Wanderer
from New York Review of Books1.
I could tell you a lot of potentially useful things about Colin Thubron’s latest travel memoir—for example, that he’s a gifted linguist, a dogged reporter, and an elegant writer. For a start, though, perhaps it’s enough to point out...