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Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer The Religious Question in Modern China, Chicago/London, University of Chicago Press, 2011, 464 pp.
Historian Vincent Goossaert and anthropologist David Palmer have pooled the expertise in their respective fields to take stock of the extraordinary changes taking place over the past several decades in the Chinese religious landscape. They approach the subject through two perspectives - historical and sociological. In the first seven chapters of Part I, the authors retrace the different stages in the evolution of the "religious question." Chapter 1 introduces the characteristics of Imperial China and the following four chapters describe the dramatic transformations of the late Imperial period and the Republican era. The authors present the de- struction of the religion associated with the ancient regime, which began under the reform period; the Republican state's moves to foster modern re- ligions; the emergence of new traditions in response to the state's ambi- tions; and finally the brutality with which transformations of the religious landscape in urban milieu were imposed on the countryside. These discus- sions facilitate a more nuanced understanding of the Communist Party's re- ligion work - discussed in Chapters 6 and 7 - with the Cultural Revolution constituting a major breaking point. Part II jettisons the chronological ap- proach in favour of an appreciation of multiple religious modernities in the Chinese world. In Chapter 8, the authors evoke Chinese religions' alternative trajectories outside the People's...