religious social organization
The contemporary Chinese religious landscape is a hybrid system in which a “confessional” approach to religious affiliation, management, and academic discourse (in which people are labeled as either atheist or “believers” in one exclusive “religion” managed by a single institution) is superimposed on the Chinese religious culture in which cosmology, ritual, scriptures, practices of worship and spiritual cultivation, and temples and communities are pervasive but interconnected and organized in a very different way. This chapter traces how this hybrid system came into being, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present day.