Events

Over the past thirty years, China experienced a simultaneous burst of religious revival and economic boom. On the one hand, wealth floods into the construction and rebuilding of religious places. On the other, the widening gap between the rich and poor, metropolitan centers and rural margins has increased the needs for development projects that are able to re-distribute the wealth to a certain degree. Meanwhile, as the Chinese government leads the country from planned economy to market economy, it has also shed some of its burdens of social welfare provision, thus leaving room for other social actors to participate in the field of delivering social services. Among those actors who find themselves in the new space of public engagement, religions not only provide valuable social capital for identifying the needy, organizing volunteers and distributing goods, but also provide salient spiritual and cultural meaning for people’s actions. Historically, Chinese charitable institutions often take the form of lineages, business associations and locality groups. Present-day developmental and philanthropic organizations in China often take the secular forms of NGOs such as the One Foundation (set up by the Chinese actor Jet Li) or GONGOS such as United Association for Chinese Charity, under the Ministry for Civil Affairs. The role religions play in development is under-studied. This does not mean, however, that they do not exist. On the contrary, the intersection of religion and development in contemporary China is very active, innovative and diverse, taking various forms.

One of the features of religions’ involvement in development in China is innovation. Not only do religious individuals and institutions invent new ways of giving, mobilizing and organizing people, individuals adopt new ways of adhering to religions, local and central government also has to forge new ways of managing or collaborating with religious organization. Of course, these innovations do not mean that there are no historical continuities. On the contrary, religious groups and individuals often invoke theological roots and historical practices of charity in their tradition to achieve legitimation. This InterAsia Round Table will examine such contemporary innovations in the field of religion and development in China in order to understand the implications for the reconfiguration of religious groups, renegotiation of state-religion-society relationship, and the reshaping of new kinds of subjectivities in China.

Questions for discussion at the roundtable include:

– To what extent does the involvement of religious individuals and institutions in development change governance or force different levels of governments to reconsider their responsibilities to people as well as relationships to religious organizations? Does the fact that religious organizations are shouldering some of the burdens of the government in providing social welfare necessarily mean the state enforce less strict control over religious groups? While religious groups are often vested with more trust in developmental projects, does this push local government to be more accountable?

– What are the factors affecting religious groups’ involvement in social service provision and the extent to which their involvement differ: theology, scale, organizational structure, competition (relationship with other groups and with the state)?

– How do religious groups and individuals conceptualize what it means to be needy and who is worth helping? How do these discourses relate to, negotiate or contradict the state discourses of social welfare as well as the popular/quasi-Buddhist cultural understanding of charity and merit accumulation? How do these discourses interact with the global modern/western/Christian discourses of poverty, development, equality, etc

– What are changing faces of religious giving in China in the past thirty years? Are we witnessing a trend from non-institutionalized (e.g., temple based) giving to institutionalized giving, one-time spontaneous/sporadic giving to routinized/normalized giving? What are the implications of such changes?

– How does involvement in development change the way religious groups envision themselves and how religions are viewed in China at large? Are there “unethical” giving? How do religions deal with charity to atheists or people with different religious affiliation? Some religious groups may refrain from involvement in development because it dilutes spirituality and leads to secularization. How do we understand religion and development in light of the current debates on religion and secularity?

REGISTRATION

This event is by invitation only.
Interested participants, please contact Ms Valerie Yeo at valerie.yeo@nus.edu.sg.

CONVENORS

Dr Wu Keping, Asia Research Institute, NUS
Assoc Prof Michael Feener, Asia Research Institute & Department of History, NUS