ARI Working Paper Series

The paper deciphers a government organized symposium on “folk beliefs” in which the author took part in as an invitee. It is organized within a confined “ethnography of a conference”, but it engages constant interactions between the author’s own reflections on the concepts of superstition, folk religion, and civil solidarity and recent mainland Chinese political and intellectual discussions concerning the “crisis of faith” (or the counter-currents of atheism), “religious revival”, ethnic isolation, and the expanding Christianity.