ARI Working Paper Series

Existing literature on religious revival in China’s ethnic minority areas often seeks to demonstrate that the revitalization of religion among the minorities would enhance ethnic pride and strengthen ethnic identity. In this paper I examine the possibility of a de-ethnicization process resulting from religious revival. I first discuss how the Communist state attempted to make “legible” the diverse groups of people in the country through the minzu shibie project. Following from this, based on fieldwork data and a review some important literature on Tibetan Buddhism, Islam and Christianity, I argue that religious revival in the ethnic minority areas could also impact on minzu in two main ways: first, exerting centrifugal pressures on sub-minzu groups, and second, allowing the minority groups to transcend minzu boundaries and facilitating their integration into de-minzuized, translocal and cosmopolitan communities.