Chinese Popular Religion

Chinese popular religion continues to fascinate both scholars and the general public in the 21st century. It does not refer to a single religious tradition but to a multitude of religious practices among Chinese, including ancestor veneration, fortune telling, and exorcism. The plural forms and contents of popular religion are not necessarily all found in China in this age of globalization. Most popular religious practices were suppressed in the People's Republic of China between the late 1950s and the 1980s due to the communist revolution and the Chinese state's iconoclastic ideology against religion. Chinese popular religion is thriving, however, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, North America, and other places where Chinese diasporic communities are found, and since the early 1990s, many of these traditional forms of ...