when an organized religion gets too organized, too big, too cohesive and powerful, the rxn by the state and elite has been to cut it down to size, and removes its power to engage in collective action.
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so much stuff i read in press about china is kind of written in a historical vacuum. or, it assumes china has the same sort of history as the west. e.g., the chinese empire's relationship to religion (see attack on buddhism ~850) is a clear precedent for current illiberalism
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china generally did not have an 'established religion' like the west or islam not because organized religions weren't around. it's just that the confucian elite and political center would campaign aggressively against anything 'cult' that got too powerful.
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in the case of the founding of the ming dynasty, one of these cults actually served as the core of the rebellion against the yuan. though once the founder of the ming dynasty got power he turned against the cult and sponsored traditional state confucianism.
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in contrast in india, the hindu religion is more central to the society's identity because the religious elite, the brahmins, had a very high status among secular rulers, even if they were sub-elite rulers. this is not the case in china. buddhist monks ~ low status
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Good thread but I think it'd be even more productive for you to read into comp hist of China and Japan. Why, you ask - isn't that trite and overdone? Actually, no serious scholars have attempted this except tard-tier 'Asian studies' morons, and there's room for decent analysis
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victor lieberman's work does do contrasts. though re: religion i think japan and china have similarities. nobunaga's attack on buddhism is pretty similar in rationale to what happened with later tang
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Im familiar with his work, it forms an evidentiary pillar for structural demographic approaches (i.e. the Turchin school to which I belong) and great reference on the Nobunaga case. Pure Land Buddhism is way understudied, and reasons for crushing by state are important
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Not like there's not Western precedent either. I've had a Chinese colleague lecture me about the Investiture Controversy in this context before! "Well, Emperor Henry didn't want foreign or disloyal bishops in his realm either! That's no different from what the Party does."
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yeah. i think henry viii with the confiscation of the church lands is a better analogy. in the short term Canossa showed that the church had the emperor by the balls (for a while)
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The intended implication was that the CCP was a lot more on the ball than the Holy Roman Empire, I think.
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I had to explain once to a a group of studio executives that movies where the dead come back to life get banned in China not for arbitrary reasons, but because the country has a history of political instability being tied to resurrection cults.
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There's also the issue of how Chinese history is full of millenarian cults growing into powerful forces of chaos. In the 19th c. the Taiping became an insurgent army that instigated with bloodiest war in history before the 20th, and you could argue Maoism did something similar.
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i am highly resistant to reductive theories of Chinese "culture". Taiwan has the same cultural "background" and is democratic and free. The reason China is unfree is because it is run by brutal murderous dictators who don't want it to be free.
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Most political analysis and discourse takes liberal universalist internationalism as a given. All people are really the same and neither biology, nor culture create divergent pathways, that may be difficult, if not impossible to bridge.
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