CHINA, November 7, 2006: (HPI note: The following report appears in the November issue of Religion Watch, URL above.)
Signs of religious revival in China may reflect more complex developments than it may seem at first. An article by Graeme Lang and Lars Ragvald in the current issue of Fieldwork in Religion (Vol. 1.3, 2005) looks at the construction and reconstruction of Buddhist, Taoist and folk-religion temples since the 1980s and finds that many of them have been built to attract tourists and investors as well as to assist economic development and to assert local cultural histories. Some have been dramatic failures, not attracting the expected crowds of pilgrims and tourists. There have been cases where temple managers have introduced new features in order to make the temples more attractive to local people. In some cases, two deities have been merged into one figure. According to Lang and Ragvald, people with an entrepreneurial rather than a religious background have been the most successful builders and managers of temples, thus apparently confirming the religious economy paradigm in contemporary Chinese settings.
In a related report, Religion Watch states the Communist leadership seems to be concerned about the growth of religious activities among Party members: according to an analysis published in the Hong Kong based periodical Zhengming, out of 60 million members, up to a third are involved in some kind of religious practice. The Party leadership has reminded its members that they are not supposed to be religiously involved.