Multiple Secularities in
Culturally Chinese Societies
André Laliberté

1 Introduction
Despite extensive academic discussion about de-centring the conceptof secularity, very few academics have looked at contemporary China.
This should not be surprising as the concept of ‘secularity’, and its
cognates ‘secular’, ‘secularisation’, and ‘secularism’ rarely translate wellinto Chinese.1 This article explores whether and how Wohlrab-Sahrand Burchardt’s conceptual framework for understanding secularity
beyond the West and beyond modernity can be applied to China.2
My focus here is on a case of secularity beyond the West, in modernity. I will present axiomatic arguments generated by the scholarshipon secularity and assess their relevance to China. In other words,
this article looks into the lessons we can derive from China’s own
recent history of relations between religious and non-religious social
spheres to enrich our understanding of secularity beyond the West,
and, at the same time, contribute to the de-othering of China and thecritique of positive orientalism.3
A major argument made in this essay is that the particular features of secularity in China are not the inevitable result of a culturalconfiguration determining institutional arrangements between religion and the spheres of the secular. Although the language and terminology of these arrangements may be culturally specific and intelligible only within the sinosphere, i.e. to people who can understand1

2
3

Translating the ‘secular’in Chinese

For a critical discussion of secularisation in the Chinese context, see José Casanova, “Asian Catholicism, Interreligious Colonial Encounters and Dynamics ofSecularism in Asia,” in The Secular in South, East, and Southeast Asia, ed. Kenneth
Dean and Peter van der Veer (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
See also Monika Wohlrab-Sahr and Marian Burchardt, “Multiple Secularities: Toward
a Cultural Sociology of Secular Modernities,” Comparative Sociology 11, no. 6 (2012).
This concept, deployed years ago by Goodman, White, and Kwon, deconstructed
the projection of an ideal-typical corporatist/residual welfare state in East Asiansocieties. See Roger Goodman, Gordon White, and Kwon Huck Ju, eds., The East
Asian Welfare Model: Welfare Orientalism and the State (London: Routledge, 1998).
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Taiwan: a secular state
in a Chinese society

Importance ofChinese societies

written Chinese, this does not pre-ordain the creation of a specificform of secular state such as the current mode of regulation of religion enforced by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The case of
Taiwan, another important centre within the sinosphere where secularity differs from that seen in China, illustrates the vast repertoire of
institutional arrangements possible in Chinese societies, and highlights the importance of agency in shaping institutions.
2 Secularity in China and Taiwan
In the case of China, Goossaert has noted a gap between scholars in
the humanities who do well at taking religious values into consideration based on their knowledge of classical Chinese, and the social scientists who are often very strong on the politics of religion but rather weakon religious values and their influence on society.4 One challenge facedby the study of secularity in Chinese societies is that the concept of secularism and the secular state is largely absent from the Chinese politicallexicon, and the concept of secularisation barely appears in discussion ofChina, or to put it differently, China is most often absent from comparative discussions on secularism, the secular state, and secularisation. For
those who believe that religion had little influence in China, discussions
about secularity in the country are irrelevant.5 The massive evidence ofreligious life in China since time immemorial, however, has led others toconclude that secularity may perhaps be irrelevant because both the conceptual distinctions and structural differentiations between religious andnon-religious spheres of society remain unclear.6 However, China matters too much to leave it out of the debate on secularity. Moreover, while
the People’s Republic of China is the most obvious example of relations
between religion and other social spheres in a society with a Confucian
heritage, the case of Taiwan shows that societies with such a cultural heritage can also produce other outcomes.
4

5
6

2

Vincent Goossaert, “For a History of Religious Ideas in Modern and Contemporary China,” in Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions, vol. 1,
State of the Field and Disciplinary Approaches, ed. André Laliberté and Stefania
Travagnin (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019).
A two-tome history of atheism in China since the Qin dynasty makes this point
strongly. See Ya Hanzhan 牙含章 and Wang Yousan 王友三, Zhongguo wushenlun
shi (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2011).
On that claim, see John Lagerwey, China: A Religious State (Hong Kong: Universityof Hong Kong Press, 2010).

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Starting from the axiom that contemporary societies have institutionalised specific forms of secularity as a result of historical struggle,
Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt define four ideal-types of secularitythat address specific reference problems, each of which are resolvedby the application of a specific guiding idea. The first reference problem has to do with domination by a religious institution, ecclesiasticalorders, or dogma; the guiding idea mobilised to address this problem
is the promotion of individual freedom. The second reference problem of religious heterogeneity and the risk of inter-religious conflicts
if not domination by a majority religion over minority ones calls
for the management of religious diversity through regimes of collective rights and legal recognition to guarantee tolerance and noninterference in religious affairs. The third problem of ensuring national and social integration and development, which conservative
clerical and lay leaders in powerful religious establishments havesought to resist, has been resolved by the promotion within andoutside of religious institutions of the values of enlightenment andprogress. Finally, the last reference problem of unclear boundaries
between different institutional domains is resolved by the guiding
idea of efficiency and autonomy.7
In order to assess the extent to which Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt’s
approach can be applied to China, I will systematically assess the extent to which, and under what conditions, each of the four reference
problems and their solutions are relevant to two Chinese societies. This
examination could include at least four societies: China under the Qing
dynasty, the Republic of China (ROC) from 1911 to 1949, the People’s
Republic of China (PRC), as well as the ROC in Taiwan after 1949. For
reasons of brevity, I will focus on the People’s Republic of China (PRC)
and the ROC, or Taiwan, since 1949.
3 Secularity in China
Although the CCP has ruled the PRC unopposed since 1949, its
approach to religion has varied in that time, partly in response tofactional disputes. At least five distinct periods can be identified in
the time since the CCP took power. Two occurred under the shadowof Mao Zedong’s rule. The first was a period of regime consolidation
7

Secularity as theoutcome of historicalstruggles

Testing the relevanceof secularity tocontemporary Chinesesocieties

Five periods and the
PRC`s religious policy
since 1949

Wohlrab-Sahr and Burchardt, “Multiple Secularities,” 890.
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between 1949 and 1957 when the government sought to win overreligions. The second, from the outbreak of the ‘anti-rightist’ campaign until the rule of the ‘Gang of Four’, soon after Mao’s death,
was a period of radicalisation during which the CCP implemented
an anti-religious policy.8 In the third period, under Deng Xiaoping(1978–1989), religions received recognition and there was a clearly visible process of differentiation between state-recognised religions and other social institutions. At the time, however, other religious phenomena, such as ‘qigong fever’, went undetected abroad.
During the fourth period, under Jiang Zemin (1989–2002), the CCP
attacked qigong as an ‘evil cult’ (xiejiao 邪教), while provincial governments promoted a cult to the Yellow Emperor that suggested a
reduction in differentiation between religion and culture.9 Under
Hu Jintao (2002–2012), the promotion of ‘harmonious society’, with
its reference to Confucianism, suggested a deepening of that process. Under Xi Jinping, two simultaneous movements indicate afurther stage in the ongoing process of lessening differentiation: There
have been calls to make religions ‘Chinese’ and efforts to promoteas ‘culture’ Buddhism, Daoism, and certain practices which many
Western scholars call ‘popular religions’.
Secularity to protect against religious domination

Forced marxist
emancipation fromthe ‘old society’

In the first years of Mao’s rule, the CCP promoted the objectives ofsocial revolution. Here, the reference problem was not individual
freedom, but liberation for the masses and, ultimately, emancipation from the structures of power inherited from the ‘old society’.
Relying on a simplified reading of Marxism about religion as the “opium of the people”, CCP cadres regarded communal religions at least
as a source of oppression that reproduced landlords and rich farmers’
domination over poor ones if not as ‘superstitions’ that maintained
people in ignorance. It looked at Christians as the accomplices of foreign imperialists, and at followers of sectarian religions as ‘reactionary’ saboteurs. In that context, CCP cadres thought that their materialist philosophical position emancipated people from what they8
94This chronology is partly inspired by that of Duan: Duan Dezhi 段德智, Xin Zhongguo zongjiao gongzuoshi 新中国宗教工作史 (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 2013).
See Térence Billeter, L’empereur jaune: Une tradition politique chinoise (Paris: LesIndes savantes, 2007).

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saw as their wrong conceptions of the world. Aware that an overly
dogmatic attitude toward all religions risked alienating the peasantsthat they claimed to represent, the CCP leaders first adopted a relatively pragmatic approach, based on a theory of ‘five characteristics’, which argued that religion is mass-based, ethnic, long-lasting,international, and complex.10 The Cultural Revolution, however,threw away this cautious approach and attacked all religions as partof the ‘old society’, only to proclaim a kind of civil religion centred
on Chairman Mao, who was described among other things as “theMessiah of the Working People”.11 During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP left wing regarded individual freedom asa ‘bourgeois value’. The views on Mao’s exalted status and on religion
in general that the CCP imposed on the entire population could notamount to a form of secularity.
While the CCP’s extreme position during the years of intense
political mobilisation sought to hasten the withering away of religion,
the return in 1978 to a semblance of normalcy with Deng Xiaoping’s
ascent to power revealed the failure of that policy. Religious belief
had continued to exist, albeit underground, and during the brief
period between the ‘Beijing Spring’ of 1978 and the student movement of 1989, China experienced a period of relative freedom of
expression. The guiding idea of freedom from religious domination
was not taken seriously by the regime as most religions had lost thematerial resources required to exercise any influence on society.
The Cultural Revolution had destroyed many places of worship andnullified the authority of most clerics, and for the first twenty years
after, the institutionalised religions focused their energy on recovering from the damage inflicted upon them. In the 1990s, with
Jiang Zemin as President, emergent religious movements that were
not recognised by the state were repressed while state-recognised
religions, and Buddhism in particular, gained favour. Arguably,
state-recognised religions dominated minority religions – a setback
for the guiding idea of individual freedom of conscience.

A policy indifferent to
individual freedom

Softening of CCP
policies but still limited
freedom of conscience

10 This theory was proposed by Li Weihan, a party leader in charge of formulating
party ideology.
11 Zuo jiping, “Political Religion: The Case of the Cultural Revolution in China,”
Sociology of Religion 52, no. 1 (1991): 101.
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Secularity to prevent inter-religious conflicts

State tradition that
determined religious
orthodoxy6

The reference problem of religious heterogeneity in China has twodimensions: a long history of conflicts between religious heterodoxy and the state; and the conflicts between the official religionsof the centralised Han state and the religions of the minorities. The
first problem relates to opposition between religious orthodoxy(zheng 正) and heterodoxy (xie 邪), which includes popular religious
movements and sects among the Han population. As Hubert Seiwert
argues, what is deemed orthodox has changed over the course of
China’s history. Before the imperial era, political rulers regarded Confucian teachings as heterodox, and it was only after the Han dynasty
adopted the Confucian canon that they became orthodox.12 Daoism
and Buddhism would go through a similar process in subsequent
dynasties.13 By the Song, these three traditions constituted an orthodoxy that expected support from the state in combatting sectarian
movements that used their teachings. The practice of ‘polytropy’, orthe simultaneous worship of rites affiliated to these three traditions, aswell as the practice of communal religions that incorporated them ina ritual system approved by the state, have left the impression of a harmonious heterogeneity.14 However, from the beginning, attacks against
heterodoxy have countered this impression with the state interpreting
eschatological beliefs about a future of peace and justice promoted byheterodox religious groups as political dissidence.15 From the Yellow
Turban (184-205 AD) during the Han dynasty, to the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), the intertwining of the religious and the political canbe observed throughout China’s imperial history.
Between 1949 and 1966, the CCP sought to address the problem of heterodoxy among the Han population. Although it useddifferent terminology, the CCP essentially reproduced the policies
against heterodox associations that had previously been imposed
12 Hubert Seiwert, Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 30.
13 Seiwert, Popular Religious Movements, 32.
14 I thank my colleague Sven Bretfeld for introducing me to this idea by Carrithers:
Michael Carrithers, “On Polytropy: Or the Natural Condition of Spiritual Cosmopolitanism in India: The Digambar Jain Case,” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 4(2000). See also Dionigi Albera, “Digressions on Polytropy: An Exploration of
Religious Eclecticism in Eurasia,” Entangled Religions 9, no. 5 (2019).
15 Seiwert, Popular Religious Movements, 14.

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by emperors. In a ‘campaign against reactionary sects’, it ruthlessly
clamped down on heterodox movements that it saw as a potential
threat to its rule.16 During the same period, as mentioned above, it
adopted a more lenient policy towards Buddhism, Daoism, Islam,Protestantism and Catholicism. The Cultural Revolution, when
the CCP briefly changed its approach and the Red Guards forcibly
closed down the institutions of state-recognised religions, can be
regarded as an exception. The CCP subsequently repudiated its
Cultural Revolution policy and introduced its policy of reform andopening. Since then, the government has maintained its approachof limited and state-controlled religious plurality. It recognises thesame five religions and enjoins them to enforce orthodoxy andpolice their followers to ensure that they do not oppose the party
and love their country before they love their religion (aiguo aijiao
爱国爱教). The CCP has failed to produce a guiding idea to address
the reference problem of religious heterogeneity. To the contrary,
it limits this heterogeneity, persecuting so-called ‘evil cults’ andrejecting calls to have Confucianism or popular religions promoted
as a ‘sixth’ religion of China.
The CCP has also failed to come up with any guiding idea toaddress the reference problem of the sometimes-tense relations between the Han and minorities with different religions. No credible
constitutional guarantee protecting the rights of minorities toself-determination, power-sharing arrangement, or independentinter-religious dialogue exists. The regime of autonomy, which
was put in place to protect the culture, language, and religions ofminorities has failed in its aims.17 The CCP’s paternalistic supervision of the national minorities does not appear to be secularity
in the name of conflict prevention. The CCP has called for national unity and denounced “extremism, separatism, and terrorism”,
making reference to ethnic conflicts rather than disputes over religious matters. Minority leaders regard these calls for national unity

Rigid suppression ofreligion during the
Cultural Revolution
as an exception

CCP restriction on
diverity

Limited protection ofminority rights

16 I am using the term ‘heterodoxy’ in its Chinese sense of deviation from what thestate considers ‘orthodox’ (zheng). The CCP is concerned about political orthodoxy, i.e. compliance with its policies. I thank Hubert Seiwert for bringing thisnuance to my attention.
17 André Laliberté, “The Two Shadows of Empire and Still-Born Federalism in China,” in Assessing Territorial Pluralism, ed. Karlo Basta, John McGary, and Richard
Simeon (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015).
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as a denial of their religions, and the assertion of the Han majority
value system and its religious antecedents.
Secularity for social development

CCP aimed to provide
social services in all
domains

State monopoly of social
provisions under Mao

8

To a certain degree, the CCP has successfully used the guiding ideaof progress and enlightenment to solve the reference problems ofsocial integration and development, which were at least as pressing
as, if not more pressing than that of national unity. When developing
the CCP’s approach to religion with respect to development, the intellectuals at the institutes for the study of Marxism-Leninism, Mao
Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping’s theory, as well as the Instituteof World Religions at the Academy of Social Sciences, have looked to
Marxism, the experience of various developing economies, and thepractice of the imperial state .
Borrowing from the reading of Marxism according to which theideological superstructure legitimises social hierarchies, CCP leaders
saw that it was imperative to undercut the authority of religious
leaders, especially at the village level. This occurred in a number ofstages. Between 1949 and 1978, it merely amounted to taking mostresources owned by religious institutions at the village level to ensure that they would not gain influence by providing social services.
Simultaneously, the CCP aimed to provide services in every domainof social policy, including health care, education, social insurance
and social assistance, to ensure welfare from the cradle to the grave.
During the land reform campaign of 1950–1951, the new regime
requisitioned the remaining plots belonging to Daoist, Buddhist, andcommunal religious temples that the previous regime had not seized
to accumulate the means to deliver services. During the Great Leap
Forward, the difficulties experienced by religious institutions merely
mirrored the misery faced by the population in general as the economy and social services collapsed. During the Cultural Revolution,
the CCP saw the remnants of religions as standing in the way of theresolution of a host of economic and social development problems
created by previous policies. Religious institutions had to close andclerical personnel return to lay life as part of the productive masses.
After 1978, the CCP changed its economic and social policy andlooked to the example of Taiwan, which was entering the second
decade of its ‘economic miracle’, and other East Asian developing

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economies.18 It explored the possibility of using the resources ofreligious actors to develop tourism in local economies as overseas
Chinese started to restore ancestral halls and help rebuild Buddhist and Daoist temples. That period of opening to foreign investment and economic reform, however, led to the collapse of publichealth care in the countryside, an increase in the number of migrant
workers with limited eligibility to social protection, and destitution
for many of the laid-off workers in the de-industrialising northeast.
This social dislocation presented opportunities for healers who promoted ‘working on the life force’ (qigong 气功), a concept central topopular religions, as a remedy for ill health, depression, and otherailments. The CCP was alarmed by the growth of movements promoting qigong, regarding it as a challenge to its legitimacy, andlaunched a campaign of repression.
Further challenges emerged in the later stages of the policy of reform and opening, when the massive influx of migrant workers into
cities generated new social categories of excluded populations suchas homeless people and left-behind children. Furthermore, decadesof the one-child policy had led to a dramatic ageing of the populationand the emergence of a skewed sex ratio which saw millions of men
facing poor to non-existent marriage prospects. To respond to theseissues, the CCP briefly considered mobilising the resources of thestate-sanctioned religions to assist the government in the delivery ofsocial services to vulnerable populations, thereby imitating policies
adopted by the liberal and conservative Western welfare states. These
policy experiments primarily targeted the disabled, orphans, elderly
people without relatives, and people suffering from AIDS. Under Xi,
it is still not clear whether the CCP wants to pursue this policy. Indeed, religions appear to be succumbing to museumification.19

Economic reform andopening led to massive
social problems

CCP mobilised resourcesof state-sanctioned
religions for social
services

Since 2012, CCP
hesitates on letting
religions help the state

18 Starting with the activities of the Taiwanese Tzu Chi charity in China in 1992 andthe opening of the Nanputuo temple’s charity association in 1994, Buddhism hasreceived a lot of attention from scholars and officials. An edited volume by Wang
Jia brings together texts on this subject by epistemic communities of experts insocial policy and religious affairs: Wang Jia 王佳, ed., Zhongguo fojiao he cishan
gongyi shiye 中国佛教和慈善公益事业 (Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua chubanshe 宗教
文化出版社, 2014).
19 Robert J. Shepherd, Faith in Heritage: Displacement, Development, and Religious
Tourism in Contemporary China (London: Routledge, 2016).
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Secularity for the differentiation of specific domains

No clear distinctionof ‘religion’, neitherto ‘superstition’ nor
to ‘culture’

Overlapping of‘medicine’ and‘religion’ in qigong

10Functional differentiation of religion from other spheres of social life
represents a key marker of modernity as religion loses influence andpower to the benefit of the political system, the economy, and otherdomains. China has presented a special problem for sociologists
looking into how the country undertook this process because historically many aspects of its religious life have remained intertwinedwith other spheres of society. This intertwining has often been unclear to outside observers who were not familiar with China and did
not see a religious dimension inherent in some of its social practice,which was either hastily dismissed as ‘superstition’ or presented as‘alternative medicine’ or ‘culture’.20 Indeed, the practice of geomancy(fengshui 风水), generally construed as an art form in Chinese metaphysics, or the divination text Book of Transformation (yijing 易经),are in a grey zone between ‘superstition’, ‘religion’ and ‘pseudo-science’.21 Although they do not receive official endorsement from the
CCP, the abundance of titles discussing geomancy and divination
sold in bookstores near sections on religion, philosophy, or ‘national
study’, reveal the popularity of this worldview, but also its ambiguous
status, undifferentiated from other domains of social life. Although
Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian scholars may refer to the yijing, it
has no religious institution with a personnel exclusively dedicated to
its interpretation.
The qigong movement constitutes another telling example of alack of differentiation between religion and other social domains,in this case medical science. As Palmer explains in his research on
the movement, many proponents of this calisthenics have praised
the therapeutic value of breathing exercises, and made statements
about the nature of qi, or ‘vital force’, ‘energy flow’, whose main characteristics cannot be apprehended via ordinary scientific knowledge. During the 1990s, qigong masters made bold claims about thesuperiority of this uniquely Chinese form of medical knowledge and
20 I admit that this etic perspective raises some thorny problems: the Chinese do
not count these practices as religions. When non-Chinese observers characterise
them as religious, they have to rely on theories or conceptualisations of religion
that can be controversial and do not make the boundaries between the religious
and non-religious any less blurry.
21 On fengshui, see Ole Bruun, Fengshui in China: Geomantic Divination between State
Orthodoxy and Popular Religion (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003).

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gained officials among the adoptees of their practices.22 Falungong,
one of the most popular of the qigong groups, faced criticism fromthe medical establishment for its lack of scientific and professional
credentials, and from the religious establishment for its ‘heterodox’
teachings. After some media outlets denounced Falungong as a ‘cult’and the movement’s response to the negative publicity was either
ignored or ridiculed, thousands of its followers responded by surrounding the CCP headquarters in 1999, asking for public recognition of their services to society. Following a promise by the Premier
Zhu Rongji that the CCP would consider their grievances, an investigation revealed that many veterans and retired CCP members hadjoined Falungong. Jiang Zemin saw this as a concatenation of some of
the CCP’s worst fears: namely, infiltration of the CCP by a sectarian
movement to undermine its authority. Jiang ordered a crackdown on
all qigong groups, which the CCP labelled as ‘evil cults’.23
This crisis brought to light the practical consequences of the
problem of a lack of differentiation between religions and othersocial spheres in the PRC. As a self-proclaimed vanguard organisation, the CCP could not compete with any other social organisation
about matters of absolute truth and had difficulty accepting the constitution of an independent sphere of religion. The imposition of astructure of control over religious affairs for each of the five religions
reflected this. With Xi Jinping, concern about the independence ofreligious actors has only increased. In 2018, in a move to further
tighten its control over religious affairs, the CCP announced the dissolution of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA)
as a separate entity.24 The institution is now under the direct supervision of the CCP United Front Work Department, a unit charged
with communicating party directives to mass organisations, andgaining intelligence about how the latter receive them. This type of
relationship evokes the totalitarian system that Mao sought to impose on the entire society, and represents a trend opposite to thatof social differentiation, religious associations becoming a conduit

Ambiguity led to
criticism from medical
and religious establishment, as in the case of
Falungong

CCP tried to crackdown
qigong als ‘evil cult’State control to limit
the development of an
independent religious
sphere22 David Palmer, La fièvre du qigong: Guérison, religion et politique en Chine, 1949–
1999 (Paris: Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2005).
23 James W. Tong, Revenge of the Forbidden City: The Suppression of the Falun Gongin China, 1999–2005 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2009).
24 SARA itself resulted from a restructuring of the Bureau for Religious Affairs.
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for the political order. The realities of local governance, which varyacross a country as large and diverse as China, are likely to limit
this.25 However, it is evident that there are obstacles preventing differentiation between the political and the religious.

State atheism to preempt religious conflicts
and domination

Close intertwining of
religion and statedomains throughcontrol and absorption

To sum up, secularity in China exists for the sake of ensuring development. This means a nominal acceptance that some people have aright to believe in religion, but also the view that the state has a duty
to deliver atheist education. The CCP’s claims of protecting against
religious group domination over individuals ring hollow when set
against the numerous cases of egregious human rights abuse targeting practitioners of Falungong and the harassment of Christians
among the Han. The assertion that the CCP aims to pre-empt potential religious conflicts amounts to no less than an Orwellian statement in light of the re-education campaign against Muslims underway in Xinjiang, which is likely to stir up resentment rather thandecrease it. The guiding idea to solve the largely non-existent problems of religious domination and inter-ethnic conflicts are neither
the promotion of individual freedom nor inter-religious dialogue
but the paternalistic idea that atheistic education can best address
both issues. Finally, the CCP’s institutionalisation of its bureaucracy
for religious affairs and the patriotic religious associations under its
close oversight are the antithesis of the independent development ofinstitutional domains, which the CCP regards with a high degree of
suspicion.
4 Secularity in Taiwan
The periodisation of Taiwanese history from 1949 to the present day
is considerably simpler. Taiwan underwent a straightforward transition from a hard authoritarian regime to a vibrant democracy in thespace of a few years. Between 1949 and 1987, the Nationalist Party,
or Guomindang (GMD), imposed martial law and kept religious
activities under close supervision. The party imposed a structure of

12

25 See, for example, the case study by Ashiwa and Wank, which describes how many
local bureaus for religious affairs and local Buddhist associations have managed
to defend their own interests relatively successfully: Yoshiko Ashiwa and David
Wank, “The politics of a reviving Buddhist temple: state, association, and temple
in southeast China,” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (2006).
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corporatist control on the religious activities it recognised, and police
surveillance on those it deemed ‘secret societies’ or ‘obscene cults’.
It generally disparaged the local communal religions as ‘wastefulsuperstitions’. While some of the GMD elite held sceptical views
on religion, others maintained their affiliation with Buddhist associations, new religions that were banned in the PRC, or Christianchurches. Some of the GMD elite had radically opposite views on theissue of national identity.26 During the process of democratic transition, many perspectives on religious affairs competed openly, andwere promoted by government officials, civil society actors, and religious associations.

Restrictive religious
policy until the
democratisation

Secularity to protect against religious domination

Religious domination was not a salient issue before or after democratisation in Taiwan. No religious institution had the power to impose
its views on society. When the GMD took charge of the island, it
eradicated the remnants of Japanese influence, leaving little trace of
Shinto, which had briefly been imposed when the island was underJapanese rule. Because Taiwan’s leaders adhered to different religions,
including different Christian denominations, and held a diversityof views on religion itself, there was no unanimity to impose withinsociety besides the rejection of Communism.
Individual freedom of conscience in Taiwan since the process of
democratic consolidation has found expression in the island’s constitutional approach and laissez-faire policy towards religion.27 However, only a minority of the population thinks that the law must protect
the population against abuse in the name of religion and very few believe that religion dominates their lives. Even when Taiwanese society
witnessed cases of fraud and exploitation by religious entrepreneurs in
the 1990s, calls for legislation on religions remained muted. Moreover,no countermovement emerged to advocate the silencing of religious
voices when religious associations formed a coalition to oppose a legal
amendment recognising same-sex marriage in 2018, which received

Diversity and religious
freedom after the
democratic transition

26 Chiang Kai-shek, the authoritarian ruler between 1945 and 1976, promoted theidea of a ‘free China’ and ordered the killing of Taiwanese independence activists.
President Lee Teng-hui was a devout Presbyterian. The Presbyterian Church advocated for Taiwanese self-determination.
27 Cheng-tian Kuo, “State-Religion Relations in Taiwan: From Statism and Separatism
to Checks and Balances,” Issues and Studies 49, no.1 (2013).
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13Companion to the Study of Secularity – André Laliberté: Multiple Secularities in Culturally Chinese Societies

Absence of religious
domination

support from the majority of the population. Since there was no reference problem of religious domination in Taiwanese society, not manysocial actors took up preserving individual freedom as a guiding ideaof secularity.
Secularity to prevent inter-religious conflicts

Absence of religious
conflicts

Taiwan did not experience major inter-religious conflicts before orafter 1945. No religion was ever in a position to impose its values
and authority on the population because none counted more than athird of the population as its adherents, and no major political party
represented one religion. The diversity of religious affiliations in boththe GMD since 1945 and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP)
since it was established in 1987 has reflected the plurality of religious
identities found in wider society. The GMD’s chairpersons have belonged to different denominations and religions, starting with Methodism (Chiang Kai-shek), Presbyterianism (Lee Teng-hui), Catholicism (Ma Ying-Jeou), and Buddhism (Wu Po-Hsiung), or professed
none. Likewise, the leaders of the DPP have had different religious
affiliations or none. It is also telling that in the 1996 presidential election, both Lee Teng-hui and the DPP’s candidate Peng Ming-min
were Presbyterians.
Secularity for social development

Government
appreciated religious
engagement in thesocial sector

14

In Taiwan, the GMD seldom referred to the ideas of enlightenment
and progress when addressing the issue of national development.
Although the government looked down on the practices of popularreligions as wasteful during the martial law period, it could not prevent them. The GMD elite appreciated the contribution religion madeto alleviating the state’s burden when it came to social assistance andrecognised the value of charity performed by religions in providing
support to marginalised parts of the population. To that end, the government provided land grants and other forms of support to encourage the establishment of care homes for the elderly, clinics, and otherforms of social services by churches, and later encouraged Buddhist
institutions to provide similar services. During democratisation, as
citizens expected the state to invest more in social services, and political parties outbid each other in this area in order to win votes,
the contribution of religions changed slightly. Local governments

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promoted popular religions as cultural heritage, and the central
authority advertised freedom of religion in Taiwan and the overseas
relief work of Taiwan-based Buddhist NGOs as diplomatic assets.
Secularity for the differentiation of specific domains

In Taiwan, social differentiation succeeded even when the island wasunder martial law. During that period, the GMD sought to control
the direction of the economy as much as possible and enforce its monopoly on the political system. However, it did not feel threatenedby economic actors, professional corporations, and religious associations. Most of these actors did not have an antagonistic relationshipwith the GMD so there was no reason to prevent their development.
Religious associations shared the state’s broad objective of economic
development within the framework of a market economy, freedom of
movement, and freedom of conscience. For this reason, the processof social differentiation did not encounter any major obstacles.
The process of democratic transition has only reinforced thetrend of differentiation of religions from other spheres of society.28
This became embodied by a gradual disengagement of the government from religious affairs, which varied from religion to religion.
Although institutional religions such as Buddhism and Christianity
have successfully established their autonomy from the state, popularreligions remain intertwined with the social fabric. This is especiallyvisible during electoral campaigns when politicians visit temple committees and ask them to deliver votes in their constituencies. Whilethe last two guiding ideas have contributed to the development ofsecularity, calls to protect against religious domination and the prevention of inter-religious conflicts never became a major guiding
idea the way they did in the PRC.

Democratisation
reinforced social
differentiation ofreligion

To sum up, as in China, development is a guiding idea behind secularity in Taiwan. However, religious associations work in concert
with the government, not against or in spite of it, to help address the

28 For an appreciation of the role of religion during democratisation, see Richard
Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in
Taiwan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). Contrary views haveemerged in the media following the controversies of 2017.
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – André Laliberté: Multiple Secularities in Culturally Chinese Societies

problems of economic development and social welfare.29 Unlike in
China, in Taiwan the guiding idea of development has been reinforced since the 1980s by the guiding ideas of inter-religious dialogue,
and of a functional differentiation between religious actors and othertypes of actors. This has shaped the distinctive character of secularity in Taiwan. Inter-religious dialogue has promoted the protectionof minorities, ensuring no religion ends up in a position to impose
its views on society. Taiwan’s vast inter-religious and intra-religious
diversity has certainly provided a powerful incentive to support this.
Functional differentiation has also been relatively effective as a substantial proportion of the population is either indifferent to religion,or even atheist. Non-believers support the idea of a clear separation
between religious institutions and other institutions, even if theseboundaries, as seen above, may get blurred in electoral campaigns, orwhen religious associations provide relief following natural disasters.

China: state ambitionof subordinating
religion

16

5 Conclusion
In China, most Christians, Muslims, and believers in other religions
acknowledge the reality of secularity, in which the religious systems
whose specific rules they observe exist alongside the legal and political systems that govern relations between their religious institutions
and the rest of society. Many individuals who profess indifference on
religious or political matters are aware of distinct spheres of religious
and non-religious domains in society, and the conflicts between
some religions and the CCP. The PRC has ‘secularity with Chinesecharacteristics’, understood by many religious believers to be ‘subordination of religion to the state’. This understanding is shared byother citizens indifferent to religious matters who care about freedom of conscience. Such ‘secularity with Chinese characteristics’,
however, can hardly lead to the institutionalisation of a secular state,whether understood as a strict separation between two equally legitimate spheres of the religious and the political or as state indifference
on religious matters.
Taiwan, on the other hand, has seen secularity recognised but not
imposed by the state elite. As a result, the gradual institutionalisationof a secular state has not faced much resistance, even from religious
29 David Schak and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, “Taiwan’s socially engaged Buddhist groups,” China perspectives 59 (2005).

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leaders, because of the laissez-faire attitude on religion exhibited bysuccessive governments during the process of democratic transition.30 The Taiwanese government does not see a threat in the double
allegiance of many citizens to earthly and otherworldly authorities.
The Taiwanese perceive secularity as encouragement towards interreligious understanding, religious institutions’ philanthropy as a positive contribution to society, and the clear institutional separation
between religion and state as a guarantee of impartiality.

Taiwan: stateoutsourcing of welfare
to diverse religions

30 See Cheng-tian Kuo, Religion and Democracy in Taiwan (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008); Kuo, “State-Religion Relations in Taiwan;”
André Laliberté, “The regulation of religious affairs in Taiwan: From state control
to laisser-faire?,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 38, no. 2 (2009).
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Companion to the Study of Secularity – André Laliberté: Multiple Secularities in Culturally Chinese Societies

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This text is part of the Companion to the Study of Secularity. The intent of the Companion is to give scholars interested in the concept of Multiple Secularities, who are
not themselves specialists in particular (historical) regions, an insight into different
regions in which formations of secularity can be observed, as well as into the key
concepts and notions with respect to the study of secularity.
It is published by the Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Multiple
Secularities − Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities”. For as long as the HCAS
continues to exist, the Companion will be published and further expanded on the
HCAS’ website. Towards the end of Multiple Secularities project, all entries will
be systematised and edited in order to transform the Companion into a completed
Open Access publication.
Please cite as:
Laliberté, André. “Multiple Secularities in Culturally Chinese Societies.” In Companion to the Study of Secularity. Edited by HCAS “Multiple Secularities – Beyond
the West, Beyond Modernities.” Leipzig University, 2020. www.multiple-secularities.de/media/css_laliberte_chinesesocieties.pdf

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