Yanfei Sun|Religious Change in China after Mao: Toward a New Sociology of Religion

This talk presents insights from my new book, Religious Change in Post-Mao China: Toward a New Sociology of Religion. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic, archival, and historical-comparative research, the book examines patterns of religious transformation in post-Mao China. Focusing on five major religions, it addresses key questions about their growth dynamics within a distinct political context: Why did Protestantism expand rapidly while Catholicism lagged behind? How can we account for the profound changes in Chinese popular religion during its post-Mao revival? Why did New Religious Movements, despite their potential, fail to become major players in the religious landscape? And why did the development of Chinese Buddhism diverge from both its Republican-era and post-1949 Taiwanese counterparts? The talk introduces an institutions-in-context theory that not only provides answers to these questions but also offers a framework that not only allows me to explain all these questions but has the potential to be used to understand the growth dynamics of religions across the globe. --- Event Details: https://my.princeton.edu/rsvp?id=1969833