Améliorer le niveau des croyants

Cet article aborde la question de l’évolution du protestantisme dans la Chine urbaine contemporaine à travers l’étude du discours chrétien sur le suzhi (“niveau” ou “qualité” des croyants), notion qui recouvre à la fois des dimensions culturelle, sociale, éducative et morale. Il s’agira de montrer, en mettant en regard la notion de suzhiet la formation de l’identité et du sujet dans la communauté protestante chinoise, que la dévotion des protestants aujourd’hui ne s’explique pas d’abord par la recherche de spiritualité dans un système politique caractérisé par le pouvoir de l'État. Elle est aussi et surtout motivée par un désir et des pratiques liés à la construction de soi chez des individus imprégnés de valeurs néolibérales et évoluant dans un contexte de développement rapide de l’économie de marché. On montrera également que le protestantisme chinois a connu une augmentation de ses effectifs, mais qu’il s’est aussi transformé, ce qui contredit les représentations unidimensionnelles de la religiosité chrétienne à l’ère postmaoïste

Li Xiangping, Xinyang dan bu rentong: dangdai zhongguo xinyang de shehuixue quanshi

Li Xiangping has made important contributions to the development of the sociology of religion in China by pointing out the socially and historically embedded nature of religious belief in a series of Chinese-language publications. His latest book, Believing without Identifying: The Sociological Interpretation of Spiritual Beliefs in Contemporary China, urges people to focus on various religious, spiritual, cultural, and political beliefs as social phenomena and forms of social relationship an..

Li Xiangping, Xinyang dan bu rentong : dangdai zhongguo xinyang de shehuixue quanshi

Li Xiangping a contribué au développement de la sociologie des religions en Chine en révélant, dans une série de publications en chinois, la nature sociale et historique des croyances religieuses. Son dernier ouvrage, Croire sans s’identifier : l’interprétation sociologique des croyances spirituelles en Chine contemporaine, incite à considérer diverses croyances religieuses, spirituelles, culturelles et politiques comme des phénomènes sociaux et des formes de relations sociales. Le livre insi..

Raising the Quality of Belief

The paper addresses the changing dynamics of Protestantism in contemporary urban China through the lens of the Christian discourse of quality ( suzhi). Linking suzhiwith processes of identity and subject formation in the Chinese Protestant community, the paper shows that the religiosity of today’s Chinese Protestants is not so much related to acts of spiritual seeking in a state-centred political framework as it is shaped by desires and practices of self-making among neoliberal individuals under rapid marketisation. It also demonstrates that Chinese Protestantism has undergone not just a quantitative increase but also a qualitative change that counters the one-dimensional representation of Christian religiosity in the post-Mao era

2006 Robert J. McNamara Student Paper Award: Christian Entrepreneurs and the Post-Mao State: An Ethnographic Account of Church-State Relations in China's Economic Transition

This paper examines the rise of a group of affluent urban Christians in the post-Mao market transition to shed light on China's church-state relations in the reform era. Based on ethnographic data collected in Wenzhou, the most Christianized Chinese cit

Bonding Social Capital with Bridging Effect: Youth Adaptation Processes in a Chinatown Church

Abstract not availabl

A Sinicized World Religion?: Chinese Christianity at the Contemporary Moment of Globalization

This essay explores the rise of Protestant Christianity at the contemporary stage of China’s globalization as a unique social and cultural phenomenon. Globalization can be seen as not only a homogenization process in political and economic terms, but also a process in which religious ideas and moral principles spread around the world. While in an earlier phase of globalization lack of Christianity was once constructed as a moral argument to ban Chinese migration to the Christian West, in the current context of China’s aggressive business outreach and mass emigration Christianity has become a vital social force and moral resource in binding Chinese merchants and traders in diaspora. By linking the rise of a sinicized version of Christianity in secular Europe with China’s present-day business globalization, I hope to suggest a new transnational framework for studying Chinese Christianity, which has often been examined in the nation-based political context of church-state relations, and for rethinking it beyond the static, decontextualized system of world religions