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Date(s)： 2018/11/21
Time： 10:00~12:00
Venue： Research 1st Meeting Room
Speaker：Prof. Stephen A. Smith(Department of History, University of Oxford)
Organizer： State and Society Research Group
The lecture will look both at official policy towards the five religions by the PRC and at the implementation of policy at the grass roots (using archival sources). It will ask how far policy followed that of the Soviet Union, how far that of the Nationalist government. It will analyse the shift from a ‘united front’ policy, which allowed some autonomy to the officially recognized religions towards a more repressive policy from the time of the Great Leap Forward. It will investigate the impact of the revolution – in its economic, social and political dimensions – on the religion of the majority of the population, which was not officially recognized, being labelled 封建迷信. The lecture will examine in some detail the efforts of ordinary people to maintain their traditional rituals, especially in the wake of the famine. It will go on to examine the Socialist Education Movement (1963-66) on local religion and show how it foreshadowed many of the policies associated with the Cultural Revolution. It ends by asking what the rapid revival of religion in the reform era tells us about the nature of power in the Mao era.