There is a very different relationship between religion and the state in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the one hand and Taiwan on the other.  In the PRC the relationship is contentious, in Taiwan relatively harmonious.  It was not always this way.  In the 1950s and 1960s, both the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the PRC and the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan set up structures to control religious activity, while putting out propaganda discouraging most forms of religious belief and practice. The evolution of religion-state relationships in Taiwan involved not only the transformation of political structures but also the creative development of new forms of religious belief and practice among the Taiwanese middle classes.  How did this evolution take place in Taiwan?  Under what conditions it could happen in the PRC?

Richard Madsen is Professor and Chair of the department of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. He received an MA in Asian studies and a Ph. D. in sociology from Harvard. He is the author, or co-author of eleven books on Chinese culture, American culture, and international relations. He has also written scholarly articles on how to compare cultures and how to facilitate dialogue among them. His best known works on American culture are those written with Robert Bellah, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton: Habits of the Heart (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995) and The Good Society (New York, Knopf, 1991). These books explore and criticize the culture of individualism and the institutions that sustain it. Habits of the Heart won the LA Times Book Award and was jury nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His books on China include Chen Village under Mao and Deng (co-author with Anita Chan and Jonathan Unger) (Berkeley, UC Press, 1992), Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (UC Press, 1984) [winner of the C. Wright Mills Award], Unofficial China (co-edited with Perry Link and Paul Pickowicz) (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1989), China and the American Dream (UC Press, 1994), China’s Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (UC Press, 1998), and  Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing  Society, co-edited with Perry Link and Pickowicz (Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). Books on social theory include: Meaning and Modernity, co-edited with William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, Steven Tipton (UC Press, 2002) and The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2003).