Building on the work of Prasenjit Duara, Vincent Goossaert, and Talal Asad, among others, Rebecca Nedostup's Superstitious Regimes offers a penetrating analysis of the complex confrontation between the Chinese Nationalist regime and the many faces of Chinese religion, largely during the Nanjing Decade. Her major theme is secularization, which Nationalist leaders saw as a necessary element of modern state building; traditional Chinese religion—much of which was relabelled as “superstition”—was viewed as an obstacle to mobilization and state penetration of society, as well as an international embarrassment. As part of the constitutional framework of modernity, freedom of religion was to be accorded to those religions who recast themselves along Western, generally Protestant lines, but the rights of most religious practitioners were not at the forefront of Nationalist concerns. While Islam, Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhism, and Christianity were largely left alone for geopolitical and diplomatic reasons, Buddhism, Daoism, redemptive societies. and local...

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