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This chapter situates Falun Gong in the history of popular religion in late imperial and modern China, seeking to identify genealogical linkages among the late imperial White Lotus sectarian tradition, the redemptive societies of the Republican period, and the qigong movement (including Falun Gong) of China's reform era. It argues that all such groups should be called “redemptive societies,” which share the following characteristics: leadership by charismatic masters, who teach fundamentalist morality and techniques of corporal transformation and who offer the promise of redemption, in the forms of healing, supernormal powers, and perhaps immortality. Methodologically, this chapter illustrates that fieldwork is crucial if one wishes to go beyond the discourse of orthodoxy and heterodoxy that has been employed by the Chinese state for centuries to label and condemn certain popular religious groups and practices.

The conclusion uses the case of Falun Gong to probe deeper issues in the history and historiography of modern China, arguing that the metanarratives of politics and revolution have obscured the important roles that religion in general and redemptive societies in particular have played in China's modern experience. The popularity of Falun Gong and qigong in the Chinese diaspora suggests that redemptive societies are not simply a product of the post‐Mao era and that they are likely to reappear in one form or another as China becomes a more open, less controlled society.

This chapter chronicles the life of Li Yujie, student leader in the Shanghai May Fourth movement and Guomindang member who went on to found a redemptive society, the Tiandijiao (Heavenly Emperor Teachings) in Taiwan in the 1980s. Li was a technocrat in the Nanjing government’s Finance Ministry when he met Xiao Changming, the founder of the Tiandejiao (Heavenly Virtues Teachings). Li became Xiao’s lieutenant, helped him to establish his society in Shanghai, and was subsequently sent to Xi’an to proselytize. Li spent the eight years of the Sino-Japanese War on Huashan, one of China’s sacred mountains, where he corresponded with the gods via spirit-writing and authored his own sacred texts combining science with the White Lotus tradition. He succeeded Xiao to the leadership of the group after Xiao’s death in 1943, but for political reasons postponed most of his religious activities until after his retirement in 1965.

Duan Zhengyuan was the charismatic leader of the Moral Studies Society, an early example of a “redemptive society”; these were new religious movements that were the most vital expressions of Chinese religiosity during the Republican period. These groups recycled traditional spiritual teachings (the scriptures were frequently conveyed via spirit-writing), often adding Western religions and embrace of science as part of their teachings, and marketed themselves as forms of “cultivation” (rather than “religion”) in which qigong or similar body technologies offered the promise of healing. Duan’s particular teachings drew on a “religionized Confucianism” with local roots in Duan’s home province of Sichuan. More generally, the redemptive societies served as popular vehicles for Confucian teachings, which had lost institutional support as well as that of much of the intellectual elite. Like Yinguang, Duan employed the tools of the new media technology of the time—including photographs—to spread his movement.

Part I of the book is dedicated to the current revival of Confucianism-inspired jiaohua, that is, education associated with a transformative dimension. The objective of this chapter is to contextualize the current revival of Confucian education by tracing lines of continuity that ran across the twentieth century. It introduces institutions (e.g., traditional schools, or sishu, and Confucian academies, or shuyuan) and projects that aimed at perpetuating or regenerating Confucian education. It also proposes a brief overview of the status ascribed to classical texts—and especially Confucian texts—in school curriculums and it introduces debates that have taken place about the importance to ascribe to those texts.

Under nation-building efforts in the first half of the twentieth century, communal temples became targets of political and military appropriation, which shook the foundations of traditional communal religion in Rui’an and Wenzhou. Yet local religion continued to thrive. Protestant churches, the Catholic Church, traditional salvationist groups, and redemptive societies all grew rapidly, perhaps due in large part to the greater social uncertainty brought about by political turbulence and wars. Since its foundation in the region in the late 1920s, communist forces stayed close to local peasant society, including their religious communities. Before 1949, they both clashed and collaborated with religious groups, depending on the circumstances.

While still focusing primarily on state cults and the ambiguous intertwinement between the “religious” and the “political,” this chapter broadens the scope. While refusing any culturalistic interpretation of history, it questions the possible perpetuation until today of fundamental schemes borrowed from an ancient cosmology. It exposes what is meant by this ancient cosmology (termed “continuism”) and emphasizes that its remains need to be understood within a modern context of ruptures and discontinuities. The argument is based on a comparative analysis of state-sponsored ceremonies taking place in both the People’s Republic of China (Confucius and the Yellow Emperor cult) and Taiwan (the Confucius cult and the “sacrifice to Heaven”). The chapter introduces ideal types of “political ceremonial” and “religious ritual” and an overall reflection about the different relations between the sage, the people, and the state on the two sides of the Taiwan straight. The discussion echoes current debates about an “ontological turn” in anthropology.

This chapter chronicles the life of Zhang Tianran, the Republican-period leader of China’s most successful redemptive society, Yiguandao (the Unity Way). In the 1930s and 1940s, Zhang presided over the astonishing expansion of Yiguandao’s fortunes, which began as a small, local group in Shandong and spread throughout the country before and after the Sino-Japanese War. Yiguandao’s success led to a massive campaign of suppression launched by the Communist regime in the early 1950s, one result of which was to thoroughly politicize Zhang’s biography, which is hopelessly divided between hagiography and demonization. Much of Billioud’s research draws on his fieldwork with contemporary Yiguandao groups in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and France, and explores the ways in which the group has harnessed Zhang’s charisma so as to maintain the group’s vitality.