Abstract

The religious question in China is not limited to the contemporary tensions between the Catholic and Protestant churches and the Beijing regime, the repression suffered by Tibetan Buddhists or Uighur Muslims and the problems associated with so-called ‘sectarian’ movements. Though these issues are very important and worthy of interest in themselves, they have to be understood in a wider context which takes in the totality of religious realities in China, including those we in the West do not see because they fall outside our representations of what is religious. Furthermore, the contemporary religious question assumes meaning only if we consider all the struggles between the Chinese state and society's religious structures since the end of the 19 th century. In another publication I have sketched out the modern history of relations between the Chinese state and the religious structures of the society. Here I should like to show the importance of the concept of religion itself and of the controversies around it in the history of those conflicting relations. We shall see that the concepts, such as religion, used in the humanities and social sciences have consequences that go far beyond the context of academic debates and can help to feed repression and social conflict.