Abstract

European and North American cultures are awash in stereotypes about religion. The recently published volume Stereotyping Religion: Critiquing Clichés (2017) tackles several of these and shows why scholars find them to be clichéd. By describing their origins and elucidating the social or political work they rhetorically accomplish in the present, the authors of the volume address some important clichés, namely, that religions are belief systems, that religion is a private matter or that it exclusively concerns the transcendent. In the same way, scholars of religion in the Chinese speaking world find themselves often having to dispel the many myths that surround it. Does China have religion? What does it look like? And where does it stand vis-à-vis religious tolerance? In this short article, I take a comparative look at the late imperial period in China and the substantive changes that took place at the end of it. What does religious tolerance – and its opposite – mean in the context of China’s modern epistemic order?