Proclaiming Subjectivity: The Contemporary Enactment of Han Popular Humanism

This book departs from the conventional secularization theory found in Western sociology, drawing instead upon the innovative concept of "popular humanism" to construct a new analytical framework for re-examining the diverse and complex religious phenomena of contemporary Chinese society. In late imperial China, where the domestic economy centered on a traditional smallholder mode of production, the individual household, the local village, and the central ruling dynasty all shared the same underlying cosmic order. Through the layered embedding of ritual space—with the household and village serving as the foundational basic units of the moral economy—a deeply cosmic-centric body was cultivated at the individual level. Furthermore, Daoist collaboration at the local level cyclically compensated for the profound anxiety that existed behind the limited transcendence of grassroots ritual autarky. Concurrently, goddess cults operated as a critical subsidiary system within the dominant patriarchal order, effectively granting the socially excluded an imagined sense of subjecthood. Intensive cultural exchanges between elite classes and the general populace generated a shared humanistic ideal, while successfully furnishing the lower strata with a vital moral legitimacy for resistance. When these cultural and social foundations later confronted Western secularizing forces, the lower strata, far from becoming secularized, dynamically rose with the tide. Ultimately, they proved fully able to link up with the contemporary global framework of subjectivity and to keep pace with modern technological platforms and multicultural realities, thereby manifesting, in both quality and quantity, the moral elevation of "popular humanism" and its remarkable capacity for global diffusion.