Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China is a collection of essays exploring the often-asked but hitherto understudied questions: what were the changes in the religious field as China embarked on its journey to “modernity,” and, more specifically, how did the process of globalization affect the Chinese way of dealing with religion. Inspired by Beyer's notion of “the existence of a global religious system,” the authors propose to “undertake some of the necessary archaeological and historical groundwork in the area of Chinese religions which at a later stage may underpin the description of such a global religious system” (p.3). They divide the book into four themes: “transformation of the religious field in China,” “global currents and their local refractions,” “Chinese–Western Encounters” and “knowledge transfer, academic networks, identity, and the study of religion.” These four themes cover a wide range of topics, from the religious pluralism demonstrated in managing city god temples in the 19th century to the recent revival of Confucianism in the town of Quzhou.

The volume opens with Vincent Goosaert's essay on the late Qing management of city god temples, in which various actors such as officials, social elites, Daoist clerics, territorial communities and devotional associations had to interact, confront, negotiate and cooperate with each other. This is the only essay in this volume that does not touch on the question of Western influence. Instead, it focuses on an entirely indigenous religious phenomenon: activities centred on city god temples. Drawing heavily on temple gazetteers and the late imperial newspaper Shenbao, Goosaert presents a vivid picture of managing religious pluralism at the local level. The sources are not only rich but also compactly arranged. It is unfortunate, however, that the “globalization” theme is not addressed, although the analysis of different “stake holders” roles in dealing with local religious matters will undoubtedly help our understanding of the local reaction “to more exotic religious practices and faiths in the process of globalization” (p. 29). The changing role of these different stake holders in managing city god temples when the Qing Dynasty was replaced by the Republican regime and when the Chinese religious discourse started to be filled with “modernity” themes is under-charted.

Thomas Jansen's “Sectarian religion and globalization in nineteenth-century Beijing” also deals with indigenous religious traditions of the same period, but from a more obviously global perspective. Jansen studies Chinese–Christian interaction at the textual level by focusing on a few sectarian religious scriptures, known as “precious scrolls,” or baojuan, as an indication of how indigenous religious groups responded to the Christian influx and the political threat posed by foreign powers. The religious texts studied show that local Chinese groups integrated, absorbed and naturalized these globalized currents into their own religious worldview, described as a “traditional universal circle of moral decline, apocalypse, and salvation” (p. 123). Jansen suggests that globalization in the religious sphere is “a multidimensional and multidirectional process which involves a variety of agents and their specific interests” (p. 117) and that Chinese religions were not just passive objects in the process of globalization. The textual comparison of Christian and indigenous Chinese religious groups is an approach that has not been taken before. It provides a vivid local topography of Chinese religious beliefs and practices at this critical point in Chinese history. While largely agreeing with Jansen's picture of a reciprocal globalization process in the religious field, I would like to probe deeper into the motivations behind this interchange and interconnection: was the mutual adaptation of sectarian and Christian texts largely motivated by the practical purpose of making converts, or was it a sign that each side had absorbed the foreign religious faith and practice into its own?

The question of the extent to which Christian ideas actually influenced Chinese thinking about religion is absent from Jansen's essay. Lauren Pfister's piece on Kang Youwei's Great Unity (Datong shu) represents a case of Westernized interpretation (or re-interpretation) of Chinese religious ideas. Pfister's analysis of Kang's religious-philosophical thought is sound and persuasive. But one is still left curious about how Kang's thought fitted into the contemporary social context. One of the leaders of the (failed) democratic reform of 1898 and much trusted by the Guangxu Emperor, Kang was an important political figure, especially in the Chinese historiography of “modernity.” Much scholarly attention has been paid to his writing. But this attention easily leads to the assumption that Kang's philosophical views were widely received by his like-minded contemporaries and thus had an immediate impact on political events. This is not necessarily the case. An equivalent error is the common assumption that Enlightenment literature was a direct catalyst of the French Revolution, an assumption disputed as “une question mal posée” by Robert Darnton.

Globalization and the Making of Religious Modernity in China is on the whole an excellent contribution to our knowledge of Chinese religion and its transformation in the late Qing/early Republican period. It is also a remarkable feat to deal with such a big topic as globalization and to cover such a long period of time in a single volume.