This paper submits that the clerical construction of spiritual authenticity via transnational mobility is among the affordances of a sinicized Catholicism. By “sinicized,” I mean less a Catholicism “with Chinese characteristics” than one that has had to adaptively respond to the program of sinicization associated with Xi Jinping’s 習近平 “New Era” (Madsen 2019; Masláková and Satorová 2019). In professing to “listen to” or “follow” God, members of the Chinese state-sanctioned Patriotic Catholic Association (PCA) defer domestic and international suspicions of spiritual impurity while moving upward socially and spiritually. To illustrate how sinicization enables outcomes that exceed its political aim to indigenise Christianity, I take as a case study a Chinese Catholic priest’s account of how God “planned” his passage to North America. This paper engages with a reflexive anthropology of Christianity (Cannell 2005; Robbins 2014) that accounts for the context-dependency of local (and global...
Social Mobility, Migratory Vocations, and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association
Abstract
This paper explores how the confessional politics of Catholic identification has been mobilised into religious callings, from the village to the city and from China to Overseas Chinese communities. Building on fieldwork conducted in Hangzhou and New York City in 2018, I show how a Chinese Catholic migrant priest authenticates the spiritual purity of his vocation by using the legality and ease of transnational travel to legitimise his moral and economic upward mobility.
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Manuscript received on 8 October 2022. Accepted on 13 May 2023.
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Full text document will be published online on June 2024.
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Bibliographical reference
Alice Yeh, “Social Mobility, Migratory Vocations, and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association”, China Perspectives, 133 | -1, 31-41.
Electronic reference
Alice Yeh, “Social Mobility, Migratory Vocations, and the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association”, China Perspectives [Online], 133 | 2023, Online since 01 June 2024, connection on 02 October 2023. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/15216; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/chinaperspectives.15216
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