Volume 2, Issue 1 -

Over the past several decades, the Hmong communities scattered around the world and their co-ethnic Miao ethnic group in China came into close contact. This paper explores the nature and dynamics of this encounter as well as the connections and ties that have been rediscovered and reestablished between the Hmong in diaspora and the Miao in China, two groups long separated by time and distance, and the impact and implications this entails. Based on three-month fieldwork in the Hmong/Miao communities across Southwest China and Southeast Asia, this paper examines the ever increasing movement of people and materials, as well as symbolic flows on the one hand, and connections and linkages between different localities on the other hand. It discusses how this new fast-changing development contributes to a new translocal imagination of Hmong community, re-territorialization of a new continuous Hmong space, a Hmongland encompassing Southwest provinces of China and northern part of Southeast Asian countries, and what it means to the Hmong/Miao people in the region. It further discusses how the emerging translocal imagination of the Hmong/Miao community will produce unique translocal subjects and how it interacts with the nation-states they belong to.

This article focuses on a prominent NGO in mainland China, the Amity Foundation, and its programs for deaf education reform in recent years. Through analyzing primary sources, such as round table minutes, it presents a vivid process in special education reform and the engagement and influence of this NGO, as a critical social force, in education and its reform. The idea that the Amity Foundation advocates and propagates – that is, deafness as a distinct cultural or cross-cultural existence that education reform should fully acknowledge – is embodied in the “bilingual bicultural” education program for the deaf in many provinces of mainland China. Many of this program’s materials can help us to deeply understand the social and sociological meanings of education reform.

This article uses the “gift paradigm” to understand the social mechanism of the revival of popular religion in developed rural areas. In eastern Zhejiang, peasants burn “Buddha paper [money]” ( fozhi ) Although fo literally means “Buddha,” in the local dialect of Zhejiang it is better understood as a generic term for “deity,” including Buddha. – Trans. as a gift when making vows and praying to deities. They consider the fulfillment of their prayers repayment by the deities. The reciprocity between human and deity forms a chain of return gifts, with the household as the unit and the year as the interval, which is permeated with affection and morality. In recent years the economic growth of rural economies in eastern Zhejiang has synchronized with social diversification. Village upper classes, which are the most sensitive to risk, have become the main bodies of faith consumption, purchasing masses of Buddha paper or even hiring people to chant scriptures. Their potlatch-style gift display has led to imitation by other classes. Different classes have gone into intense competition over the degree of intimacy with the deities. The competition for symbolic capital is the driving force of the constant expansion of popular religious activities in this area. The rapid growth of Buddha paper consumption has made it impossible for household providers who offer ritual services to meet the demand. They therefore convene older people to form scripture-recitation groups to enlarge their supplies. The use of scripture chanting ( nianfo , literally “reciting Buddhist texts”) results in a redistribution of superfluous wealth in villages to their middle and lower classes, via acquaintance networks. Everyday practices of eastern Zhejiang villagers show that popular religious activities in their society have a self-contained logic that has brought about an expansion in the competition for intimacy with deities. Society, on the other hand, has achieved integration in the circle of gift exchange between human and deity. Although the holistic view of the “gift paradigm” is the key to unlocking this popular religion revival, both the “power paradigm” and the “society paradigm” of gift exchange are indispensable in understanding the nature of the relationship in local popular religion.

Since the mid-1990s, Singapore’s Chinese religious landscape has seen the rapid development and popularisation of Netherworld spirit medium ( tang-ki ) cults based around the channelling and worship of two Underworld deities, Tua Ya Pek and Di Ya Pek. Emphasizing Earthly morality and post-mortal punishments in the Underworld, the tradition has developed a distinctive ritual and material culture. The Temple of Mysterious Virtue illustrates this culture, is broadly representative of successful tang - ki temples where both Underworld and Heaven deities are channelled in a multi-ethnic environment, and where orthodox Taoist priests and tang - ki mutually reinforce each other’s legitimacy through ritual cooperation.