Chinese in Southeast Asia: Religion, Economy, and Conviviality

Type

Double Laboratory

Part 1

Session 5
Wed 10:00-11:30 Classroom B 51

Part 2

Session 6
Wed 12:00-13:30 Classroom B 51

Conveners

Oliver Tappe University of Cologne
Yu-sheng Lin Academia Sinica

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Part 1

Chinese Religious Devotees and the Hindu Navaratri Festival: Material and Aesthetic Assemblages in Thailand Yu-sheng Lin Academia Sinica
While conducting research on the Hindu Navaratri festival in Bangkok, Thailand, I encountered a loose network of devotees who used to participate in Chinese religious rituals and ceremonies, such as those held in Chinese shrines and Mahayana Buddhist temples. Over the past several years, these individuals have also become active participants in the Hindu Navaratri festival. Classical studies might interpret this phenomenon as an instance of religious syncretism in Thailand. However, this presentation shifts the focus to the religious material objects used across these different ritual contexts, arguing that aesthetic and artistic preferences play a central role in shaping these material assemblages. By examining how these material and aesthetic choices reflect personal devotion and everyday creativity, this paper seeks to shed light on the changing forms of Chinese religious practice within the private sphere in contemporary Thailand.
Religious Marginality and Local Creativity: Chinese Buddhism in Comparative Southeast Asian Perspective Tzu-Lung Melody Chiu Nanhua University
Across Southeast Asia, Chinese Buddhism occupies a relatively weak institutional and demographic position: Thailand is dominated by Theravāda Buddhism, Myanmar closely binds religion with ethnic identity, and Indonesia operates under an Islamic-majority framework. Rather than disappearing, Chinese Buddhist communities at the margins have maintained religious vitality and social visibility through diverse and adaptive local strategies.
Drawing on ethnographic and historical data, this paper examines three interconnected cases: (1) how Chinese monastic communities in Myanmar, lacking official recognition, gain legitimacy through linguistic adaptation, charitable work, and interreligious engagement; (2) how the Sangha Agung Indonesia promotes cross-ethnic Buddhist practice through religious de-ethnicization and sectarian integration; and (3) how Chinese Buddhism in Thailand, within a highly assimilated environment, preserves its sectarian identity and rebuilds its public role through sustained Chinese-language chanting, bilingual (Thai phonetic) ritual recitations, traditional festivals such as the Ullambana and Nine Emperor Gods celebrations, as well as charity services.
Comparatively, these cases reveal that “weakness” does not equate to marginalization. Rather, within constrained institutional spaces, minority Buddhist communities display remarkable creativity and adaptability. This study highlights the dynamics of power and pluralism in Southeast Asia’s religious landscape and illuminates new directions for understanding localization, inter-sectarian collaboration, and humanitarian practice in Chinese Buddhism.
Confronting moralities: Tai Lue monks as Chinese citizens and the influence of Thai monasticism Roger Casas Yunnan University
The Tai Lue of Sipsong Panna (Xishuangbanna) are one of several groups inhabiting the borderlands between China and mainland Southeast Asia. As such, they operated historically within a web of multiple suzerainties and allegiances, and blurred ethnic boundaries, engaging in complex economic and ritual relations with other groups in the fringes of larger regional polities. Singularly relevant is the case of the cross-border movement of Tai Lue Buddhist monks, temporarily interrupted during the political movements of the Maoist period. Since the end of religious repression in China in the late 1970s, Tai Lue monastics have resumed their wanderings across borders, travelling from their homeland to different countries in the region, pursuing the prestige offered by Thai monastic institutions in particular. While staying at these institutions, these monastics have reproduced a localized habitus of male bonding and commensality, provoking tension and potential embarrassment to hosts and to their superiors back in China. At the same time, staying in Thailand has transformed the views of many with regards to what is proper Buddhist practice, propelling a “reformist project” by which Tai Lue Buddhist elites in Sipsong Panna attempt to raise the status of local Buddhism within regional and global symbolic hierarchies of civilization.
In this presentation I will explore these processes, and especially the dynamics between Tai Lue and Thai monasticism, from a historical and anthropological perspective, paying attention to both broader, (inter)national conceptions of religious practice, and to the individual experience of Tai Lue monastics in Thailand. Taking into account other relevant factors such as official religious policy in both China and Thailand, and the currently widespread use of social networks, I will argue that transnational monastic exchanges have radically transformed understandings of Buddhist moral discipline and religious practice overall among the Tai Lue of contemporary Sipsong Panna.

Part 2

Jade Thavixay EHESS
Pannier Emmanuel IRD
Thi Kim Tam PHAN Department of Anthropology, University of Social sciences and Humanities, VNU Hanoi
Simon Rowedder National University of Singapore

Show Paper Abstracts

Abstract

For centuries, Southeast Asia has been influenced by economic and religious dynamics that originated in China and are represented by a variety of social groups, networks and cultural practices that are, in one way or another, described as ‘Chinese’. This double session investigates the manifold Chinese presence and (political, economic, cultural) impact in Southeast Asia from different historical and anthropological perspectives.
First, a panel investigates mutual religious interactions between Southeast Asia and China. On the one hand, it explores how Chinese religious practices have been transformed through long-term encounters with diverse sociocultural environments in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, it also examines religious negotiations among actors moving from Southeast Asia to China, in order to investigate how Southeast Asian religious influences are reconfigured within Chinese contexts.
Second, a roundtable discusses historical trajectories of the Chinese presence in the northern Lao and Vietnamese borderlands – harking back to precolonial caravan trade networks – and explores contemporary patterns of conviviality, integration and economic exchange.
Both sessions aim to shed light on the historical contingencies and cultural diversity of the Chinese presence in Southeast Asia – avoiding the primacy of the nation-state while highlighting everyday interactions, cultural practices and creative assemblages on the ground in SE Asia.
The panel on religious practices brings together case studies from Myanmar, Indonesia, Thailand, and China to examine the negotiations between Chinese and Southeast Asian religious traditions. The first paper focuses on a group of Chinese religious devotees in Thailand, analyzing their aesthetic preferences and material creativity in their participation in Hindu rituals. The second paper investigates how Chinese Buddhist communities position themselves within national religious regimes in Myanmar and Indonesia. The third paper shifts attention to the influence of Southeast Asian religious practices in China, examining the dynamics between Tai Lue and Thai monastic traditions, with particular focus on Tai Lue monastics in Sipsong Panna who have had religious experience in Thailand.
The subsequent roundtable discussion on Chinese communities and networks in the northern Lao and Vietnamese borderlands contributes to debates on mutual perceptions and relations in the multiethnic societies of highland Southeast Asia. Through taking an ethnographic and microhistorical grassroots perspective, the speakers explore the everyday encounters and interactions that have been shaping social life in culturally diverse border towns such as Boten in Laos and Móng Cái in Vietnam – rapidly urbanizing places that mark historical trading hubs and today constitute key sites of economic and cultural exchange on the Sino-Southeast Asian frontier. This roundtable gives particular attention to patterns of (non-)integration of Chinese actors into the social fabric of northern Laos and Vietnam.****