China

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China is home to one of the largest and most historically continuous Buddhist civilizations in Asia, shaped over two millennia by successive waves of doctrinal innovation, imperial patronage, and periodic suppression, and, since the early twentieth century, by sustained engagement with modern political ideologies, especially socialism and Marxism. Mahāyāna Buddhism arrived from Central Asia and India in the first centuries of the Common Era and by the Tang dynasty (618–907) had produced the distinctively Chinese schools of Chan, Pure Land, Tiantai, and Huayan that continue to define the tradition. The collapse of the imperial order after 1911 and the subsequent rise of Marxism as the dominant framework of Chinese political thought forced Buddhist reformers, monastics, and lay intellectuals to articulate, for the first time, a systematic relationship between Buddhist soteriology and revolutionary politics. Currents ranging from Buddhist anarchism and the Humanistic Buddhism (人間佛教/人间佛教) movement associated with Taixu (太虛/太虚) to the sophisticated Buddhist-Marxist synthesis of the lay intellectual Wen Guangxi (溫光熹/温光熹) and the state-sponsored accommodation of the Chinese Buddhist Association after 1949 illustrate a recurring structural tension between Buddhist claims to intellectual autonomy and the ideological demands of a Marxist-Leninist state.

(Taiwan and Tibet will be discussed in separate pages.)

Buddhism in China

Buddhism entered China from Central Asia along the Silk Road in the first centuries of the Common Era, and the subsequent centuries saw an immense effort of scriptural translation, first from Central Asian intermediary languages and later directly from Sanskrit. By the Tang dynasty (618–907), this process of assimilation had produced a range of distinctly Chinese schools of thought and practice, including Chan (禪), Pure Land (淨土), Huayan (華嚴), and Tiantai (天台), which would define the tradition's institutional and doctrinal shape for the remainder of the imperial period. Buddhism's relationship with the state during this era alternated between lavish patronage and episodes of persecution, most notably the Huichang persecution of 845, and its relationship with the scholar-official class remained ambivalent: Buddhist monastic wealth and the sangha's formal exemption from taxation and corvée labor were recurrent sources of friction with a Confucian bureaucracy that prized this-worldly civic obligation.

Under the Song and Ming dynasties, Buddhism became deeply entangled with a resurgent Confucianism, so much so that Song-Ming Neo-Confucianism has been described as already a hybrid tradition, absorbing elements of Chan Buddhism and philosophical Daoism even as it publicly disavowed both. By the late imperial period, Buddhism occupied an ambiguous social position: institutionally robust and woven into popular devotional life, but regarded with persistent suspicion by the Confucian literati who staffed the imperial bureaucracy.

The nineteenth century brought a series of severe shocks. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) devastated monastic institutions across the Lower Yangtze region, and temple property was repeatedly confiscated by late Qing and early Republican authorities scrambling to fund modern schools and local militias. The modernizing intellectual current that swept China after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 subjected Buddhism, along with Confucianism and the whole of received tradition, to the charge of irrelevance and obscurantism. The reformer and lay Buddhist apologist Yang Wenhui (楊文會/杨文会, 1837–1911) began the work of response, establishing the Jinling Sūtra Press and reviving Chinese scholarly access to texts that had survived only in Japan. His student Taixu (太虛/太虚, 1890–1947) extended this project into the Humanistic Buddhism (人間佛教/人间佛教) movement, an ambitious program of institutional reform intended to make Chinese Buddhism socially engaged, intellectually credible, and adequate to the crises of a modernizing nation. Alongside this reform current, the lay scholar Ouyang Jingwu (歐陽竟無/欧阳竟无) founded the Nanjing scriptural press and a rigorous, philologically grounded revival of Yogācāra (consciousness-only, 唯識) studies, a project subsequently developed with great sophistication by his student Lü Cheng (呂澂/吕澂, 1896–1989).

The proclamation of the People's Republic of China in October 1949 inaugurated a new and more coercive phase in the state's relationship with Buddhism. The Marxist-Leninist framework adopted by the new government classified religion as ideological superstructure, a form of false consciousness generated by material conditions and destined to wither away as socialist construction advanced. At the same time, the Party recognized that Buddhism retained a substantial domestic constituency and diplomatic value among Buddhist communities in Southeast Asia, and it therefore pursued a strategy of controlled accommodation rather than immediate suppression. The vehicle for this strategy was the Chinese Buddhist Association (中國佛教協會/中国佛教协会), organized in the early 1950s and formally established in 1953, through which Buddhist institutions were permitted to continue under Party-approved leadership and directed toward officially sanctioned ends such as anti-imperialist declarations and diplomatic contacts abroad. Within this framework, Buddhism was a tolerated practice rather than a legitimate intellectual resource for building the new China. The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) brought the near-total physical destruction of monastic institutions and the suppression of religious practice nationwide; the reform era beginning in 1978 saw a gradual institutional revival, the reopening of major monasteries, and the reconstitution of Buddhist associations under continued state supervision, alongside the growth of lay practice, Buddhist charitable activity, and renewed international engagement.

Radical Buddhism in China

Late Qing Crisis and Buddhist Anarchism, 1898–1921

The Chinese encounter between Buddhism and radical politics began under the pressure of a series of domestic crises that discredited received tradition as a whole. The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) had already devastated Buddhist institutions across the Lower Yangtze; the crushing defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 then convinced a generation of reform-minded literati that not merely China's material strength but its inherited "culture" itself stood in need of wholesale reconstruction. A handful of late Qing intellectuals responded by turning to Buddhism as a source of revolutionary rather than merely devotional value. Kang Youwei (康有為/康有为, 1858–1927) built a Buddhicized utopianism into his Book of the Datong (大同書/大同书), envisioning the abolition of nations, the establishment of a world parliament, and eventual universal Buddhahood. Tan Sitong (譚嗣同/谭嗣同, 1865–1898) fused Buddhist metaphysics with Western science and the activist epistemology of the Ming Neo-Confucian Wang Yangming into an idealist philosophy that he sealed with his own martyrdom after the failed Hundred Days' Reform of 1898, a self-sacrifice explicitly modeled on the bodhisattva ideal. Zhang Binglin (章炳麟, 1869–1936), already a prominent philologist and revolutionary, began to study and apply Buddhism to his revolutionary work during a three-year imprisonment from 1903 to 1906, developing a "national essence" (國粹/国粹) current that looked past centuries of what it regarded as degenerate Confucian orthodoxy toward an imagined, purer indigenous past. Other Buddhist-inflected revolutionaries of this generation included the ordained monk Huang Zongyan (黃宗仰/黄宗仰, 1865–1921) and the iconoclastic poet and artist Su Manshu (蘇曼殊/苏曼殊, 1884–1918).

Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread (麵包與自由/面包与自由) appeared in Chinese translation as early as 1906, and excerpts soon circulated in the anarchist journal Natural Justice (天義/天义), catalyzing a Buddhist-anarchist milieu that drew equivalences between the bodhisattva vow, the classical utopia of Datong, and the anarcho-communist vision of voluntary cooperative society. From 1907 until at least the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921, anarchism rather than Marxism was the dominant framework of Chinese radicalism, and it was frequently anarchists, many educated in Japan, who first introduced Marxist texts and ideas into China. The central figure of this milieu, and the acknowledged leader of Chinese anarchism as a whole after 1911, was Shifu.

Shifu

➣ Main article: Shifu

Shifu (師復/师复, 1884–1915), born Liu Shaobin and initially known by the revolutionary name Liu Sifu, was the central figure of the Buddhist-anarchist milieu of the early Republic. After time in Japan (1904–1906), where he joined Sun Yat-sen's Revolutionary Alliance (同盟會/同盟会), and three years of imprisonment following a botched assassination attempt in 1907, Shifu fused Zhang Binglin's "national essence" thought with a Rousseauian vision of natural, pre-civilizational man, arguing that earliest China had been a pristine anarchist society and that the bodhisattva who "dares to die" for others exemplified the selfless spirit such a society required. In November 1912 he and a small circle of fellow anarchists founded the Conscience Society (心社) in Guangzhou, articulating its program in a set of Twelve Principles combining Buddhist, anarchist, and proto-Marxist commitments; the Society became the principal institutional home of Chinese anarchism until his early death from tuberculosis in 1915. His conviction that belief and action were inseparable shaped a generation of Buddhist-inflected radicals, including the young Taixu, with whom he corresponded from 1914.

Taixu

➣ Main article: Taixu

Taixu (太虛/太虚, 1890–1947) was the most consequential Buddhist reformer of Republican China and, in his formative years, an outspoken proponent of Buddhist anarchism. Raised near Hangzhou by a devout Buddhist grandmother and ordained in 1906, he began reading Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Marx around 1910, and through 1911–1914 argued that Buddhist monastic communism, with its shared property and absence of hierarchy, offered a working model for a coming anarcho-communist society, founding short-lived organizations toward this end and criticizing Marxian socialism for remaining tied to the nation rather than embracing anarchist internationalism. A three-year monastic retreat begun in 1914 ended his direct political activism, and his subsequent career centered on the institutional reform program known as Humanistic Buddhism (人間佛教/人间佛教); he nonetheless continued to engage Marxist theory on its own terms, notably in a sustained critique of historical materialism for reducing social change to economic causes alone, at the expense of the plurality of causes and conditions (眾緣) that Buddhist analysis holds to govern all phenomena.

The Marxist Consolidation of the 1920s

By the mid-1920s, the consolidation of Leninist orthodoxy on the Chinese left, culminating in the 1921 founding of the Chinese Communist Party, steadily displaced the eclectic Buddhist-anarchist hybrid that had flourished since the 1900s. Within the anarchist camp itself, a persistent distinction had already opened up between "narrow" (狹義/狭义) socialists, who held close to anarchism proper, and "broad" (廣義/广义) socialists, who embraced state socialism, social democracy, and other eclectic progressive hybrids; Taixu identified firmly with the narrow, anarchist camp, helping form a splinter Socialist Party (社會黨/社会党) in October 1912 against the more statist Chinese Socialist Party founded the previous year by Jiang Kanghu and favored by Sun Yat-sen. After Shifu's death in 1915, and especially after 1921, this narrower current steadily lost ground: the utopian, quasi-religious sensibility of early Chinese anarchism gave way, in Peter Zarrow's phrase, to a more technocratic "feat of social engineering," and cooperation between anarchists and Marxists continued increasingly on the latter's terms, with Buddhist vocabulary correspondingly less at home in Chinese radical discourse than it had been in the 1900s and 1910s.

Marxist Critiques and Lay Buddhist-Marxist Synthesis

The Nationalist-Communist civil conflict and the consolidation of Communist Party rule after 1927 drew Buddhism ever more directly into the ideological apparatus of the new order, both as an object of Marxist critique and, after 1949, as a resource the Party sought to accommodate and instrumentalize rather than simply suppress. Senior Party figures developed their own assessments of Buddhism well before Liberation: Qu Qiubai (瞿秋白), an early Party leader, credited Buddhist ideas of impermanence and the bodhisattva path with shaping his own turn toward revolution, while Mao Zedong articulated a durable official framework treating Buddhism as cultural heritage, a repository of a "fine tradition" to be selectively preserved and mobilized, and a body of thought capable of coordination with socialism. After 1949, academic Marxist historians, notably Hou Wailu (侯外廬/侯外庐) and Ren Jiyu (任繼愈/任继愈), applied class analysis systematically to classical Buddhist philosophy, treating its idealist metaphysics as ideological superstructure serving feudal landlord interests while still crediting Buddhist logic with a genuine, if ultimately compromised, dialectical content; Fan Wenlan (范文瀾/范文澜) offered a considerably more polemical rejection of Buddhism as systematic deception of the oppressed, dismissing Buddhist scripture wholesale as "lies from beginning to end." Against this current of Marxist critique, a distinct cohort of lay Buddhist intellectuals worked from the 1930s into the early 1950s to demonstrate compatibility, or even convergence, between Buddhist philosophy and Marxist dialectics. Wang Xiaoxu (王小徐) argued that classical Buddhist metaphysics achieved a more thoroughgoing dialectic than Hegel or Marx, since the latter could not consistently apply the logic of historical negation to the proletariat's own future communist society, while You Zhibiao (尤智表) and Su Yuanlei (蘇淵雷/苏渊雷) drew systematic parallels between Mahāyāna philosophy, relativity theory, and Marxist historical and dialectical materialism across the domains of worldview, society, and human life. The two most systematic and totalizing such syntheses, however, were those of the lay intellectuals Wen Guangxi and Chen Mingshu.

Wen Guangxi

➣ Main article: Wen Guangxi

Wen Guangxi (溫光熹/温光熹, b. approximately 1909) was a former Nationalist army officer, attaining the rank of Major General, and a lay Buddhist intellectual; through his father-in-law Ji Zuyou (嵇祖右), a former Sichuan Civil Affairs Director and Mayor of Chengdu, he moved in high Nationalist circles, and a 1934 collection of his writings carried an endorsement from Chiang Kai-shek himself. In a series of essays published between 1948 and 1950 mostly in the Shanghai journal Jue Youqing (覺有情), he developed the most systematically argued Buddhist-Marxist synthesis of the Republican period, which he termed "New Buddhism" (新佛法). Rather than arguing merely for compatibility, Wen held that Mahāyāna Buddhism's bodhicitta, the compassionate vow to liberate all beings, supplied the motivational resource that historical materialism, confined to objective economic conditions, could not itself generate, formulating the claim as "social science plus Buddhist compassionate vows equals the New Buddhist Movement." At a state-organized thought reform symposium in Shanghai in April 1952, Wen complied with the demand for public self-criticism while carefully distinguishing "Buddhist practitioners' thinking," which he conceded required reform, from "Buddhist thought" itself, which he implicitly placed beyond the campaign's jurisdiction. After this speech he disappears entirely from the historical record, and his fate remains undocumented.

Chen Mingshu

➣ Main article: Chen Mingshu

Chen Mingshu (陳銘樞/陈铭枢, 1889–1965) was a senior Nationalist general, cabinet minister, and later a founder of the Beijing-aligned Revolutionary Committee of the Kuomintang (民革). In August 1949, two months before the PRC's founding, he addressed a long letter directly to Mao Zedong laying out ten theses on Buddhadharma's relation to society and human life, stating that he had begun studying dialectical materialism some twenty years earlier and praising Mao's "sinicization of Marxism-Leninism" as itself an instance of the Buddhist unity of knowledge and action. Illustrating his claim that Buddhist "mind-only" teaching does not assert idealism but rather dissolves the very subjective attachment idealism presupposes, Chen adapted the Diamond Sūtra's tetralemma to his own name: "what is called Chen Mingshu is not Chen Mingshu; this is named Chen Mingshu." In a rapid sequence of essays published between 1950 and 1951 in Xiandai Foxue (現代佛學), a journal he co-founded with the reform-minded monk Juzan (巨贊/巨赞) and whose publishing house he directed, he developed this project systematically, describing himself as an advocate of studying Buddhism through the method of dialectical materialism and arguing that Buddhist doctrine, correctly analyzed, resolved into a series of dialectical unities, of mind and no-mind, self and no-self, the relative and the absolute, culminating in the selfless practice of the bodhisattva path. Because the bodhisattva's complete self-forgetting for the sake of others was already, in substance, the stance of a Marxist-Leninist fighter, Chen held that any properly awakened Buddhist was thereby "unconditionally a hundred percent Marxist-Leninist," while cautioning that Marxism-Leninism should not be treated as an exclusive doctrine, since truth itself was one and universal. Despite this accommodation, Chen was purged as a "rightist" during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and stripped of his official positions.

Thought Reform and the Institutional Settlement

Wen was not the only casualty of the settlement then taking shape, nor was Chen's later purge an isolated event. The campaigns of land reform, the suppression of counterrevolutionaries, and the Three-Anti and Five-Anti movements of the early 1950s created an atmosphere in which thought reform (思想改造) operated as a pedagogical ritual of public self-criticism and confession, and independent religious intellectuals, who represented alternative structures of loyalty and authority, were an obvious target. Monastic leaders such as Juzan (巨贊/巨赞), chief editor of Xiandai Foxue under the directorship of Chen Mingshu, publicly called on Buddhists to study Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong's On Practice, framing this study as a means of "excavating" the valuable resources preserved within religion for the benefit of the whole of humanity, a formulation that reflected both political pressure and a degree of genuine accommodation to the new order. The formal establishment of the Chinese Buddhist Association (中國佛教協會/中国佛教协会) in 1953 provided the lasting institutional settlement: a Buddhism tolerated as cultural heritage, patriotic instrument, and diplomatic resource among Buddhist communities abroad, but structurally denied any claim to intellectual parity with Marxism, and reorganized under leadership acceptable to the Party.

From the Cultural Revolution to the Present

The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) brought the near-total physical destruction of monastic institutions, the closure or repurposing of temples nationwide, and the effective suspension of all public Buddhist intellectual life, foreclosing for over a decade any further engagement between Buddhism and Marxist thought. Sustained Buddhist engagement with Marxist philosophy resumed only gradually after the reform era began in 1978, alongside the reopening of temples and the reconstitution of the Chinese Buddhist Association's provincial branches. Among the few notable philosophical contributions of this later period, the Gansu-based Geshe and reincarnate lama Duoshi (多識活佛/多识活佛) argued in the 1980s and 1990s that Buddhist philosophy is not uniformly idealist, distinguishing several classical schools of Buddhist epistemology and defending most of them, with the exception of Yogācāra, as broadly compatible with a materialist theory of perception in which consciousness arises only in dependence on an external object. Since the 1980s, however, explicit philosophical engagement between Buddhism and Marxism has become markedly rarer within mainland Chinese Buddhist circles than it had been in the Republican and early Communist periods, even as the party-state's institutional framework for managing Buddhism through the Chinese Buddhist Association has remained substantially in place.

Literature in English

• Zu, Jessica X. (2025). Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China. Columbia University Press. [A major intellectual history of Lü Cheng's Yogācāra "socio-soteriology," situating his revival of consciousness-only philosophy within a broader project of building a non-Marxist, non-liberal Buddhist social theory.]
• Shields, James Mark (2022). "Buddhist Socialism in China, 1900–1930: A History and Appraisal". In: Graeme Kirkpatrick, Peter McMylor, & Simin Fadaee (Eds), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics: 81–102. Palgrave Macmillan. [The most detailed English-language account of the Buddhist-anarchist milieu of the early Republican period, tracing the influence of Kropotkin and the Datong utopia on Shifu and Taixu.]
• Ritzinger, Justin (2017). Anarchy in the Pure Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism. Oxford University Press. [A study of Taixu's early anarchist-inflected Buddhist reform activity and its relationship to Maitreya devotionalism.]
• Pittman, Don A. (2001). Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism: Taixu's Reforms. University of Hawai'i Press. [The standard English-language study of Taixu's Humanistic Buddhism reform program and its institutional legacy.]
• Welch, Holmes (1972). Buddhism under Mao. Harvard University Press. [The foundational English-language study of the Chinese Buddhist Association and the mechanics of Party accommodation and control of Buddhist institutions after 1949.]
• Xue Yu (2009). "Buddhist Contribution to the Socialist Transformation of Buddhism in China: Activities of Ven. Juzan during 1949–1953". Journal of Global Buddhism 10: 217–253. [A detailed study of the monk Juzan's collaboration with the early PRC government and his editorship of Xiandai Foxue, the journal Chen Mingshu directed; documents the doctrinal reinterpretations (compassionate killing, patriotism) used to justify Buddhist support for state policy.]
• Krebs, Edward S. (1998). Shifu: Soul of Chinese Anarchism. Rowman & Littlefield. [The definitive biography of Liu Sifu (Shifu), documenting the Buddhist dimensions of his anarchist thought and activism.]
• Zarrow, Peter (1990). Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture. Columbia University Press. [A foundational intellectual history of Chinese anarchism, including its debts to Neo-Confucian and Buddhist conceptions of the self and community.]

Literature in Other Languages

• He Jianming 何建明 (1998). 《佛法观念的近代调适》 [Modern Adaptations of Buddhist Concepts]. Guangdong People's Publishing House. [Proposes a structural distinction between "new Buddhism" (新佛法), which accommodates Marxist primacy, and "Buddhist socialism" (佛教社会主义), which claims independent or superior standing for Buddhism.]
• Li Guangliang 李廣良/李广良 (2001). 〈马克思主义的佛教观和佛教的马克思主义观〉 [The Marxist View of Buddhism and the Buddhist View of Marxism]. 《佛学研究》 10. [A comprehensive survey of both Marxist critiques of Buddhism and lay and monastic Buddhist engagements with Marxism across the twentieth century, covering Party leaders, academic historians, lay intellectuals, and monastics alike. (archived)]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "China". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 27 July 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/China.