On March 3rd I attended an event put on by Butler’s seminar on religion and global affairs. This event was part of their series about incarceration. Specifically, tonight’s event talked about incarceration nationalism and religious identity in China. Unlike the other seminars in this series, tonight’s presentation had three speakers who all spoke for an equal amount of time. The first speaker was Professor Gross. Professor Gross is an associate professor of china studies at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. His work has been published in the China journal and also on CNN. One of his more well known pieces is a book titled Negotiating Inseparability. He started off his presentation by going into detail about a significant event that greatly impacted how religion was looked at in China. In 2016 Xi Jinping delivered a speech in which he demanded all religions in China merge their doctrines with Chinese culture and laws. This speech had a great impact on religion in China. Since this speech mosques have been destroyed in the Gansu province, religious buildings were destroyed in the Sichuan Province, and more than 1,700 crucifixes were removed from churches across China. Professor Gross then pointed out that China’s constitution states that people are allowed to enjoy freedom of religious belief. However, the constitution says nothing about the freedom of expressing these beliefs. This gives the government a way to control the religious ideas of the people without implicitly saying so.
The second speaker was Professor Anderson. She has dual PHD’s from Indiana University in which she recently graduated in the last year. In her introduction it was mentioned she is a vocalist, musician, dancer, and even had an appearance in a musical reality TV show in China. She is currently working at the Uyghur Human Rights Project and wanted to really focus more on Uyghur. She talked about the individual oppression that is currently going on in the North West part of china (Xinjian region)
The third speaker was a professor from Purdue. He has focused his studies over the years on the sociology of religion and immigration/religion in the United States. It was interesting to hear his ideas on the various topics and how they relate to what we have talked about in class this semester. I really enjoyed the three speakers and it was really interesting to see how their speech differed from Dr. Fleet Mauls that I attended earlier in the semester. This series that Butler put on exposed me to new and different ideas that I most likely would have never heard if I had not attended event.