Transcript

Graeme Smith  00:12

Welcome to the Little Red Podcast, which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I'm Graeme Smith from the Australian National University's Department of Pacific Affairs, and I'm joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now at the Centre for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We're on air thanks to support from the Australian Centre on China in the World.

 

Louisa Lim  00:36

As we slither into the Year of the Snake, one recent trend has been an uptick in what's being called incense burning youth in China. These are young people who've turned to spirituality, perhaps because of high unemployment. This episode, we're zeroing in on feng shui and spirituality in China, including digital spirituality and yes, AI spirituality or fortune telling powered by artificial intelligence.

 

Graeme Smith  01:06

We're absolutely delighted to be joined by two guests whose expertise spans spirituality then and now. Firstly, Haoyang Zhai, a graduate researcher at the University of Melbourne who specialises in the intersection of spirituality and social media platforms. We're also joined by Tristan Brown, a historian at MIT whose book, Laws of the Land: Feng Shui and the State in Qing Dynasty China won the American Historical Association's John K Fairbank Prize. Tristan, let's start with you. Let's do that academic thing that Louisa always loves, and go to the definition. How would you define feng shui?

 

Tristan Brown  01:45

Well, I mean, we could start with the characters, literally, two Chinese characters, wind and water. And I define it as a knowledge and a practice of analyzing forces in the land for the benefit of living human communities. Typically with the aim of constructing houses or graves, traditionally. But from that, it has immense literature, classical literature, that goes back many, many centuries, and it has many, many applications. So that's just and if I may, add one thing to that definition, I'd say, in addition to a knowledge and a practice, it was also in China, and maybe still is today, a discourse. And what I mean by that is just the way people spoke. So, people might not, you know, there were experts in feng shui and there were lay people who weren't necessarily experts, but, you know, just talking about houses or land or something like that. Feng shui vocabularies and frameworks were totally interwoven with just how people spoke about this stuff. So that's, I guess, how I define it.

 

Louisa Lim  02:52

So Haoyang, your work is on spirituality, which is wider than feng shui. I mean, what does it actually encompass?

 

Haoyang Zhai  03:00

Yes, I understand spirituality is a term that often causes confusion because it has different interpretations in different contexts. But for me, I define that based on some literature. So spirituality can be broadly categorized into two types. Firstly, the structured religions, the traditional ones, they are tied to specific traditions and values, such as Christianity, Islam or Buddhism. And secondly, the unstructured belief system, which blend elements from various sources, including religions, but also folk beliefs and even psychology today. So, for me, I would say I think feng shui belongs to the second one, the unstructured belief system, because it doesn't, you know, strictly bound to any religions. It's more like the folk thing.

 

Graeme Smith  03:55

Maybe before we dig any further, I'll do that thing I like to do. I've done it for fish maw and sea cucumbers and fess up to where you stand on your own subjects. So, are you guys believers in feng shui or spiritual practices? Or maybe a better way to put it is, when was the last time you engaged in something that could be classified as sort of feng shui or spirituality related?

 

Louisa Lim  04:21

We're putting you on the spot early here… Tristan, you first?

 

Tristan Brown  04:26

Yeah. So let me well, let me just say I'm not a feng shui practitioner. I've often got, I often get asked if I could give real estate advice, or if I should have a second career outside of academia. Maybe, you know, maybe there's always retirement, you know, things like that. So, you know, I'll plead the fifth in this one, in the sense of, I don't, you know, who knows what the future holds, but let me just say, I'm not a feng shui practitioner. I've studied it as an academic subject, which is actually interesting to point out, because it's mainly been this kind of popular thing and New Age movements kind of stuff. It hasn't seen a lot of academic scholarly treatment, especially in the historical field. So, I'll say that regarding the question of belief, I think I'll channel some of the actors in my book and saying like this. It's like a lot of officials and Confucian officials in Chinese history, if you ask them this question, they'll probably say something like, oh, I don't really believe it, but they'll do it, you know what I mean. You know that they'll still do it, and they still know it. So, let's just say I think a lot of people the Confucian elites in China, they were like, open to be persuaded. And so, I approach the subject with a great deal of respect and reverence and all of that. And of course, I'm open to all of the various kind of good advice and insights that feng shui can give, you know people today.

 

Louisa Lim  05:57

You're sitting on the fence very firmly there. Haoyang, what about you?

 

Haoyang Zhai  06:02

I would keeping the academic perspective too. But I also want to say, like most Chinese people I know, do know the proverb 宁可信… 宁可信其有 (ningke xin… ningke xin qi you), I would rather believe it than not believe it. So yeah, but every time when I share that I'm doing such a topic, digital spirituality, I got the question that, can you do fortune telling? And my answer is, unfortunately, no.

 

Graeme Smith  06:35

Perhaps only for your retirement as well. And Louisa, I want to put you on the spot too, because I know your family are, well, not feng shui practitioners, but they've certainly called upon feng shui practitioners. Could you maybe tell us a bit about that?

 

Louisa Lim  06:48

Oh, well, my father is a massive believer in feng shui, and actually, he got into it by mistake. He was, where his workplace, they were spending an awful lot on the feng shui consultants. And he said to them, “Oh, you know, anybody could do it. I'll read a few books and feng shui the office.” He read a few books immediately became completely convinced in feng shui and has since spent a considerable amount of money inviting various feng shui people into our various homes to get the best feng shui. So yes, it does run in my family, and I will admit, the last time I did something that could count as a spiritual practice was actually within the last week, someone convinced my son that he had been cursed in Penang, and I ended up walking around a temple three times clockwise with him. Pretty much, Haoyang, along the same lines as you that I would give it the benefit of the doubt. Graeme, what about you?

 

Graeme Smith  07:53

Look, I want to follow up. How did he come to be cursed in Penang? If that's not too personal?

 

Louisa Lim  07:57

Oh, it had to do with visiting a graveyard, which we later found out was haunted. What about you Graeme?

 

Graeme Smith  08:07

Look, I mean, like a lot of people, in my late teens and 20s, I was very open to Taoist thinking, but my father was an absolute militant atheist. He would invite Mormons into the house to torment than with books by Charles Darwin. So, I think later in life, I've become a lot more sadly, like my father and I view a lot of it very, very skeptically.

 

Louisa Lim  08:31

Okay, well, now we know where we stand. Let's talk about your work. Tristan, I'm going to do that really, even more annoying journalistic thing of asking you to sum up your book in a single sentence. I mean, you were looking at legal cases during the Qing Dynasty involving feng shui, and particularly about feng shui being damaged. And the central tenet is that the Qing state used feng shui to help keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy. Can you talk a bit about how it went about doing that?

 

Tristan Brown  09:02

No, this is a great question. I mean, so exactly. So, the crux of the book is basically two points, which is first in the legal system. So, I think first, it's something a lot of audiences outside of China might not be familiar with. The fact that feng shui was litigated, right? So, this is something before I started researching this book, I encountered these lawsuits just by accident, right? I was looking for other stuff, and I said, wow, people were suing each other on the basis of feng shui. Why don't I look at these documents and tell me what theysay. And so, it was a whole sort of journey into something I never expected and knew very little about it that time. So, the first thing I noticed, the first major conclusion of the book, is that the Qing state, the last dynasty of Imperial China, gave feng shui a space for consideration in the legal system. And I say that space needed to be there. Now it doesn't mean that the state always endorsed feng shui. Oftentimes, the state will disagree with the feng shui interpretation and provide its own, but it engages the logic, and it engages the people’s beliefs in a very direct and even systematic way, I would argue. The second point that I raise is that during the Qing Dynasty, the Chinese population hit an unprecedented, historical high. China's population crossed 300 million in 1800 and kept on rising right through the 20th century. So, in the second half of the dynasty in particular, as we have more pressure on the land, you have growing population, more pressure on need of timber, need of coal, all of these natural resource questions, these are exactly sectors that feng shui had a lot to say about. So, it's in the second half of the dynasty in particular that feng shui anxieties and concerns, I think, were elevated in China. And that actually culminates in this really fascinating, you know, like, let's say, blow up after the Opium Wars with industrialization. And so, my book, it really kind of rethinks that whole moment by providing the sort of legal, environmental historical background that gets us to this, like, big conflict between China and the West, over industrialization and everything in the 19th century.

 

Graeme Smith  11:24

Maybe to pick up on one anecdote which relates to this and this industrialization was unprecedented. It brought railways, it brought telegraph lines. And there's this one moment where the Empress Dowager gets a train as a present, as a birthday present, and she’s delighted. But then immediately she starts to think about the feng shui implications and comes to a rather novel way of dealing with that. Could you maybe tell us what happened? Because I always thought this story was apocryphal, but it turns out, no.

 

Tristan Brown  11:53

Yeah, no, it's true that that they had, you know, I believe animals and also manpower pulled pull the rails rather than actually do the steam-powered, coal-powered trains, right? Due to the, due to the noise, due to a whole variety of things that they were concerned about.

 

Louisa Lim  12:12

When, how far did this train go, being pulled by people?

 

Tristan Brown  12:16

It was in the tens of miles, not thousands of miles. Let's just say that, and we have to remember too, there's a lot of stuff that's going on around this story. I mean, I'm happy to talk more about it, if you're interested. But you know, we have to remember that it’s the imperial city, right? The capital city is where the palaces are. The Imperial tombs are not that far away. So, this is a very sensitive area to begin with, right? And just like, you know, I always say, think about, like, zoning today, right? The size of buildings. Why doesn't Paris have skyscrapers? You know, we would find that to be completely, you know, reasonable, right? So, it was just in the law of the time, in the cultural expectation of the time, you know, especially the imperial city Beijing, had to have a certain environment and keep that up. And frankly, you know, coal power, locomotives and stuff were noisy, they were polluting. They did shake the land. And it was going to take time for people to get used to all that. So, I actually tried to talk about in the book really sympathetically, right, why these concerns made sense to people. And I think now in the 21st century, we're confronting all these environmental challenges, right? We still have a lot of the same questions that they were facing right at that moment, starting in the mid-19th century. So, it is a fascinating moment, and it is not apocryphal. It actually happened.

 

Louisa Lim  13:47

So Haoyang, when you hear Tristan talking about his work, how much of what he's saying still rings true in today's China? The China of Xi Jinping, where spirituality is not just tolerated, but actually also allowed to grow. In part, maybe to sort of allow an escape valve for social anxiety?

 

Haoyang Zhai  14:10

So, first of all, I want to avoid oversimplifying things by attributing this trend of digital spirituality entirely to anxieties we are experiencing now. Because you see, after all, I believe every generation and every individual, they all have moments of stress or uncertainty. We all want to seek guidance or help sometimes, and from a legal perspective, many of these practices we see online today still exist in a kind of grey market. They are not encouraged, but they are not banned as well. So, I think the key issue here is not just about the rise of spirituality online, but it's more about how the concept of spirituality has been reframed. One of the reframing strategy I found is pulled to make the spiritual scientific. Like last year, there was a popular topic on Chinese social media that's hashtag “fortune telling is China's version of psychological counseling.” And Tristan, I don't know if you have heard of something similar, like claims that fengshui corresponds to the globe, to the Earth's magnetic fields. I personally don't know if there's any truth or evidence to these ideas, but they are just an example of how people are reframing spirituality through a scientific lens. So, this way it becomes more acceptable for some people who might otherwise consider these spiritual practices skeptical or superstitious. And you know, it just also aligns better with the mainstream values that uphold a science-oriented ideology.

 

Graeme Smith  16:07

So maybe talk us through, like some of your friends who've really gotten into this, like, how do you get into online spirituality these days? What would be kind of a common sort of, if you like, world system that someone would have if they were starting to delve into this, where would they start? And what sort of apps would they have on their phone?

 

Haoyang Zhai  16:29

It's easy to find a lot of resources online, I have to say. Like, if you go to the popular Chinese video platform Bilibili you will see complex videos about the topic like face reading, fortune telling, astrology, tarot. And just in the comment sections of those videos, you can see a lot of information from the spiritual practitioners. And also, for a lot of my research participants, they just know these people in their social network like they may start from a very small community. And later on, those people in this community will introduce new members here.

 

Louisa Lim  17:15

Tristan, I saw that you were raising your hand. Do you want to chip in?

 

Tristan Brown  17:19

I wanted to just respond to something Haoyang said. I think it's a really brilliant point, and I agree. And I think one of the things that we have to remember with feng shui is that the resilience of this practice of this knowledge system is that it's constantly changing. And that's one of the things that it's very easy to forget because so much of the discourse around legitimizing it today is that it's a traditional thing. So, we say like, oh, it's ancient, it's ancient, it's ancient. Oh, it's traditional, it's traditional, it's traditional. That gives us this veneer of like, okay, it's cool to do. It's okay to do. You know, the state doesn’t want to condemn this cornerstone of traditional Chinese culture, outright, all of that. So, I get it right, but when we look at feng shui across history, it’s constantly absorbing new information. That’s not to say it doesn’t go way back. And there are things that are consistent of yin and yang and the five agents, or five phases. And you know, these cornerstones of Chinese cosmology, those are very ancient, and they're consistent. But, you know, I can, for instance, very brief thing, you know, the Jesuit missions in the 1600s you know, they came into China. And one of the things that got updated around that time with the use of Western scientific knowledge, was the compass.  Alright, so the Chinese compass traditionally had 365.25 degrees. Jesuits wanted to use 360 degrees. So literally, the feng shui masters said, we'll use both. So, they updated the compass to include one layer with 365.25 degrees and another layer with 360 degrees. That’s why the luo pan 罗盘, the feng shui compass, is so huge because they kept adding to it. You see, they didn't… there was never a subtraction, right? It was always more and more every time something new. The Buddhist brought something. Or, you know, the Jesuits brought so on, they added to it. So, in another way it's really a time capsule, in a way of Feng Shui's history, and it shows that dynamism over time. So, when Haoyang talks about, you know what's happening online, or you know what the online landscape is with Chinese users, I'm not surprised at all. Because, of course, it's going to continue to evolve, and it's that's a really exciting story to follow.

 

Haoyang Zhai  19:46

Yeah, and I totally agree with you, because that's why I think spirituality is just the right word to describe today's... what Chinese people are doing, because Chinese people like mixing up. Right? So, yeah, spirituality is such a right word here in this context.

 

Graeme Smith  20:05

And I mean, what is going on online, if you like, what's presented to the world is, you know, the Communist Party is now atheist, people don't believe anymore. But you're describing a completely different world in many ways.

 

Haoyang Zhai  20:17

Okay, if you're interested, I can share some examples of the actual practices with you. We can start from the traditional ones, because just like the global trend, the digital religions in China, the religious practitioners also have become very active on social media today. And one of my participants, he is a Daoist. I hope you are interested in this. He is from the northern China, and he takes orders through WeChat, which means you can book rituals with him for specific reasons, even though you are in Melbourne. And you can book some rituals, maybe for your families or someone who has already passed away, and all you need to do is to provide some basic details through WeChat, like the name and the birth time and the reason behind it, and the Daoist will perform the ritual in his temple in China and send you photos and video recordings of the whole process. And he also take feng shui consultation orders on WeChat. He would visit the locations in person. And he also shares a lot of updates via short videos in the WeChat moment, the social function of WeChat. I think it's so interesting. But it's just an example of a practice rooted in Chinese traditions. It's just, let's say it's migrating to the online spaces. But the practice itself is not changed too much, and there are also a lot of different practices that you can see. It's very innovative that will only happen in online spaces.

 

Louisa Lim  22:07

I remember when I was in China, I did a story about a graveyard going virtual. So, you could, Qingming [清明 Tomb Sweeping Festival], you could visit the grave virtually and make virtual offerings. So, in fact, the whole thing had moved online. I mean, give us some other examples of that type of movement.

 

Haoyang Zhai  22:22

Okay, so the example you mentioned Louisa is it's like the creation of the virtual forum, right? But what people do online, offline is not very different. And a very interesting example I found this time is the spiritual daigou 代购, or spiritual shopping agents. Have you heard of the shopping agents daigou on WeChat? They basically purchase items from overseas for their Chinese customers, and the spiritual daigou may help people purchase spiritual items. For example, theamulets from some Japanese temples, or witchcraft items like star dice or tarot cards from Europe, or even booking rituals in Thailand. So one of my research participants, she helps her WeChat customers book rituals at temples in Thailand, and he's like, she's like a bridge between her Chinese customers and the Thai temples, coordinating everything through WeChat. So I think it's so interesting. I've never seen such practice before, like before the advent of WeChat or some other platforms.

 

Graeme Smith  23:38

So can you find a feng shui master online as well if you wanted to find one?

 

Haoyang Zhai  23:43

Definitely. And there's even the gig platform for these people.

 

Graeme Smith  23:47

And I mean, this is the thing that came up in Tristan's book. Like, how do you vouch for the quality of this advice? Because in Tristan book, there are examples of people hiring a dodgy feng shui master, and then it going to court, because someone dies. And it’s like, well, they obviously died because you put the grave in the wrong place. I mean, given that it's unstructured, how do you vouch for this? Is it just word of mouth?

 

Haoyang Zhai  24:09

I'm sure there are a lot of scams, but all of my research participants, they believe they have found the most authentic practitioners or religious figures for themselves. Like for traditional religious figures, it's pretty easy, because they have to go the approval of local government to operate online so they can show you some certification. It's like a passport, a real thing to show you. I got the approval, I'm officially recognized and I'm illegal, I'm legal, so you can believe in me. But for the other you know tarot fortune tellers, I don't know, I think they have cultivated their customers, because it's not so easy to build a very close relationship with these spiritual practitioners. You have to, for example, you have to find these people's information online first, and then you have to get their WeChat account or some kind of private communication method to become their contacts. And maybe after a few days, you can book an appointment with them. So, after all of these steps, I think these people can build a kind of trust with their consultants or advisors.

 

Louisa Lim  25:32

Tristan, I believe you have done some research on Chinese migrants and their views towards spirituality. I mean, do you tend to find there's differences in attitudes towards feng shui between Chinese migrants and those in China?

 

Tristan Brown  25:50

Well, it's a very, very interesting question. I mean, I think in terms of the fate of feng shui right in the 20th century, there is a difference, at least out of the 20th century, depending on where we are, right? So, you know, in Taiwan, where feng shui practices continued, at various times, the KMT would say, Oh, we're against superstition and all this. But it was never a big crackdown. So, it continued [for] quite, quite some time. That's why a lot of people did field work in Taiwan. Hong Kong was a center of feng shui stuff, I'm sure a lot of other Chinese divinatory type practices for exactly the same reason. I think it's often said in the mainland, feng shui had a tough 20th century in the mainland, in the sense, for a variety of reasons. And it's sometimes, we think of it as, oh, the Cultural Revolution and came in and wiped out all these traditional practices. It is, I think now, we're seeing, more complicated than that. One of the biggest things that I think contributed to change feng shui fortunes in the mainland was simply urbanization. You know, people actually starting in the 70s, 80s, you know, especially the 1980s into 1990s people leaving rural society, which is where feng shui practices were rooted, literally in the soil. And then coming into, you know, concrete jungles of mass urban places, you know, of course, it makes sense that you know, how are you going to apply feng shui when you're not building your own house, right? So there's that. I think as an extension, we could say it did remain. It is, of course, quite large in Southern California, and places of overseas Chinese communities, especially where private real estate markets for single family homes are quite active. I'm sure it's active in Australia. And with all of that being said, I want to make it I want to stress that I totally believe that in the 21st century there will be great interest. There is already great interest in this practice in mainland China, right? So, it's just like, I think, I think feng shui did have a tough 20th century moment. But I think that it's really a question of adjustment, exactly the kinds of adjustments that Haoyang is tracing in her research, right? What is the new evolving landscape and how can it be applied? When I look at feng shui in history, there's no doubt feng shui was mainly practiced in rural environments, right? Where, you know, water sources really mattered, and people had trees all over their property and things like that. What does feng shui look like in a highly urbanized environment? Well, Hong Kong gives us an answer, right? Singapore gives us an answer, right? So, in some ways, we're already seeing new applications of feng shui to these highly urbanized environments, and there's no doubt in my mind that we will continue to see that spill over in the mainland, take their own evolutionary trajectories in the mainland, in various cities. I think it's just a matter of time.

 

Louisa Lim  29:10

I was just going to follow up and ask you about with this really interesting case in 2019 about Wang Jing SOHO and their Zaha Hadid building complex in Beijing. And some websites said that it had terrible feng shui, was heart piercing and looked like a pig's kidney. And actually went to court, and they awarded Soho China $30,000 in damages. Tristan, what does that case show us about the state's attitude towards feng shui and how much that has changed?

 

Tristan Brown  29:50

I think it's fair to say that all of the practices at all times going well back in history, maybe the right word is ambivalent. Okay, it's never a complete rejection, or sometimes it is, but rarely. It's neither a full throttle yes, we're totally into this, right? It's a case-by-case thing. And of course, in the case, for instance, that I'm looking at the legal landscape of pre-modern China, pre-20th century China, for exactly the reasons I was just talking about. Rural society, lots of trees, water. There were just so many ways in which feng shui applied. So people talked about it a lot. It came up a lot, and so the state dealt with it a lot. But if we look at now evolutions in, you know, Chinese law, you know, since the 1980s but also various kinds of ways in which cities are greening, urbanizing, managing space, you know, trying to even, let's say, combat pollution. There's all ways in which you could bring feng shui back into the equation. And so, I'm not surprised. I’ll just, I'll just kind of say, for instance, there's also the big new urban space that's been planned outside of Beijing, this sort of, you know, new capital, or Xi Jinping's capital. And there's been a ton of discussion about the feng shui online. Again, it's all on this online space, of what the feng shui, of that, you know, sort of newly planned city outside of Beijing looks like, right? Is it good? Is it bad? What does it portend for Xi Jinping, and the future of the of the central government, or whatever? So, I mean, I think it all shows us that this stuff is not going to go away. It's going to be relevant exactly in the case that you just pointed out. Feng shui is intrinsically and this is something that a lot of people, I think, missed. Perhaps at least in Western audiences prior to the publication of my book, which is its legal implications, which have always been there and will continue to be there. Because fundamentally, these questions are about control over space and how space and resources in an area should be used. And so, it's a story to watch, right? It's not going away, and it's going to be relevant in the 21st century.

 

Graeme Smith  32:09

When I was in Anhui in the noughties, I watched the county government relocate itself from one side of the valley to the other, simply for feng shui reasons, because the county government was sitting with mountains to the south instead of mountains to the north. So, they moved to the other side of the valley, so they had mountains blocking the cold north wind, and they built a massive artificial lake in front of the new government compound. And it was an enormous amount of money, and yet the attitude of ordinary people was like, “Ah, yeah, that makes sense. That’s why the county party secretary never gets promoted to a good job, because the feng shui was all wrong.” And they spent all this money, literally in the name of feng shui, with the party on board and the ordinary people, apart from those who are relocated on board as well. I mean, is this pretty, is this a difference between local government and maybe central government?

 

Tristan Brown  33:01

One thing I'll tell you is that, you know, with Xi Jinping anti-corruption campaign, a number of provincial level officials, I mean, fairly high-ranking officials. I'm not going to say hundreds, but you know, more than a couple were brought down. And one of the reasons they were brought down is because of their participation in activities like feng shui. So which, again, I think is a really, really interesting. So, for example, so it can be good, right? It can be well received. It can also be like, look at what this local official is doing, or provincial official is doing, hoarding money or wasting resources on some, you know, some spectacle for his own benefit. So, what I think that’s all goes to show, is that feng shui, I mean exactly, it's not only always been legal, it has been political. And it still is a political question, right? Whether it's to legitimize power or to attack somebody in power, right? And so I think, like, especially, you know, and this is also, think, something of like, you know, what are the political wins at any given point, right? So, at the height of the anti-corruption campaign, right? You probably don't want to move the county government seat to the other side of the river. But in another context, maybe you very much want to.

 

Louisa Lim  34:25

I think it's interesting, because there's so much noise still about feng shui. And as you say, Tristan this discussion about the location of Xiong’an and whether that was driven by feng shui. And even I've seen stuff online about whether the purge of the rocket force was due to feng shui reasons. I mean, it's clear that the, as you put it, the discourse around feng shui is still extremely active, isn't it?

 

Tristan Brown  34:55

We are talking about like civil society questions here, right? Which is like, okay, maybe I can't openly criticize this policy, or maybe I can't openly criticize this thing. But what I can say is, I can say, hey, I think that's very inauspicious, right? Or I can say that, hey, I think that place's feng shui is bad, right? And that's a way to criticize Xiong’an or a new airport or whatever, right? And so, in a sense, it's important, right? Because what we're looking at here, and this isn't, this isn't new. I just want to say, I mean, historians are always going to say that. I have to do that spiel as a good historian. Of saying, like, you know, variety of astrological calculations, eclipses, right? So, for instance, I mean, eclipses were always political in Imperial China, lunar eclipses or solar eclipses. And, you know, let's say you kind of think that the sitting emperor or officials, they're not doing a good job. And then an eclipse comes, and then you're gonna make a big deal about it, because you're gonna be like, hey, I think some really inauspicious things are gonna happen. I'm feeling bad about this, because you can't openly say, I don't think the emperor is doing a good job, right? So, you could, you could say, but you could say it in this other way. So, this is a reason, I speculate, actually, that you know, these practices were so resilient, it's because they were useful, right? They were they were useful; they were relevant. They allowed people to talk about things that were otherwise really difficult to talk about. And I think that still turns around today.

 

Louisa Lim  36:36

And Haoyang? How do you think that plays out today? I mean, we mentioned this uptick in incense burning youth and temple tourism and stuff like that. What is happening now, and how do you explain it?

 

Haoyang Zhai  36:50

Even I'm looking at some online practices. I know more young people today are visiting their religious sites, not necessarily for spiritual reasons, actually, but because these are historical landmarks, and they can take beautiful pictures or vlogs and share them on social media. So, these young people are influenced by patriotic education. I think they are combining an interest in traditional culture with popular, fashionable trends. And at the same time, China’s indigenous ritual practice such as burning incense or burning paper money or visiting temples, just riding this culture wave.

 

Graeme Smith  37:37

And have some local governments kind of woken up to this as almost a tourism opportunity to sort of promote spirituality, to attract tourists?

 

Haoyang Zhai  37:46

We don't have certain evidence, but I believe so. Because you can see it’s more frequently that some spirituality-focused application are trying to relate some concepts like wuxing 五行, the five agents of elements or fengshui or even some traditional Chinese fortune telling arts to cultural heritage, to the national culture and more. Many people running fortune telling business online also present themselves as promoters of tradition, because they believe in this way it can help them to avoid the moderation of the platform.

 

Louisa Lim  38:31

Can you talk a bit about how AI is being used in this spirituality space now?

 

Haoyang Zhai  38:37

I'm actually writing a book chapter about that. So, if I share that briefly, I would say it's just very in a intro level, because I look at a specific platform. It's called Cece 测测. It's only focused on astrology, fortune telling and psychology, and I think they use AI as a tool for beginner. It helps beginners to get familiar with all the different tools and let you know what will happen in a real communication with a human advisor or human consultant. And after the report generated by AI, they will show you a link and just direct you to the gig part for the human you know, fortune tellers.

 

Louisa Lim  39:29

Oh, so it's like an Uber for fortune tellers?

 

Haoyang Zhai  39:32

Kind of like that.

 

Graeme Smith  39:33

So, it's kind of screening you in a way, and trying to direct you to the best or most suitable practitioner. Yeah, and is this a really popular app, Cece?

 

Haoyang Zhai  39:41

Yes, it's really popular because it has three parts. So, one is AI part, and also they have the human advisor, human fortune teller network. And also there are some different tools for you to DIY your spiritual reports.

 

Graeme Smith  39:57

And you mentioned up top that there was this divide between structured, sort of spirituality, religion and unstructured. How do people try and stay on, if you like, the unregulated side of that line? What's what sort of tactics do they use to stop the state regulating them?

 

Haoyang Zhai  40:14

I think most especially young people today, they are just freely exploring everything. Because, you know now so many people, in so many ways, are participating in what has essentially become what I call a spiritual industry. And even the pricing varies widely, depending on how you, where you go to and what you are seeking for. So, I find fascinating is that people are not bound by specific religions today. They are considering not only the spiritual elements, spiritual aspects, but also some additional factors. For example, in the past, people might drink the talisman water. Do you do know that? It's usually made by burning a piece of talisman into ashes and then mixing the ashes into water. So, in the past, people might drink that for good luck or for safety without caring about how it tasted, because it wasn't about flavor. If it was good for you drank it, that's it. But today, people think differently, especially for young people. If a temple's protective amulet looks lovely, looks cute. They are more likely to wear it. If they don't like the design, they might shop around for one they find more aesthetically pleasing at another temple, whatever is Taoist, it's Buddhist, or from China or Japan or Thailand.

 

Louisa Lim  41:56

I think it's so interesting that what you're talking about is that actually it sounds like spirituality is becoming very trendy, right? Both because it of its roots in traditional Chinese beliefs, but also because of its sort of patriotic sense. And I guess my final question is, to what extent do you think Xi Jinping's China will continue to tolerate this uptick in spirituality? At what point would they see it as being a threat?

 

Haoyang Zhai  42:29

Honestly, I can't give you a very certain answer, because I believe spirituality is just in the stage of being reframed, you know, for the purpose of the government. And I can't definitely say, from a political or even a philosophical perspective, whether the essence of spirituality has changed. And whether it will be tolerated by the governmental authority. But I do know that this dynamic, this disorder, is incredibly intriguing, and I'm happy to say that everyone seems to be exploring and interpreting spirituality in their own way today. So, I'm happy to see that, and I hope it can last for a longer time.

 

Louisa Lim  43:17

Tristan, do you think the reframing of spirituality as an industry, does that help the Communist Party find a way of dealing with it?

 

Tristan Brown  43:26

Well, they're definitely going to try to regulate. I mean, so it's going to be a battle. I think there'll be periodic crackdowns. There'll be people, certain practitioners, will be exposed as frauds. And you know what I mean, there'll be, you know, public examples made of a few of them. I expect all of this will play out, but I think that the long-term trend is that the state will live with it, and the state will find a space, space for it, right? And it's a story to watch, right? As I said. I mean, I'll give you one real example, not directly related to feng shui, but just from the 19th century, right? There's a sacred edict right that goes back to the early Qing Dynasty and the Kangxi Emperor, and they had to recite it all, all across villages over China. And it was kind of a bland affair for much of the dynasty. The Taiping Rebellion came to town. It was a huge, huge crisis for the Qing. And so what the Qing did was they mixed the sacred edict with a bunch of popular religious deities and spiced it up and everything like that. And they managed to, you know, of course, the Taipings were put down and the state was able to shore up its legitimacy. But it came at a cost. They compromised, right? They gave more space. So, it's an ever-evolving battle, right? Or battle may be too militaristic a term, but ever evolving negotiation. How much room the state gives tells you a lot about the government at any particular moment, right? What does it need? Right? Or what does it afford? What does it think it needs to do all of that. So just take, for instance, going back to the feng shui example, in real estate. Well, real estate's been a very sensitive issue for obvious reasons in the last 20, 30 years in the People's Republic, and there have been a variety of regulations placed on real estate. Various times, how many properties can you own? Or, you know, in whose name could it be? I remember in Shanghai, you know, people were getting divorced so that they could have a second property. You know, all of these games that were being played, right? Well, now we're in a very different landscape, right? Well, you know, China is now the cities that it was going to build. It's already built. The buildings that it was going to build, a lot of them have already been built. The population is aging. We're getting into the era of a second-hand housing market, rather than a new housing market. At what point in the 21st century do local governments say, hey, let the feng shui masters back in we got to sell some properties, right? You could think about it like that, right? It might just be a matter of time, and I wouldn't be surprised if something like that ends up transpiring, not necessarily this decade, but at some point in the future.

 

Graeme Smith  46:16

Tristan, Hao Yang. Thanks for joining us.

 

Tristan Brown  46:18

Thank you so much.

 

Graeme Smith  46:19

You've been listening to the Little Red Podcast, which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. Many thanks to our guests, Tristan Brown and Haoyang Zhai and to my co-host, Louisa Lim. Our editor for this episode is Andy Hazel. Our background research is by Wing Kuang. Social media and transcripts by Juliette Baxter. Theme music is by Susie Wilkins. And our contents and GIFs are courtesy of Seb Danta. Bye for now.