Abstract
Over the last years, there have been a handful of stories in the South China Morning Post, an important English language newspaper in Hong Kong, talking about a problem that has emerged recently: ‘fake monks.’ The problem seemed to be that men who had come into Hong Kong from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were shaving their heads, putting on robes, and pretending to be monks begging for alms. Apparently, it was a more effective way to get money for beggars than some of the usual tricks. Intriguingly, the stories from the South China Morning Post equate these ‘monks’ with prostitutes: both are immigrants from China who are not allowed to work under the terms of their visas to Hong Kong. Thus, these articles argue that, like prostitutes, the ‘fake monks’ need to be sent packing. There is an assumption in this that may seem obvious but worth highlighting nonetheless: like other people, Buddhist monks and nuns need visas.1
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Notes
See Carney, J. and Cheng, J. (2013) ‘Call for Visa Crackdown on Bogus Buddhist Monks,’ South China Morning Post, 24 February 2013;
see also Wright, A. ‘Saffron Swindle,’ South China Morning Post, 15 August 2012;
Ng Tzewei. ‘Clampdown Urged on “Migrant” Monks,’ South China Morning Post, 15 August 2012.
Davis, S. L. D. (2005) Song and Silence (New York: Columbia University Press).
Blackburn, A. (2010) Locations of Buddhism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
For example, Smith, B. L. ed. (1978a) Religion and the Legitimation of Power in Sri Lanka (Chambersburg: ANIMA Books);
Smith, B. L. ed. (1978b) Religion and the Legitimation of Power in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia (Chambersburg: ANIMA Books);
and Tambiah, S. J. (1976) World Conqueror, World Renouncer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Jackson, P. (1990) Buddhism, Legitimation and Conflict (Singapore: ISEAS).
Blackburn, A. (2001) Buddhist Learning and Textual Practice in Eighteenth-Century Lankan Monastic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Hill, A. M. (1998) Merchants and Migrants (New Haven: Yale Southeast Asia Studies), p. 67.
McCarthy, S. K. (2004) ‘Gods of Wealth, Temples of Prosperity,’ China: An International Journal 2, 28–52.
Borchert, T. A. (2006) Educating Monks: Buddhism, Politics and Freedom of Religion on China’s Southwest Border (PhD Dissertation, University of Chicago).
Chinese Communist Party Central Committee. ‘Document 19: The Basic Viewpoint and Policy on the Religious Question during our Country’s Socialist Period,’ in D. E. MacInnis (ed.) Religion in China Today (Maryknoll: Orbis Books), p. 15.
Tweed, T. (2006) Crossing and Dwelling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
Bloemraad, I., Korteweg, A., and Yurdakul, G. (2008) ‘Citizenship and Immigration,’ Annual Review of Sociology 34, 156.
This summary comes primarily from Fong, V. and Murphey, R. (2009) ‘Introduction,’ in Fong and Murphey (eds.) Chinese Citizenship (New York: Routledge), pp. 1–2,
Rosaldo, R. (2003) ‘Introduction,’ in R. Rosaldo (ed.) Cultural Citizenship in Island Southeast Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press);
Ong, A. (2003) Buddha Is Hiding (Berkeley: University of California Press);
and Goldman, M. and Perry, E. (2002) Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
see Yang, F. (2006) ‘The Red, Black and Grey Markets of Religion in China,’ The Sociological Quarterly 47, 93–122;
Palmer, D. (2008) ‘Heretical Doctrines, Reactionary Secret Societies, Evil Cults,’ in M. Yang (ed.) Chinese Religiosities (Berkeley: University of California Press);
and Borchert, T. (2010) ‘The Abbot’s New House,’ Journal of Church and State 52, 112–37.
Ashiwa, Y and Wank, D. (2006) ‘The Politics of a Reviving Buddhist Temple,’ Journal of Asian Studies 65, 337–60.
Nichols, B. (2011) History, Material Culture and Auspicious Events at the Purple Cloud: Buddhist Monasticism at Quanzhou Kaiyuan (PhD Dissertation, Rice University), p. 376.
See the essays in Ashiwa Y. and Wank, D. eds. (2009) Making Religion, Making the State (Stanford: Stanford University Press),
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© 2016 Thomas Borchert
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Borchert, T. (2016). On Being a Monk and a Citizen in Thailand and China. In: Kawanami, H. (eds) Buddhism and the Political Process. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57400-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-57400-8_2
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