Let's Get Spiritual: State, Digital Spirituality and Feng Shui in China

To welcome the Year of the Snake, we're launching a new series looking at belief in China. Young Chinese people are increasingly turning to spirituality - even online manifestations of it - and feng shui, in this moment of high unemployment and economic stress. For a Party guided by materialism, this spike in spiritual interest presents a dilemma: how to regulate something you purport not to believe in. To discuss the state's use of spirituality from the Qing to now, we're joined by Tristan Brown, a historian at MIT and author of Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China and Haoyang Zhai, a researcher at the University of Melbourne. Image: "May The Snake Be With You" c/- Juliette Baxter Episode transcripts available at

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Let's Get Spiritual: State, Digital Spirituality and Feng Shui in China is an episode from The Little Red Podcast by The Little Red Podcast.

This episode is 46:54 long.

This episode was published on Feb 5, 2025.

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