ABSTRACT
In short, under the modern states of mainland China (Communist) and Taiwan (Nationalist), there has been an institutional separation of politics from religion. And the most intense period of political rituals has come to form a total event in the historical memory of mainland China. Fortunately, there are enough indicative studies to begin to gauge the significance of collectivisation and to understand what might have been the effects of the political rituals of those years. Now the collectivist ideals and senses of self that had been induced by political rituals have themselves become a tradition over which the revivals have been laid. He places three different connotations of ritual in a chronological order, before the modern category of religion and its academic authority stamp onto it their own authoritative conceptions.
