ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the belief world of Chinese migrants by introducing the exuberance of religion in Chinese society in New York. It explores religion’s social function in the migrant community and reveals how the little tradition interacts with the great tradition as well as how immigrants reconstruct a moral order in the community. It is followed by a discussion of whether the activities of the religious contribute to the construction of civil public space. That is, are there cultural possibilities in the traditions that make sense to the construction of a civil society? The narrative will reveal two levels, the cosmopolitanism of humanistic Buddhism and the impressive development of a suppressed folk region in transnational space. These two categories represent the scale and nature of different folk beliefs, but now all refer to the cosmopolitanism of migrants.
