Taoism Is Revived in China After the Cultural Revolution

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Persecution of Taoists in China came to an end in 1979, three years after Mao Zedong's death had opened the way for the political shift that followed him. For the Taoist communities that had survived the Cultural Revolution only in private, hidden observance, 1979 marked the first point since 1966 when practicing openly no longer meant risking a labor camp.

Taoists across the country moved quickly once that door opened. Temples that Red Guards had damaged or shuttered began reopening, and practices that families and individuals had kept alive quietly through thirteen years of suppression came back into public view for the first time since the campaign began.

Institutional recovery continued through the 1980s rather than stopping at reopened doors. Formal priestly ordination, the mechanism by which Taoism had trained and recognized its own clergy for centuries and which the Cultural Revolution had broken entirely, resumed during the decade, restoring the institutional structure a purely private, family kept faith could not maintain on its own.

What the 1979 turn changed for Taoism's spread was the difference between a tradition preserved and a tradition practiced. Thirteen years of underground survival had kept Taoism alive in China; the reopened temples and resumed ordinations of the 1980s gave it back the public, institutional form in which it had operated for most of its long history before the Cultural Revolution nearly erased it.