The Way of Pervading Unity: Contemporary Dynamics of a Major New Religious Movement

Abstract:

In this lecture, I will present one of the most important yet least known and least understood “new religious movements” in the Chinese world. Yiguandao (the Way of Pervading Unity) was one of the major redemptive societies in Republican China. It managed to endure and redeploy in Taiwan and Hong Kong after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and has today a global reach.

Drawing on nearly a decade of ethnographic research, I introduce a Yiguandao community in Hong Kong that serves as a key node of circulation between Taiwan, Macao, Mainland China and other regions. I then explore the factors driving the group’s expansion: the ways in which adepts live and confirm their faith; the importance of charismatic leadership; the role of Confucianism in defusing tensions with Chinese authorities; and finally, Yiguandao’s well-structured expansion strategies and its quasi-diplomatic efforts to navigate the troubled waters of cross-straits politics.

This presentation is based on my book Reclaiming the Wilderness, contemporary Dynamics of the Yiguandao (Oxford University Press, 2020; Chengchi University Press 2022; CNRS Éditions, 2025).

Bio:

Sébastien Billioud is Professor of Chinese studies at Université Paris Cité, a senior member of the Institut universitaire de France and a researcher at the French Research Institute on East Asia (IFRAE). Using a cross-disciplinary approach, his work explores the modern and contemporary fates of Confucianism.

His publications include Thinking through Confucian Modernity: A Study of Mou Zongsan’s Moral Metaphysics (Brill, 2012), The Sage and the People: The Confucian Revival in China (with Joël Thoraval, Oxford University Press, 2015), Reclaiming the Wilderness: Contemporary Dynamics of the Yiguandao (Oxford University Press, 2020). He is currently completing a monograph on the appropriations of a Confucian political imaginary in China since the end of the Empire.