The DOI matches its Crossref record; 26 of the 31 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Bearing Witness: Maoism as Religion
Open accessAbstract
The role of foreign witnesses in describing exceptional historical events can contribute to the way those events unfold. Three examples serve to illustrate this: Edgar Snow, Anna Louise Strong and Agnes Smedley. At the start of the Chinese communist revolution each of these commentators offered personal testimony to and validation of what became a political myth and was elevated to the status of a state political religion with Mao the central figure. This paper discusses the differences between political religion and religion tout court. It suggests that the former is more ephemeral while the latter is more capable of self-replenishment, leading to the ritualization of the first in the exercise of state power. It also deals with the question of socialism as proto-religion and the problems posed by its disappearance.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The check wasn’t confident either way, so it gives no verdict — never disputed.
In the citing paper
“The detective work of the Taiwanese amateur historian Ke Yuxian 柯 毓 賢 , 2 as well as studies by Takeuchi Fusashi 竹 内 房 司 3 and mainland scholar Yu Songqing 喻 松 青 4 in particular, have made us better aware of the contents of this text and its historical significance.”
From The Sutra of the Five Lords : Manuscript and oral tradition (2015) · cites this paper as [2]
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Polanyi, K. (2002) · Readings in Economic Sociology · doi:10.1002/9780470755679.ch4 · Cited by 6,208
Williams, R. (1961) · Columbia University Press eBooks · doi:10.7312/will93760 · Cited by 3,220
Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s
Fitzpatrick, S. (1999) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780195050004.001.0001 · Cited by 493
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia.
Prager, J., Ricoeur, P., & Taylor, G. H. (1988) · Contemporary Sociology · doi:10.2307/2069705 · Cited by 488
Cohn, N. (1957) · Cited by 359
The Origins of the Cultural Revolution
Hinton, H. C., & Macfarquhar, R. (1984) · The American Historical Review · doi:10.2307/1866532 · Cited by 269
Snow, E. (1937) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 237
Revolutionary discourse in Mao's Republic
(1995) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.32-4726 · Cited by 225
The political thought of Mao Tse-tung
毛, 沢., & Schram, S. R. (1963) · Medical Entomology and Zoology · Cited by 220
Schram, S. (1989) · Cambridge University Press eBooks · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511521454 · Cited by 185
Research works printed but not linked: 6
- Fitzpatrick, Sheila 1999. Everyday Stalinism. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Hamilton, John Maxwell 1988. Edgar Snow. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
- MacKinnon, Stephen R. 1988. The Life and Times of an American Radical. Berkeley: Uni- versity of California Press.
- Smedley, Agnes 1970. China Correspondent. London: Pandora Press.
- Strong, Anna Louise (1885-) Letters from China. Peking: New World Press.
- Tsou Tang 1986. The Cultural Revolution and Post-Mao Reforms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cited by
The Sutra of the Five Lords : Manuscript and oral tradition
ter Haar, B. J. (2015) · Studies in Chinese Religions · doi:10.1080/23729988.2015.1044323 · Cited by 9
Inouye, M. W.-T. (2018) · Modern China · doi:10.1177/0097700418763557 · Cited by 3
The Religious Dimension of Politics in Maoist China 1
Gamsa, M. (2009) · Religion Compass · doi:10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00142.x · Cited by 2
Values and beliefs : Chinese seafarers in an age of transition
Li, L. (2011) · ORCA Online Research @Cardiff (Cardiff University) · Cited by 1
Karmisto, T. (2024) · UTUPub (University of Turku)
Metadata
- Authors
- Apter, D. E.
- Affiliations
- Yale University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Apter, David E.
- Venue
- The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies
- Publisher
- Copenhagen Business School
- Published
- 2005-04-10
- Volume
- 22
- Pages
- 5-37
- ISSN
- 1395-4199 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1754303217
- Cited by
- 4
- References
- 31
- Citations by year
- 2018: 1 · 2015: 1
- FWCI
- 0.00
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › Chinese history and philosophy
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Communism, Protests, Social Movements
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Religion and Society Interactions
- Keywords
- Maoism, political religion, Mao Zedong, Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley, foreign correspondents, Chinese Communist revolution, political myth, church-state relations
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Bearing Witness: Maoism as Religion. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.22439/cjas.v22i1.519
- The paper
- Apter, D. E. (2005). Bearing Witness: Maoism as Religion. The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies. https://doi.org/10.22439/cjas.v22i1.519
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
