Shanrendao

Shanrendao () is a Confucian-Taoist religious movement in northeast China. Its name as a social body is the Universal Church of the Way and its Virtue () or simply the Church of the Way and its Virtue (), which is frequently translated as the Morality Church. Shanrendao can be viewed as one of the best examples of the jiaohua () movements. It is one of the most prominent religions of redemption of China, and was formally established as the Universal Church of the Way and its Virtue in Shandong in 1921 by Jiang Shoufeng (1875–1926), a member of the Confucian Church () of Kang Youwei. Kang Youwei himself was the president of the church during the last year of his life. The movement was concerned with a reconstitution of morality, at a time in which people no longer understood what morality means because of the decline of religion. By the 1930s the religion had a strong presence in Manchuria, where it persists to the present day. A great contribution came from Jiang Shoufeng's son, Jiang Xizhang (1907–2004), an intellectual prodigy who composed commentaries on the Confucian classics before the age of ten. Father and son composed vernacular versions of the classics in order to disseminate Confucianism among the Chinese masses. After the World War I, Xizhang wrote a leaflet, the Xizhanlun with anti-war teachings inspired by the content of the world religions. The strongest impetus in the social importance of the movement, however, came from Wang Fengyi (王凤仪; 1864–1937), a charismatic healer and preacher of peasant origins who led the Universal Church of the Way and its Virtue in the 1930s. He is celebrated as a peasant saint throughout northeast China, a shànrén () with the epithet "Wang the Good" or "Virtuous King" (王善人), a wordplay as his surname means "king" or "ruler". Wang Fengyi elaborated a doctrine and practice based on self-knowledge, self-realisation, and self-reliance, based on traditional Chinese theology and cosmology, especially the five elements () and the yinyang cosmology.