De Jiao in Thailand

De Jiao (德教 – "teaching of virtue") is an Asiatic NRM which emerged in Chaozhou (Guangdong province - China) during the Sino-Japanese war (1937 - 1945). Based on spirit-writing and rooted in the Buddhist tradition of the Teochew (Chaozhou) "halls for good deeds" (shan tang – 善堂), it blends the worship of Buddhist and Daoist deities, and the teachings of Confucian values. According to the typology elaborated by Duara Prasenjit (2001), it is one of the "redemptive societies" that emerged in China during the first half of the 20th century. Banned from China when the Communists took power in 1949, it has spread in the 1950s to Hong Kong and throughout mainland Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand). Overseas, its organization and strategies for social and political integration strongly reflect the managerial habits and entrepreneurial ethos of the local ethnic Chinese businessmen who ensure its financing and management. It has also built original bonding with symbols of the Chinese civilization whose greatness and charitable activities it claims to champion from the periphery. Up to the 2010, De Jiao had achieved global expansion, although its presence was strongest in Southeast Asia. It had about 150 congregations in Malaysia, 81 in Thailand, 11 in Singapore, 3 in Hong Kong, 3 in Laos, 3 in Australia, 2 in the United States and one in Japan. From 1997 onwards, De Jiao has steadily developed small underground congregations of 30 to 60 adepts in different parts of the PRC. Overseas, its congregations and temples are mainly distributed in places where ethnic Chinese communities are dominated by the Teochew (the endonym for people from Chaozhou). The latter represent more than 70 per cent of the adepts, and the Teochew dialect is the common idiom in performing rituals. The leading function that the De Jiao adepts confer to "divine instructions" through spirit writing induces a cult flexibility which in turn largely contributes to its adaptability to political contingencies.