I am writing a research paper on the evolution of religion in China and I am currently searching for any primary sources of specific Struggle Sessions and Self Criticisms attributed to religion. I am super excited about this topic, however, I've never done academic research of any sort and I have zero idea where to start.
I found a book titled, "China's Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society)" however the Google preview does not show any of the sources used.
Are there databases/collections of any sort I could search for primary sources? Can anybody point me in the right direction to finding a primary source in Chinese or preferably translated to English related to this topic?
A couple of thoughts.
One category of primary sources you'll have is contemporary Chinese scholars and theologians writing about religion from either a scholarly or a pastoral/personal perspective. I suggest search terms like "china mysticism" and "china spirituality" (and better yet, specify "chinese christian spirituality" "chinese traditional spirituality" and so forth) would be a way of channeling your searches towards something that might talk about dark nights of the soul.
scholar.google.com is a decent place to start searching, but I'd recommend searching through academic databases more directly. JSTOR is a popular place to begin for paywalled databases, although it doesn't catalogue the most recent journal issues. EBSCOhost has ATLA, which is a religion-specific database that might be worthwhile. If your school's website has a History, Religious Studies, or Asian Studies Library Resources page, it might direct you to the most helpful databases that you have access to.
As far as older works go, the Internet Sacred Texts Archive is really great but must be used with caution. It's all freely-available, out-of-copyright texts and translations, which means everything is from the 19th or early 20th century. That is okay with translations of ancient/medieval/early modern works (although for your paper itself, you should track down a more recent translation if one exists). However, any scholarly commentary on the primary sources or any "history of _____" from 1896, 1910, etc. is not really worth reading today.
Hopefully this gives you a good platform to start looking!