Northeast China folk religion is the variety of Chinese folk religion of northeast China, characterised by distinctive cults original to Hebei and Shandong, transplanted and adapted by the Han Chinese settlers of Liaoning, Jilin and Heilongjiang (the three provinces comprising Manchuria) since the Qing dynasty. It is characterised by terminology, deities and practices that are different from those of central and southern Chinese folk religion. Many of these patterns derive from the interaction of Han religion with Manchu shamanism. Prominence is given to the worship of zoomorphic deities, of a "totemic" significance. In the region the terms shen ("god") and xian ("immortal being") are synonymous. Figures of ritual specialists or shamans perform various ritual functions for groups of believers and local communities, including chūmǎxiān ( "riding for the immortals"), dances, healing, exorcism, divination, and communication with ancestors. History The formation of northeast China's folk religion and shamanism can be traced back to the Qing dynasty (1644-1911), when a large number of Han Chinese settled in the northeast of China mixing with Manchus. Either in the Qing period, and in the later Republic of China (1912-1949) and subsequent People's Republic, the worship of zoomorphic deities and the practice of chumaxian had bad relationship with the governments, which considered it "feudal superstition" ( fēngjiàn míxìn) and banned through different decrees. The popular worship of animal gods began to resurface in the 1980s, and soon also the chumaxian practice was revived. In the 2010s there have been attempts to protect chumaxian under the policy of "intangible cultural heritage". Japanese scholarship and Shinto similarities The study of northeast China's folk religion owes much to the scholarly enterprise that the Japanese conducted on the subject during the period of Manchukuo (1932–1945) that they established after they occupied Manchuria. Unlike Japanese-occupied Korea and occupied Taiwan, Manchuria was conceived as an autonomous nation, not to be assimilated into Japan, but rather to be modeled after the latter's social and religious structure keeping an independent identity. Ōmachi Tokuzo (1909-1970), a pupil of Yanagita Kunio (the founder of academic ethnography in Japan), conducted field research on local religion in Manchuria through the war years. He later acted as the head of the Society for the Study of Manchurian Customs, producing an impressive body of research on local religion in Manchuria and north China. Ōmachi identified the rural village, each with a Tudishen shrine, as the fundamental unit of northeast