A Guerrilla War of Words: A Mixed-Methods Dataset on Fortune-Telling Practices in Changsha

This dataset constitutes the core of an innovative ethnographic study conducted in Changsha, a Chinese city renowned for its deep-seated revolutionary tradition. It captures a paradoxical socio-cultural phenomenon: the proliferation of fortune-telling practices among highly educated young elites, who operate under the dual structural pressures of state atheist ideology and intense "neijuan" (involutionary) competition.The collection uniquely documents how individuals construct a covert, highly adaptive system of meaning-making—termed "Guerrilla Spirituality"—and navigate the consequent "Folded Personhood" of maintaining a public materialist identity alongside private spiritual seeking.Comprising four pillars, the dataset provides a holistic 360-degree view, capturing both the supply side (practitioners' adaptive strategies) and the demand side (clients' cognitive negotiations) of this meaning ecosystem:Consumer Questionnaire Dataset: Records the nuanced beliefs and behaviors of 100 educated young consumers in Changsha. It combines quantitative ratings with rich qualitative feedback, vividly illustrating how individuals translate abstract "Ultimate Concern" into manageable "existential anxieties" (career, relationships, meaning) and seek strategic guidance through fortune-telling.Synthesis of Practitioner Interviews: A consolidated analysis of in-depth interviews with 20 diverse fortune-tellers, from traditional blind masters at temple gates to "cultural consultants" in upscale office towers. It reveals their survival tactics and "rhetorical evolution," detailing how they recast traditional metaphysical concepts into the modern lexicons of psychology, management, and data science to secure legitimacy and clientele.Practitioner Interview Guide & Consumer Questionnaire Template: The complete research instruments that ensured systematic and replicable data collection. These tools provide critical context for understanding the genesis and structure of the core datasets, showcasing the study's methodological rigor.Value of the Collection: The paramount value of this dataset lies in its capture of a profound societal paradox. It documents not a simple resurgence of tradition, but a sophisticated, modern-day "guerrilla warfare of the spirit"—a strategic, fragmented, and instrumentally rational pursuit of meaning under ideological constraint. The data is rich with tension between science and metaphysics, public conformity and private solace, revolutionary legacy and spiritual exploration. It offers an unprecedented empirical resource for scholars of secularization, contemporary Chinese society, youth culture, and the anthropology of religion, providing a compelling case study from a socialist state for global theoretical dialogues.