ABSTRACT
Li Dong,1 who was an art student in Beijing at the time, made a short film about Buddhist meditation in 2010 and uploaded it to the Chinese online video platform Youku.2 The project was part of an artistic and ethical engagement with Buddhism, which he maintained side by side with the Christian belief inherited from his family. By discussing Li Dong’s religious practice and his use of new media and communication technologies, this chapter aims to critically address a pervasive emphasis on conflict and antagonism in scholarly studies of religion and of the Internet in China. The dominant notion in academic studies of China holds that economic reforms in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s have provided Chinese citizens with increased autonomy vis-à-vis the state. This assumption, I argue, is conceptually flawed and leads to reductive accounts of religion and of media. As a result, creative religious and digital media practices of Chinese citizens are either framed as forms of resistance against state regulation (Madsen 2010; Tang and Sampson 2012; Xiao 2011) or discussed as phenomena that evade it (Ji 2006; Palmer 2004; Yang F. 2006). This tendency is especially pronounced when religion and the Internet converge, as they do in Li Dong’s online mediation of Buddhism. Yet while his religious and artistic practice did not take shape as resistance, it was nevertheless constituted in political and technological environments.
