ABSTRACT
Yang Guobin has argued that the Internet offers Chinese citizens an opportunity to circumvent the state and question authority when it is abusing power. The expectation that active netizens would make the government accountable has received validation over some remarkable cases, such as the train accident in Wenzhou or the mass mobilization in Wukan 乌坎. Moreover, the resilience of the Falun Gong despite more than a decade of persecution by the Chinese government has pointed to the potential of cybermobilization. The use of the Internet to create community of meaning is especially relevant to religious institutions whose raison d’être is precisely to promote a worldview that can sometimes clash with that of the state, even if only symbolically or metaphorically (Thornton 2002). Keeping in mind the efforts of the state to encourage the unification of Buddhism under a single organizational structure, the number of people who relate to that tradition and, as I will document in this chapter, the vitality of online Buddhism, we know very little about the political leanings of online Buddhism in China. In this chapter, I look beyond the structure of official Buddhism and offer a bird’s-eye view of the numerous Buddhist websites in China, asking to what extent they resist, reinforce or complement the party-state’s agenda. In addressing this issue, I will proceed as follows: I will first briefly address the issue of online religions and politics, make the case for a comparative perspective, underline the past and present activism of Buddhists in Chinese societies, introduce the broad contours of the Chinese Buddhist cyber-scape and proceed with a content analysis of a representative site before concluding about the politics of online Buddhism in China.
