ABSTRACT
The Chinese blogosphere is vast, with Chinese blogs (boke 博客) constituting at least half of the estimated 181 million blogs worldwide (tracked by NM Incite in 2011). An even greater number of Chinese-estimated at 309 million people by the China Internet Network Information Center in 2012-engage in microblogging (wei boke 微博客)—a Twitter-style social media that allows users to broadcast short messages in continuous streams.1 Previous scholarship on Chinese blogs have focused on the effect of blog discourse for Chinese political life (Hassid 2012; Yang 2009), depicted blogs as sites for shallow infotainment and expression of one’s feelings, with political content comprising “only an extremely tiny portion of China’s cyber-cacophony” (Leibold 2011, 1027), considered how one might cluster Chinese blogs by their embedded sentiments (Feng et al. 2011), or claimed that Internet styles and genres of contention allow for an online activism and “irreverence toward power and authority” (Yang 2009, 82). This chapter examines how monks from Mainland Chinese and Taiwan have approached blogging, and how particular features of blogs enable them to express their religious identity.
