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Part One
Media Translations of Religion in China
History, Concepts and Methods
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1 Beyond the Conceptual Framework of Oppression and Resistance
Creativity, Religion and the Internet in China
Introduction
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.
Providing an ethnographic account of the production of Li Dong’s film and its online publication, this essay argues for a nonoppositional understanding of creativity and asks how new media and communication technologies and state regulation shaped Li Dong’s mediation of Buddhism in a nonbinary creative process. It begins with the film’s online publication and dissemination, highlighting Li Dong’s unwillingness to determine the meaning of his film. It is precisely such creative and indeterminate practice, part two of this chapter argues, that tends to be bracketed by a conceptual framework of oppression and resistance. I discuss a range of academic literature on the Internet and on religion in China to show how the emergence of the market economy in the Republic of China (PRC) is central to this reductionism. The following two sections consider how the notion of the autonomous actor is at the heart of such oppositional accounts. Suggesting a more relational approach, I emphasize how the Chinese government’s secularist politics and new media and communication technologies are constitutive of Li Dong’s exploration of Buddhism. As summarized in the conclusion, this chapter proposes that creative mediations of religion should be studied in terms of technological and political contingency rather than autonomy. This would allow us to see the constitutive role of governmental and media technologies in producing not only oppositional effects but also a much wider and more creative range of practices.3
Indeterminacies in Li Dong’s Art
In June 2010, next to a field of rubble in the outskirts of Beijing, an actor placed a baby doll in a glass vase standing on a table. He proceeded to douse the doll with gasoline and set it on fire. Noticeably excited, Li Dong filmed the burning doll. Wearing a satisfied smile, he looked at the screen of his camera and said appreciatively, “Fuck” (wo cao 我操). The finished version of Li Dong’s film starts out with shots of seemingly ancient stone carvings. After a moment, the viewer is introduced to a young Buddhist monk who is reading. A close-up reveals an ant crawling across his face. The monk pauses, picks up the ant, and sets it free. Finally, he puts down the book, burns an incense stick, and begins to meditate. Pearls of sweat are rolling down his face. There is a cut, and the monk finds himself next to a field of rubble. Black pants and a black shirt have replaced his Buddhist garment. Nearby he finds a rooster in a cage. He releases the animal, only to batter it to death with a stone. Next we see the now blood-smeared monk sitting with a baby doll in his lap. He gets up, places the doll in a glass vase, lights a match, and sets it afire. The twelve-minute piece ends with the monk opening his eyes and breathing heavily. He looks around for a moment and begins to meditate again.
During a year of ethnographic research in 2009–2010, I accompanied Li Dong to monasteries, witnessed his conversations with monks and participated in the shooting of his short film. As I participated in the different stages of his work, I witnessed his project evolve until he published it on Youku 优酷, a Chinese online video platform. On Youku, users can open an account and upload videos, surf the vast archives and comment on specific videos. By September 2014, Li Dong’s film had been viewed more than twenty-one thousand times and received 273 likes, 134 dislikes, and 107 comments. For an art student, this exposure was considerable. On the platform, Li Dong presented his film as an art project for his school, and the majority of people commented on its artistic quality. Nevertheless, a variety of other issues were discussed in the comment section as well.4 Somebody said that the monk’s murderous intent just meant that he had not yet mastered Zen Buddhism. Another user suggested that the film was a warning to political rulers. When someone criticized Li Dong for not taking more time to understand the hearts (xin 心) of actual monks, he simply challenged them to tell him what they thought they knew about a monk’s heart. To the question of whether or not his film was a satire of religion, he replied that it was not. To the critique that his film was neither fish nor fowl he countered by saying that it was not trying to be either. Thus when someone commented that it looked almost like a horror movie, Li Dong simply replied that they could watch it as one.
The interpretational indeterminacy displayed in this online discussion not only reflects Li Dong’s artistic creativity but also is evocative of his explorative and emergent engagement with religion. He spoke of Buddhism as an ethical practice that had changed him profoundly. When he went to buy a doll for his artistic short film, the vendor at the store overheard his plan to burn it and refused to sell him one. Confronted with this reaction, Li Dong told me (July 3, 2010), he began to feel uncomfortable with the idea of burning the vendor’s goods. Despite his hesitation, however, he came to the conclusion that he would proceed for the sake of producing an audiovisual artwork reflecting his engagement with Buddhism.5 But while he felt at ease with his decision to move forward with his project, he also thought that others might see it as simply destructive. In the burning of the doll, his ethical practice of Buddhism, his artistic work, negotiations of others’ moral expectations and his desire to share his own thoughts on Buddhism converged. Manifesting as an ethical dilemma, these various dimensions of his practice should not be considered altogether unified and unidirectional. As matters of continued reflection and practice, art and Buddhism were and are indeterminate and evolving elements of Li Dong’s life.
Although Buddhism was a part of Li Dong’s life in these diverse ways, he stated that he was not a Buddhist. When I asked him to help me find research participants who were ‘religious’ (xinjiao 信教) in the early stages of my fieldwork, he took me to a small Buddhist temple in the center of Beijing. Unaware of his religious beliefs, I asked him if he himself was a Buddhist. He answered that he was a Christian but had not told me because he thought he was not the kind of religious person I was looking for since he did not attend church and was not an active member of a religious community. He maintained that he was a Christian but also said that he might become a Buddhist at a later stage in his life. His religious practice and his artistic engagement with Buddhism were parts of an entangled, ongoing and creative process. Accordingly, his online mediation was not simply representational of his background but was also a continuation of this process through new media and communication technologies.
Created in a field saturated with political and technological possibilities and inhibitions, Li Dong’s artistic mediation emerged from diverse and sometimes ambivalent experiences of religion. “If ambiguity is part of the data,” Jonathan Parry writes, “then it is no part of the anthropologist’s task to suppress it” (Parry 1991, 274). As I argue in the following section, a binary framework of oppression and resistance challenges attempts to account for ambiguities of emergent religious practices and uses of digital media. Indeterminacy, in this kind of analysis, is often portrayed as an obstacle to researchers’ efforts to understand people’s political intentions. If creative or nonconforming religious phenomena or media practices are not read as political ambition, they tend to be framed as circumventions of state regulation. Yet, as I emphasize throughout this chapter, Li Dong’s religious practice and uses of new media and communication technologies neither evaded state power nor took shape in a binary of oppression and resistance. His take on Buddhism was neither explicitly political nor explicitly apolitical. To address the challenges it poses further, the following section examines the presence of a binary framework of oppression and resistance in studies of religion and of the Internet in the PRC.
The Limits of Control and Resistance
In an article titled “The Upsurge of Religion in China,” Richard Madsen discusses the increase in religious movements in postreform China as possibly “the biggest threat of all to the CCP’s ability to maintain its control” (Madsen 2010, 58). Relating this threat to the government’s inability to completely seal off the Chinese religious landscape from foreign movements in “an age of global hypercommunication” (Madsen 2010, 67), he concludes that Chinese online censorship—the “Great Firewall” (Madsen 2010, 70)—may be able to limit the influence of foreign religious movements somewhat but cannot hope to do so completely. Madsen’s account addresses both religion and new media and communication technologies in terms of their ability to challenge and resist the Chinese Communist Party’s rule. Similarly, David Palmer relates what he considers an ‘evolution’ of media technologies culminating in the Internet to “the increasing autonomy of the individual in religious experience and belief” (Palmer 2004, 39). He argues that despite the Chinese state’s ability to monitor online activities, the Internet has engendered new religious networks and allowed for new forms of religious practice (Palmer 2004, 49). It is important to note that neither Madsen’s nor Palmer’s argument can be reduced to a framework of oppression and resistance. Rather, what I want to highlight in discussing their examples, as well as those of others, is a scholarly tendency to analyze both religious practices and applications of new media and communication technologies in terms of oppression and resistance.
The problem inherent in this emphasis rests in the exclusion and negation of relationships that don’t follow its pattern. Studies of religion, as Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank argue, often work with dichotomous categories to describe the relationship between state and religion as one of antagonism and conflict while ignoring questions of competition, adaptation and cooperation among multiple actors (Ashiwa and Wank 2009, 3–5). Studies of the Chinese Internet equally display this issue. Jens Damm notes that such scholarship often focuses too much on antagonistic relationships between the Chinese state and the user, excluding from analysis a multitude of online contributions such as websites and blogs that are not explicitly political but are nevertheless significant (2007, 275–278). Behind this exclusion is a conceptual binary of oppression and resistance, which Saba Mahmood has critiqued because of its omission of “dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance” (Mahmood 2005, 14). Underlying such reductive examinations of power and resistance, Talal Asad has argued, is a notion of agency in which power “is external to and repressive of the agent” (Asad 2003, 70–71). Peter van der Veer has further emphasized the need to situate religious movements in a wider field of politics (van der Veer 2008, 809–812). “Agency cannot be studied entirely at the level of discourse or entirely at the level of the political economy of social movements and institutions,” he argues, “but instead has to be studied by combining theory and practice” (van der Veer 2008, 810). In the study of religion and of the Internet in China, certain practices are removed from politics entirely and conceptualized as apolitical phenomena somehow untouched by state regulation.
As a conceptual framework, an emphasis on antagonistic relationships brackets practices that do not appear as resistance or oppression—or treats them as apolitical. Within a binary framework, the scope of conceivable reactions to oppression consists of resistance or submission. Importantly, creative practices that seem to run against the regulatory and homogenizing power of the state tend to be framed as resistance. The only alternative way of acknowledging creative and emergent human behavior as something other than resistance—without abandoning the binary of oppression and resistance—is to render it apolitical. In contrast, Judith Farquhar and Zhang Qicheng point out that actions can be political even if they do not emerge as resistance but instead take shape in nonconfrontational ways (Farquhar and Zhang 2005, 310).6 In their discussion of life-cultivation arts in Beijing, they also argue against the notion that creativity is necessarily oppositional to institutionalized forms of power (308).
In spite of this critique, practices that are not clearly recognizable in the oppositional terms of oppression and resistance are often considered to be somehow unaffected by the state. The sociologist Ji Zhe, for example, argues that the apparent rise of religious activity among young Chinese during the reform era was possible, despite continuing state efforts to restrain religion, because of the noninstitutional ways in which religious content can circulate in postreform China (Ji 2006, 536, 546–547). Noninstitutional religious practice, Ji claims, thwarts the government’s attempts to regulate religious life through the official institutions of Buddhism, T...
