FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS IDENTITY IN THE DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM WITHIN THE CHINESE CULTURAL WORLD

Abstract

Religion in the Chinese cultural sphere has long functioned as an everyday grammar of conduct and a public archive of shared meanings, while digitalization has entered this landscape as both a solvent and a binder, loosening inherited patterns of ritual mediation even as it knits dispersed publics into new communities of practice. This article advances a theoretically grounded and empirically informed analysis of how digital infrastructures recompose religious life in contemporary China by reshaping practice, authority, and identity under conditions of platform governance and state regulation. Building on regional scholarship in digital religion and on studies that document the Chinese case across institutional, organizational, and public communication levels, the article proposes a triadic framework that links platform affordances, governance regimes, and traditions of moral cultivation as co-determinants of online religious forms, and it operates this framework through an applied protocol that can be used by researchers and religious organizations to audit and improve digital presence in ways that are both effective and compliant. By synthesizing insights on virtual temples, online pilgrimage, streamed sermons, and the algorithmic circulation of ritual content with documented patterns of organizational strategy and public engagement, the study shows that digitalization does not merely transfer religiosity to a new venue; it reorganizes visibility, temporality, and communal belonging, and it does so within a Chinese internet ecology that is simultaneously innovative and regulated. The article concludes that future trajectories will depend on negotiated balances among technological innovation, regulatory guidance, and the resilient creativity of believers, and that these balances will be worked out in the hybrid spaces where incense and interface mingle.