Lecture | China Seminar
Delicate Repertoires- Buddhist Creativity, Commodification, and Digitalization in Xi’s China
- Date
- Wednesday 11 February 2026
- Time
- Serie
- LIAS China Seminar
- Address
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 1.80
Abstract
Since the 1980s, Buddhism in China has gone through a comprehensive revival, manifested in the restoration and establishment of temples, rehabilitation of monastic and lay communities, and a robust and increasing presence of Buddhist material culture in the public and private spheres. This talk focuses on two interrelated facets of this revival to explore tangible aspects of lived Buddhism in today’s Chinese society. The first is the spiritual and material economy that evolves around lay Buddhist practice. A second facet is the accelerating use of technologies, digitalities, and online modalities in the lay Buddhist sphere. The talk will engage with questions such as: What are the push and pull factors for these practice modalities? What inherent challenges do practitioners of Buddhism in Xi’s China face? And what do online and offline contemporary repertoires of Buddhism tell us about the place of the religion in society? Presenting research from her recently published book, Shmushko will explore these questions through micro case studies and macro theoretical approaches.
Biography
Dr. Kai Shmushko is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the sociology department of the University of Amsterdam. Her research stands in the nexus of several primary interests: religion and spirituality in the PRC and Taiwan; Chinese migration and diaspora communities; heritage and material culture; religious and cultural production in new media; religion and politics; and religious freedom. She earned her PhD in Tel Aviv University's Department of East Asian Studies. Her first book, based on her doctoral thesis, is titled: “Multiple Liminalities of Lay Buddhism in 21st Century China- Modalities, Material Culture, and Politics” and was published with LUP in 2024. Shmushko’s academic grounding is in China Studies, Religious Studies, and Cultural Sociology and Anthropology, with a strong orientation towards on-site and digital ethnography. Currently, she works within the project RECOGNITION, exploring religion and spirituality among the Chinese diaspora in the Netherlands.