GREGORY SCOTT: Buddhist Mass Media in Modern China [Research Talk]

Mass media, that is, media designed to reach a large segment of the population, played a pivotal role in the making of the modern era, linking disparate audiences together across space into a shared imagined community. In modern China, mechanised print, film, and radio were all venues where cultural and political revolutions were articulated, derided, debated, and finally proclaimed. Buddhists in China were especially active in mass media, motivated partly by a longstanding tradition of mass reproduction of Buddhist texts, founding dozens of presses and printing thousands of titles in millions of copies from the 1860s to the 1960s. Their media output during this era, however, went far beyond the canonical corpus of religious texts. They produced new histories and commentaries, primers and books for beginners, dictionaries and lexicons, magazines and newspapers, book catalogues and bibliographic guides. In this project I survey the textual, visual, and auditory output of Buddhists in modern China, examining their motivations and strategies in producing content for a mass audience. Far from being a simple reflection of the status quo, this corpus of media output tracks massive changes in how Buddhists in China understood themselves, their tradition, and their place in a rapidly changing world.

Dr Gregory Adam Scott is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Culture and History at the University of Manchester and Teaching Director at the Manchester China Institute. Dr Scott completed his PhD in Chinese Buddhism at Columbia University in 2013, and was selected as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. He later completed a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship in the Asian Studies department at the University of Edinburgh before coming to the University of Manchester in September 2017 as Lecturer in Chinese Culture and History. He is also the author of .

promotes multidisciplinary research, teaching and programming with impact beyond academia, seeking to remedy class, racial, gender, and other inequalities, and to improve mutual understanding in UK-China relations. The MCI is based at the University of Manchester.

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