Introduction: Buddhists and the Making of Modern Chinese Societies

Corresponding author: Francesca Tarocco, New York University Shanghai. Email: ft21@nyu.edu This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ISSN 1527-6457 (online). The special focus of this issue of the Journal of Global Buddhism is on the role of Buddhists and Buddhist-inspired practices and ideas in (Greater) China in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing connections between the preand post-1949 periods in the Chinese-speaking world and between both sides of the Taiwan straits, all contributors pay close attention to history and historiography. They examine trans-regional and global processes of influence and conflict, bridging contemporary theory, comparative religious studies, and ethnography. The formation of Buddhist and Chinese modernities is seen through the lens of a process of interaction between Buddhist and non-Buddhist agents and Asian and non-Asian agents, in the Sinophone and Tibetophone world in particular.