The proliferation of social media in China has provided traditional religious authorities with multifarious digital features to revitalise and reinforce their practices and beliefs. However, under the authoritative political system different religions pick up the new media to varying degrees, thereby showing different characteristic and style in their social media use. This paper examines the public discourse about Buddhism and Christianity (two of the great official religions in China) on China’s largest microblogging platform-Sina Weibo, and seeks to reveal a distinct landscape of religious online public in China. Through a close look at the social media posts aided by a text analytics software, Leximancer, this paper comparatively investigates several issues related to the Buddhism and Christianity online publics, such as religious networks, interactions between involved actors, the economics and politics of religion, and the role of religious charitable organizations. The result supports Campbell’s proposition on digital religion that religious groups typically do not reject new technologies, but rather undergo a sophisticated negotiation process in accord with their communal norms and beliefs. It also reveals that in China a secular Buddhism directly contributes to a prosperous ‘temple economy’ while tension still exists between Christianity and the Chinese state due to ideological discrepancy. The paper further points out the possible direction for this nascent research field.

The emergence of social media over the last decade has substantially altered not only the means people communicate with each other but also the whole online ecosystems. For the common public in particular, social media enables and broadens the social conversation that anyone interested can engage in on urgent social problems such as environmental pollution. In China, the ever-thickening air pollution smothering most urban cities in recent years has provoked a nationwide discussion, and popular social media like Weibo has been fully utilised by various social actors to participate in this "green speak". This paper examines the civil discourse about the deteriorating air pollution on China's largest microblogging platform-Sina Weibo, and seeks to understand how different social actors respond to and reconstruct the reality. Through a discourse analysis aided by a text analytics/ visualisation software-Leximancer, this paper investigates the civil discourse from three angles: the demographics, the discursive strategies and the potential social effect. The result suggests that proactive civil engagement in this issue has produced an environmental discourse with a wide range of topics involved, and that the benign interactions between social actors could give rise to a proactive interactional mode between Chinese state and civil society which would definitely be beneficial to the democratisation process in contemporary China.

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