The conspicuous reappearance of Chinese religion since the end of the Cultural Revolution has already prompted a fine crop of monographs and collected essays on contemporary developments, and has further stimulated a number of authors to reconsider the place of religious aspects of Chinese life in earlier times. Now the work of some of the most promising researchers in this broader field has been brought together in two separate volumes. Together, they provide ample evidence of the potential for investigations never dreamed of a generation ago. The very diverse approaches of 16 different scholars are made available here, since only Gregory Adam Scott appears in both collections, and though neither volume attempts to provide a comprehensive survey of religious history as a whole, the overall dimensions at least of a new picture of the modern Chinese religious scene are between them made clear. In addressing Buddhism, the authors deal with the institutionally best established and most self-aware of Chinese religious traditions in its encounter with the 20th and 21st centuries; in treating publishing and print culture their colleagues likewise deal with a mode of religious propagation that was also extremely deep rooted, yet that also underwent significant changes during the period covered. Both volumes thus tackle an array of issues of considerable complexity and interest, ranging from the history of the propagation of Seventh Day Adventism to the contemporary provision of Buddhist rituals for menopausal women.

The editorial introductions to both volumes are admirably balanced and illuminating. Philip Clart and Gregory Adam Scott deftly contextualise the changes described in subsequent chapters with a brief history of religious publishing in China as a whole – though too brief to include in the case of Christianity any consideration of Catholic publication, which has perhaps suffered unduly from the only partially correct assumption that its history pales into complete insignificance compared to the stimulus to print provided by Reformation Protestantism. Jan Keily and J. Brooks Jessup by contrast wisely avoid any attempt at summarizing the story so far for Chinese Buddhism, but carefully point up the great diversity of phenomena that in China had come to be subsumed under the one Western label “Buddhism” during the 20th century, including those that their own authors were not able to touch on. They note for example on p. 14 that a significant volume could easily have been filled with studies of Buddhism in 20th century Chinese literature, painting, music and film – one is tempted to add other media such as radio, too.

To single out individual contributors is somewhat invidious, but the palpable sense among all the contributors here that research horizons are expanding rapidly is particularly clear in the work of Yau Chi-on, translated by Philip Clart in the volume co-edited by him. Like many of the other contributions this piece has a strong local focus, in this case investigating a religious publishing concern in the Guangzhou and Hong Kong area, but conspicuous use is made here of the long span of development indicated in the title of this collection but less in evidence in the majority of its other chapters and in the volume on Buddhism alone. Indeed, Yau traces the type of publishing activity that concerns him back into the late 18th century. One wonders what both volumes would have looked like had the “Modern China” mentioned in their titles been extended to include more work on the 19th century, which surely has a religious history of its own beyond the introduction of Protestant Christianity and the meteoric career of its Taiping offshoot. The tendency of the missionaries of that era was to perceive Chinese religion as otherwise something quite static, but for instance Lai Chi-tim's work on Qing Daoism would suggest that this was far from the case. In reconstructing the publishing history of the period, however, Yau does paradoxically on occasion have recourse to materials collected by missionaries and lodged outside China, simply because the reluctance of most Chinese book collectors and librarians to preserve the type of religious literature that now interests us has left this phase of woodblock printing in some obscurity, at least at present.

Of course, this is not to deny that in this instance at least new technologies opened up truly new possibilities: both volumes mention Christopher A. Reed's 2004 study Gutenberg in Shanghai, for example. But the new technologies were not introduced in a cultural vacuum. The editors of the collection on Buddhism are certainly well aware of this and are far too canny to overdraw a contrast between tradition and modernity: thus, they speak carefully of “the burgeoning religious activism that has been called the Buddhist revival” (p. 6) rather than themselves straightforwardly endorsing that label. Even so, one regrets that for example the persistent presence of Buddhist themes in Shanghai painting from the 19th into the 20th centuries fell beyond the scope of their book, since while 20th century modes of activism may have been new, as befitted a new political environment, other elements in the 20th-century picture may equally have been burgeoning for some time. This is not a criticism of either of the books under review, but rather a plea to extend the range of future efforts yet further, now that research into the 20th and 21st centuries has been demonstrably so well established.