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By examining two very different manifestations of Chinese Buddhism in Italy, this paper seeks to build upon and add a new dimension to Dessì’s “Glocal Buddhas” project and, more broadly, offer a rare insight into Chinese Buddhism in Italy. By offering a rare window into two private and non-official migrant Chinese Buddhist groups in Rome, this article will ultimately conclude that Chinese Buddhism can manifest in seemingly contrasting ways: by either embracing religious globalisation or, despite being a product of it, rejecting it. This paper also seeks to demonstrate that although official providers of Buddhism do exist in Italy, they by no means account for all Chinese Buddhists living in the country. As it is often private individuals that go unnoticed by larger studies or those who focus only on official institutions, this paper hopes to give voice to some of these somewhat hidden Buddhists.

As more and more students in China turn to religion, it follows that an increasing number of students in Chinese universities self-identify as Buddhist. Chinese academia has a tendency to treat this as problematic, offering reasons for this trend as well as solutions but neglecting to examine the nature of student belief and identity. By utilising two case studies, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the Buddhist identity and practice of self-proclaimed Buddhist students in Beijing can manifest in two very different ways: overtly or covertly. More specifically, each case study provides an example of students in Beijing who very much break with the commonly held perception that students in China who self-identify as religious have a fundamentally flawed and limited understanding of their religion and rarely actually practice it.

This article provides an overview of the major existing scholarship pertaining to childhood religion in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). More specifically, it examines lived childhood religion in a rural village in Gānsù province. This article challenges the commonly preconceived notion that children in the PRC do not regard religious belief as important and simply mirror the religious practices of their guardians. By utilising ethnographic data, I argue that children in the PRC are capable of constructing their own unique form of lived religion that is informed by, but crucially distinct from, the religious beliefs and practices of adults. The practices and beliefs of this lived religion can be extremely important to children and the evidence from fieldwork suggests that they tend to take both their practice and belief very seriously.