Play the Electronic Wooden Fish: Digitizing Rituals in Chinese Cyberspace

The Electronic Wooden Fish app (dianzi muyu, 电子木鱼), which allows users to accumulate merit by tapping a virtual wooden fish, took the Chinese internet by storm in October 2022, becoming the second most downloaded free app that month (Wu and Zhu 2024, 70). Alternatively, a physical form of wooden fish is a Buddhist instrument popular in East Asia conventionally used to accompany sutra chanting in monastic settings. While some dismissed the use of the electronic wooden fish app as a parody, many users reported experiencing genuine spiritual efficacy. The Electronic Wooden Fish app is not an isolated case of online religious practice that deviates from the traditional format of rituals in China. Similar sensational online phenomena have emerged, such as the popular homophonic pun “hanging Conan” (gua kenan, 挂柯南), often used by students to pray for educational success, and the viral movement “sharing the koi” (zhuan jinli, 转锦鲤), reflecting people’s desire toward auspiciousness and well-being. In response to these developments in Chinese cyberspace, this paper proposes the category of meme rituals—rituals that rely on online platforms to reproduce and spread in a memetic manner, often taking the form of emojis, images, or interactive apps. These meme rituals commonly exhibit characteristics such as decentralization, playfulness, and adaptability. I argue that there is a complex nature to these meme rituals: while they are drastically different in format compared to traditional Chinese religious practices, they tend to inherit the same gravitation toward practicality and fluidity in identity as their more traditional counterparts. By introducing the concept of meme rituals, this paper aims to provide a framework for understanding how technological developments are facilitating the reinvention of religious practices in contemporary China.

The study of online religious practices has been a subject of scholarly interest since the 1990s. O'Leary's analysis that identified online religious communities as textual communities was discerned by many as one of the first works that systematically analyzed the increasing digitization of religion (O’Leary 1996). In the early 2000s, Helland proposed the dichotomous categorization of online religion and religion online, which later became one of the anchors for studying religions in cyberspace (Helland 2002). Religion online includes websites and other forms of information posted by real-world religious organizations for the netizens to consume, whereas online religion describes the more horizontal religious activities in cyberspace: they are dialectic interactions where people freely engage their belief systems presented online with the capability of providing feedback and thus also contribute to and alter the belief systems presented. However, much of this scholarship focuses on Western experiences, leaving a significant gap in the study of online religious practices in China. The scholarly discourse on online religions in China has been a late-blooming field. According to the report made by the China Internet Network Information Center, a government-controlled organization, by January 2025, the number of internet users in China had reached an astonishing 1.108 billion (CINIC 2025). As internet access and social media continue to universalize, the influence of religion in cyberspace is likely to expand. Despite the scale of this phenomenon, Campbell and Xu’s literature review highlights a clear lack of English-language scholarship offering specific and in-depth analysis of religion in Chinese cyberspace. They identify several under-researched topics, including authenticity, ritual, community, identity, and authority (Campbell and Xu 2018, 257). This paper responds to Xu and Campbell’s call for further research. There have been some publications in the Chinese academia, with the most notable one being Lin and Lv’s investigation of the electronic wooden fish based on interviews with its users (Lin and Lv 2024). However, these studies have not systematically examined the internal connections among this new wave of digitized rituals or explored the broader implications of such connections. This paper seeks to fill that gap.

Therefore, in this paper, I will employ a multidisciplinary approach, combining insights from material culture studies and historiography to analyze the cultural significance of meme rituals. More specifically, by critically examining the affordances of online platforms in the historical and social context of temporary China, I aim to elucidate the powerful agency displayed by the popularization of digitized rituals, especially meme rituals. The reinvention of rituals in Chinese cyberspace, I argue, will not merely generate changes in the format and platform of religious practices but also revolutionize the ways that people process profoundly impactful cultural and social experiences. For example, the electronic wooden fish app enables the users to earn good karma through their own power at their own convenience, circumventing traditional Buddhist institutions’ monopoly on merit-generating rituals, such as offering incense and donating to temples. Ultimately, through constructing the category of meme rituals, this paper seeks to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on religion in Chinese cyberspace and the technologization of everyday religious rituals.