About East Meridian

Bai Zhaojie has spent his career following a single thread — how Chinese thought, Daoist, Buddhist, and everything woven between them, has taken shape across the centuries, and why it still matters now.

He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Macau, then spent nearly a decade at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, where he directed its Center for Classical Daoist Studies, before joining Minzu University of China in 2025. His research centers on the history of Chinese Daoism and Buddhism and the long exchange between them, with a particular focus on Tang-dynasty religious history and cosmology. An award-winning scholar, he has held visiting posts at the CNRS in Paris and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, taken part in international research on East Asian religions, and published in both Chinese and English, including “Searching for the Location of Lord Lao: The Evolution of Daoist Cosmic Concept between the Han and Tang Dynasties” (Religions, 2023).

That life between traditions — and between Eastern and Western ways of thinking — gives him something rare: he can hold an idea in its full depth, then hand it to you in words you can actually carry. With East Meridian, that is his work — turning what once felt distant into something close enough to live with.