Short answers, pulled from the story.
Chinese folk religion is the range of traditional religious practices of the Han Chinese, including the Chinese diaspora, centred on the veneration of shen, meaning spirits, and of ancestors. By the Song dynasty, which ran from 960 to 1279, its practices had blended with Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist teachings into a popular system that survives today.
The Chinese government formally recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Islam. Chinese folk religion, being a syncretism with ambiguous boundaries and a poorly defined structure, is not counted as a religion and is treated instead as part of China's cultural heritage.
Scholars Fan and Chen summarise four concepts: Tian, the transcendent source of moral meaning; qi, the breath or substance of which all things are made; ancestor veneration; and bao ying, meaning moral reciprocity. Two further ideas of fate are ming yun, personal destiny, and yuanfen, fateful coincidence.
After the Qing dynasty fell in 1911 modernizing elites condemned the tradition as feudal superstition. The Nationalist government's 1928 standards tried to abolish most cults, and after the Communist Party took power in 1949 the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 was the most serious effort to destroy it.
After 1978 the tradition revived rapidly, with millions of temples rebuilt or built from scratch. Since the 1980s the central government moved toward benign neglect of rural life, and under Xi Jinping's administration temples can register as folk belief activities sites.
Southern folk religion focuses on lineages and ancestral gods, worshipped by kinship associations of the same surname. Northern folk religion centres on the communal worship of tutelary deities of creation and nature, organised into deity societies in villages of mixed surnames.
Salvationist sects, which Prasenjit Duara called redemptive societies, are folk religious sects with a soteriological and eschatological character, often founded by a charismatic figure. Examples include Yiguandao, the Sanyi teaching founded in the 16th century, the Tiandi teachings, and Weixinism.