Religion in China

• 1. Introduction

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  Religion in China produces a survey result that looks like a contradiction. In 2023, Pew Research reported that 93% of respondents had no formal religious affiliation. In the same survey, 75% said they visit family graveyards every year. Another 47% believed in feng shui, and 26% burned incense to deities each year.

  These numbers describe the same population, and often the same individuals. The respondents also held overlapping beliefs. Of the 33% who believed in Buddha, a significant portion also believed in Taoist immortals, Jesus Christ, the Catholic God and Allah.

  So what counts as religion when nobody asks you to join anything? Where do ancestors, Heaven and a crowded world of spirits fit, if not inside a church? How did these practices live through dynasties, rebellions, foreign missions and a ruling party hostile to belief? And why do counts of the faithful change so sharply from one survey to the next?

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• 2. A Borrowed Word

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  Around 1900, Chinese writers began using the word zongjiao for religion, and in its earliest uses it pointed specifically to Christianity. Classical Chinese had no term that matched the Western idea. The two characters had circulated since the Tang dynasty in Chan Buddhist circles, where they described Buddhist doctrine. At the end of the 19th century, intellectuals chose the pair to translate the Western concept, following the Japanese word shukyo.

  The borrowed word carried borrowed assumptions. Under the influence of Western rationalism and later Marxism, many Chinese came to understand zongjiao as organised doctrines. Most academics in China apply it to formal institutions, specific beliefs, a clergy and sacred texts. Western scholars tend to use the word much more loosely.

  The characters themselves tell a different story. Zong can mean ancestor, model, master, pattern or purpose, and it suggests that the ultimate is understood through great ancestors who support their descendants and depend on them in return. Jiao means teaching, and it connects to filial piety, because it describes knowledge passing from elders to the young and support flowing back. The theologian Hans Küng called Chinese religions the religions of wisdom. He set them apart from the religions of prophecy, meaning Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and from the religions of mysticism, meaning Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.

  Naming the everyday cults of gods and ancestors proved harder still. In English, folk religion covers all of them. In Chinese, the terms minjian zongjiao and minjian xinyang usually mean the folk religious organisations and salvationist movements, the sects, rather than local cults. Some Chinese intellectuals have proposed Chinese native religion, Chinese ethnic religion, or even Zhonghuajiao, which simply means Chinese religion.

  Labels shift the counting too. In the 1990s, some of these organisations began registering as branches of the official Taoist Association, which moved them under the heading of Taoism. Few people call themselves Taoists in surveys, because the word traditionally meant an ordained priest, and the language had no term for a lay follower. One further proposed name, Shenxianism, joins the characters for spirits and immortals, the beings who populate the rest of this story.

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• 3. Ancestors and Temples

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  The Qingming Festival and the Double Ninth Festival are the two great occasions for honoring ancestors. Veneration also appears at weddings, funerals and triad initiations. Worshippers usually offer prayers through the jingxiang rite, with food, lit incense and candles, and burning joss paper. They do this at an ancestral grave or tomb, at an ancestral temple, or at a household shrine.

  The scholar Julia Ching argued that this makes Chinese religion different from the Abrahamic faiths. Judaism and Christianity were religions of the fathers, but Chinese religion was ancestral as well as patriarchal. Israel believed in the God of its fathers, but not in divinised fathers. Among the ancient Chinese, the God of the Zhou dynasty appears to have been an ancestor of the ruling house. Early Christian Church Fathers read the First Commandment as reserving all worship for one God, which ruled out prayers to the dead. In Chinese religions, every living being descends from beings who existed earlier, and those ancestors live on in the lineage they began.

  Memory holds this system together. Written genealogies called zupu, which means books of ancestors, link families to history, as do temple activities and village theatre. Ancestor worship, which dates to prehistory, has been called the essential religion of the Chinese. A newer practice began in the 1990s in Confucian temples managed by the Kong kin, the lineage descended from Confucius himself. Ancestors there were no longer represented only by name tablets but by statues, a form once reserved for Buddhist bodhisattvas and Taoist gods.

  Lineage cults sit inside larger ones. The founders of surnames belong to the ancestor-gods of regional and ethnic groups. Above them stand virtuous historical figures such as Confucius and Guandi, and the figures Huangdi, Yandi and Chiyou. Huangdi and Yandi are ancestor-gods of the Han Chinese, while Chiyou belongs to western minority ethnicities and foreigners. The ladder ends at Heaven, called the utmost ancestral father.

  Temples also run on money. Mayfair Yang studied how rituals and temples form grassroots networks of socio-economic capital, and she called the result an embedded and ethical capitalism. Law, writing in 2005, found that folk religion in the Pearl River Delta thrived as the economy developed, contrary to Weberian predictions of disenchantment. Hao, in 2017, described lineage temples as nodes of economic and political power that work like crowdfunding. In Shishi villages, associations for the elderly, chosen by civil election among prosperous businessmen, handle public order as well as popular rituals.

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• 4. Heaven and Spirits

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  The highest principle in Chinese religion goes by many names. Tian means Heaven or Sky, and a popular image of it is the Jade Emperor. Other names include Taidi, the Great Deity, and Shangdi, the Highest Deity. Hao Tian, Vast Heaven, refers to the vastness of its vital breath, or qi. Min Tian, Compassionate Heaven, hears the world and answers with justice. Cang Tian, Deep-Green Heaven, is named for being unfathomably deep. Among Altaic shamanic peoples, the equivalent is Tengri.

  According to Stephan Feuchtwang, the universe in Chinese cosmology creates itself from a primary chaos of material energy. That energy sorts itself into the polarity of yin and yang, which marks winter and summer, shade and brightness, female and male, even disorder and order in political history. Creation is therefore a continuous ordering and not something made from nothing. Confucian theology stresses realising the starry order of Heaven in human society, while Taoist theology stresses the Tao. The neo-Confucian Zhu Xi, who lived from 1130 to 1200, developed the idea of Li, the reason or order of Heaven. Taoism places the Three Pure Ones at the center of the universe, and Chinese Buddhism paired its own triad of Shakyamuni, Amitabha and Maitreya with them. They stand for enlightenment, salvation and a paradise after the apocalypse.

  The word shen covers the spirits themselves. The ancient dictionary Shuowen Jiezi defines them as spirits of Heaven that draw out the ten thousand things. Stephen Teiser says the word needs at least three English renderings. One is the human spirit or psyche, another is spirits or gods, and the third is spiritual, describing anything that inspires awe. Gods in lowercase, because Chinese spirits need not be all-powerful, transcendent or creators of the world. They are tied to stars, mountains and streams.

  The counterpart of shen is gui, the ghosts or demons. Ancestral souls can be called back to live in a family's spirit tablet, yet the combined term guishen holds the lucky and the unlucky, the benevolent and the malevolent. Humans, shen and gui are all made of qi, so no gap separates them. There is no ontological difference between gods and demons, and a human may emulate the gods and join their ranks. Spirits that are neglected, or people who died without death rituals, become hungry and trapped where they met their end. Such ghosts endanger the living and call for exorcism.

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• 5. Mandate and Sects

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  The Shang dynasty, which ruled from 1600 to 1046 BCE, built its state religion on ancestors and god-kings. Calling Shangdi their ancestor-god let the Shang claim power by divine right. The Zhou, who ruled from 1046 to 256 BCE, recast that claim as the Mandate of Heaven, saying they had won because they were virtuous and loved their people. The Shang, in their telling, were tyrants whom Tian had stripped of power. By the 6th century BCE, the authority of Tian had become diffuse, and anyone able to afford the ceremonies could claim it.

  Confucius emerged from this decadence, educated in Shang and Zhou theology. Disillusioned with the vulgarization of rituals to reach Tian, he preached an ethical reading of the old religion. Heaven, he held, responds to a sincere heart built on humaneness, rightness, decency and altruism. He re-codified the inherited classics and composed the Spring and Autumn Annals.

  The short-lived Qin dynasty chose Legalism as its ideology. It burned Confucian classics and killed scholars who supported Confucianism. Qin Shi Huang personally held sacrifices to Di at Mount Tai and near the capital Xianyang. The Han dynasty built its universal religion around the incarnation of God as the Yellow Emperor. In the Huang-Lao tradition, Laozi was identified as the Yellow Emperor and received imperial sacrifices.

  Unrest in the Eastern Han pushed ordinary people toward local divinities and enlightened masters. A mass movement formed around the expected arrival of the Queen Mother of the West. Between 184 and 205 CE, the Way of the Supreme Peace organized the Yellow Turban Rebellion against the Han. Between 143 and 198, the Zhang lineage, from Zhang Daoling to Zhang Lu, founded the early Celestial Masters church. Zhang Lu died in 216 or 217, and between 215 and 219 the people of Hanzhong were dispersed northward, carrying Celestial Masters Taoism across the empire.

  Buddhism is first mentioned in 65 CE, arriving along the Silk Road with peoples of the Western Regions, among them Tocharians and Saka. It became a major influence only after the Han fell. When Luoyang fell to the Xiongnu in 311, the court and Celestial Masters clerics fled south to Jiangnan. There, revelations received between 364 and 370 in modern Nanjing produced Shangqing Taoism. Revelations between 397 and 402, re-codified by Lu Xiujing, produced Lingbao Taoism, which borrowed universal salvation and ranked heavens from Buddhism.

  In the late Tang dynasty, the cult of the City Gods spread alongside cities that had become centers of commerce, and merchants rose in influence. Foreign faiths came too. The earliest evidence of Christianity in China is a stone stele in Xi'an, inscribed with a summary of basic Nestorian teachings and dated to the eighth century.

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• 6. Missionaries and Rebels

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  In the 16th century, Jesuit missionaries opened a dialogue between China and the West. They advised the imperial court on astronomy, taught mathematics and mechanics, and folded admiration for Confucius and ancestor veneration into their own teaching. The Manchu-led Qing dynasty promoted the teachings of Confucius above all other traditions. It made its laws more severely patriarchal than any dynasty before, and it downgraded Buddhism and Taoism. Even so, Tibetan Buddhism gained a significant presence among the Mongols and Manchus in the north.

  The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, organised by Christian movements in southeast China, set out to replace Chinese religions with forms of Christianity. Many temples were destroyed, and the libraries of Buddhist monasteries were wiped out almost completely in the Yangtze River Delta. A backlash followed at the turn of the century.

  Since 1860, Christian missionaries had held the right to build or rent premises, and they took over many temples. Churches with high steeples, along with foreign factories and mines, were seen as disrupting feng shui and caused tremendous offense. The Boxers, who called missionaries devils, set out to sabotage or destroy these structures. Thousands of Chinese Christians and foreign missionaries were killed. After the retaliatory invasion, some reform-minded Chinese turned toward Christianity anyway. Between 1898 and 1904, the government issued a measure to build schools with temple property.

  After the Xinhai Revolution, the new intellectual class stopped worrying about gods and began attacking religion itself as an obstacle to modernization. The New Culture Movement revolted against Confucianism, and the Anti-Christian Movement rejected Christianity as an instrument of foreign imperialism. The Nationalist government intensified the suppression of local religion, destroying or appropriating temples. It abolished the cults of all gods except human heroes such as Yu the Great, Guan Yu and Confucius. Both Sun Yat-sen and his successor Chiang Kai-shek were Christians. During the Japanese invasion between 1937 and 1945, many temples became soldiers' barracks and were destroyed in fighting. Meanwhile, the interest of Chinese reformers in spiritual and occult matters kept thriving into the 1940s.

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• 7. Party and Revival

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  Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party has ruled as an officially atheist state, and it bars its members from religious practice while in office. Soviet Marxist ideas shaped its view, and after the 1920s its discourse centered on theism against atheism. From the Yan'an period through the 1950s, though, it was more accommodating than the Soviets, working with five officially recognized religions under a United Front framework. The Three-Self Patriotic Movement turned Protestant churches into official organizations, while Catholics resisted state control and independence from the Vatican. Foreign missionaries were expelled. The new government labeled religious groups superstitious and feared that popular movements might be seditious.

  The Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976, was a systematic effort to destroy religion. Many observances and religious organisations were destroyed or forced underground.

  After Mao's death, policy loosened. China's 1978 Constitution declared that citizens enjoy "freedom to believe in religion and freedom not to believe in religion and to propagate atheism." In 1980, the Central Committee approved a national conference for religious groups, made up of the Catholic Patriotic Association, the Islamic Association of China, the Chinese Taoist Association, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the Buddhist Association of China. In 1981, Document No. 19 described religion as a feature of a stage of human development, expected to last a long time and eventually fade. It warned that coercion against religion was counterproductive, while criminal activity under religious cover would not be tolerated.

  In the 1980s and 1990s, the government began rebuilding places of worship destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Protestantism grew rapidly in rural China in the 1980s and in urban China in the 1990s. The state banned so-called heterodox teachings such as the Falun Gong and has persecuted its practitioners since 1999. Local authorities mostly left other religions alone.

  In the early 2000s, the government embraced traditional religions, praising their role in a Confucian Harmonious Society. It founded the Confucius Institute in 2004 and hosted the first World Buddhist Forum in 2006. A turning point came in 2005, when folk cults began to be protected as intangible cultural heritage. Interrupted traditions resumed, and some ceremonies forgotten for centuries were reinvented. The annual worship of the god Cancong of the ancient state of Shu returned at a ceremonial complex near the Sanxingdui archaeological site in Sichuan. Modern political leaders have even been deified into the common pantheon.

  Outside observers raised alarms. The international community has voiced concern over allegations that China harvested the organs of Falun Gong practitioners and other religious minorities, including Christians and Uyghur Muslims. In 2012, Xi Jinping made fighting moral void and corruption through a return to traditional culture a primary task of government. Then in 2023, the government decreed that all places of worship must uphold the leadership of the Communist Party, implement Xi Jinping Thought and promote the sinicization of religion.

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• 8. Numbers and Maps

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  Researchers have long warned that counting believers in China is unreliable. In 2006, Phil Zuckerman pointed to low response rates, non-random samples and a difficult political and cultural climate. One scholar concluded that the statistics cannot be accurate in a real scientific sense, because definitions of religion leave out people who belong to no organisation but still act on religious beliefs daily. The 2021 CIA World Factbook estimates give 52.1% unaffiliated, 21.9% Chinese folk religion, 18.2% Buddhism, 5.1% Christianity, 1.8% Islam and 0.7% other religions. Early 21st-century national surveys put folk religion at about 80% of the population, over a billion people.

  Individual surveys diverge sharply. In 2005, Xinzhong Yao surveyed five cities and found only 5.3% in religious organisations, with 51.8% non-religious. Yet 23.8% regularly worshipped gods and ancestors, and just 32.9% were convinced atheists. The Chinese Spiritual Life Survey of 2010 found 56.2% of the population, or 754 million people, practiced ancestral religion, though only 16% claimed to believe the ancestor exists. A 2007 East China Normal University survey counted about 300 million religious believers. The 2014 China Family Panel Studies asked about belief in a conception of divinity instead of membership, to improve accuracy. In 2017, Chris White criticised many Western estimates of Chinese Christians for what he called a Western evangelical bias and a considerable romanticisation.

  Who believes what is also measurable. Yu Tao's 2008 rural survey found Protestants were the poorest and least educated, while Buddhists and Catholics were the wealthiest. The share of Taoists who were also local Party members was exceptionally high. The World Values Survey shows the Chinese becoming more religious from the 1990s to the early 2020s, with Buddhists growing most. Sichuan University researchers found Generation Z slightly more religious than the average. Ji Zhe notes that Chan Buddhism and individual, non-institutional folk religiosity do especially well among young people. Henan has the largest share of Christians of any province, about 6%.

  Geography divides the picture further. Goossaert described a Taoist south against a village-religion and Confucian center-north, while calling this an oversimplification. In the south, folk religion centers on lineage associations and ancestor-gods. On the North China Plain, villages of mixed surnames form communities of the gods and hold temple ceremonies called miaohui, with processions and pilgrimages. In 1930s Manchuria, the Universal Church of the Way and its Virtue claimed 8 million members, about a quarter of the population. Tibetan Buddhism dominates Tibet, and Christians cluster in Henan, Anhui and Zhejiang. In Hong Kong, 843,000 people were Christians as of 2010, or 11.8% of the population.

  The northeast has its own character, shaped by contact between Han religion and Tungus and Manchu shamanism. Practitioners there ride for the immortals, a practice called chumaxian, and worship Fox Gods. At the head of many pantheons sit the Great Lord and the Great Lady of the Three Foxes.

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