Religion in China: A Taboo That Is Slowly Being Revealed

Assessing religious trends in today's China is a task that deserves to be added to the list of the twelve labors of Hercules, if only to consider the immensity of the Middle Kingdom and the culture of secrecy peculiar to this totalitarian State where religion is still taboo.

While the Pew Research Center (PRC) was unable to carry out its own on-site survey, it did endeavour to cross-check and weight as much data as possible, published here and there by Chinese public authorities and universities. The results should be taken with a grain of salt, but they do give some idea of the population's religious stance.

According to two surveys carried out in 2016 and 2018 by an organization dependent on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), only 10% of Chinese identify with a religious group, while 33% say they simply believe in the existence of Buddha and/or a bodhisattva, 26% confine themselves to “burn incense at least a few times a year”—a gesture tantamount to imploring divine favor—while 18% claim to belong to the Taoist movement, which is more of a philosophy than a religion in the strict sense.

As the PRC notes, “The discrepancy is partly due to linguistics: The closest translation of the English word ‘religion’ in Chinese is zongjiao, a term Chinese scholars adopted in the early 20th century when they were working with Western texts and needed to translate ‘religion.’”

“Zongjiao” refers to certain forms of religion which, in the Chinese mentality, refer above all to the great monotheistic religions imported from abroad, and which still seem largely impenetrable to the popular masses. However, as the PRC continues, “Zongjiao does not typically refer to diffuse religious beliefs and practices, which many Chinese people consider to be matters of custom (xisu 习俗) or superstition (mixin 迷信) instead.”

And to top it all off, in 2024, given the progress in the Sinicization of religions decreed by Xi Jinping, the term “zongjiao” has a negative connotation, “influenced by the government’s view that religion reflects a backward mindset incompatible with socialism.”

Another official survey carried out in China in 2021 gives a slightly different overview: 88% of Chinese declare themselves with “no religious belief”—in the sense of “zongjiao,” which does not mean they are atheists.

However, we learn that 1% of the Chinese population identify as Muslim, particularly the Uyghur ethnic group present in the west of the country, 2% as Christians, 3% as followers of popular religions—the cult of elders, pagan divinities—and 6% as Buddhists.

This survey by the Communist State concludes that there has been no significant growth in the major monotheistic religions in China for several decades: a judgment to be taken with a grain of salt if we recall the CCP's fight against Christianity and Islam.

University studies allow a little more nuance to the administration's figures: according to some of them, the proportion of Christians could in fact be as high as 7% or even 9% of the total population, including children. Moreover, another survey conducted in 2018 reveals that 7% of Chinese people answer “yes” to the (biased) question “Do you believe in Jesus Christ or in God?”

Again according to data provided by the Chinese State, Protestantism is more widespread than Catholicism in the Middle Kingdom: sixty thousand Protestant places of worship were counted in 2018, compared to 6,440 officially registered Catholic churches.

Finally, it is worth noting that Protestantism—based on the results obtained by the PRC—is currently enjoying a significantly higher growth rate than Catholicism: some see this as the fact that Pentecostal groups, which are totally independent and highly “volatile,” are more likely to escape the religious control of a totalitarian power, unlike Catholicism.

A trend that the renewal of the provisional agreement between the People’s Republic of China and the Holy See is unlikely to reverse.