Pew has an excellent survey up about the state of religion and religiosity in China. There isn’t a lot of good data out of China on this topic for obvious reasons. One of the phenomenon of recent years in the West has been the perception among evangelicals that China is the scene of mass conversions to Christianity. Because of the lack of data there are speculations of hundreds of millions of crypto-Christians; and some in the media repeat these claims rather uncritically (Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power is an example of the power of anecdote synthesized with the hope of evangelicals). It is almost certainly true that the “official” numbers presented by the Chinese government probably lowball the number of Christians, but this survey (skewed toward urban areas, where one assumes Christianity might be more prominent as it is in other East Asian nations) yields a number in the 2-4% range. Higher than what the Chinese government reports, but multiplicatively, not by orders of magnitude. But let’s take a closer look at the data.
From the 2007 survey,
Buddhist – 12%
Christian – 2%
Muslim – < 1%
Taoist – < 1%
None – 81%
Refused – 5%
Does this surprise you? It shouldn't. Even in “hyper-religious” South Korea only about half of the population avows a religion. One of the differences between East Asia and much of the rest of the world is the relative weakness of institutional religion in terms of securing exclusive access to believers. Patronization of multiple religious institutions and lack of explicit identification is often the norm; not the exception (e.g., most Japanese avowing both Shinto and Buddhist identities). It seems likely that Muslims are underrepresented in this sample because of the geography (skewed toward eastern China), while I would not be surprised if there was widespread underreporting of religious identificaiton because of the state’s customary hostile attitude towards belief.
But lack of religion does not necessarily mean a purely naturalistic worldview. Here are the beliefs in various supernatural phenomena….
Fortune – 40%
Fate – 29%
Buddha – 8%
Yama (Lord of Death) – 2%
Jade Emperor – 2%
Immortal soul – 8%
Ghosts – 6%
Supernatural or immortal beings – 5%
Elves or witches – 2%
Believe in at least one of the above – 60%
Believe in none of the above or don’t know – 40%
I think you can look at this from various angles. One the one hand compared to the gods-intoxicated cultures of Europe, Islam and South Asia, a place like China is relatively free of divine hauntings. But relatively is the key. Even after decades of state encouraged atheism and scientism the majority of Han Chinese still accept some sort of “superstitious” belief. On the other hand, China has traditionally been weak in terms of the monopoly of any given institutional religion since the persecutions of “foreign” religions (this included Buddhism) during the 9th century, and I suspect that this state will remain the case. Yet there is also a broad well of belief in diffuse supernatural phenomena, as has also been the case among most Chinese for most of history.
Finally, in terms of not forcing things into one’s preconceptions, I think one should be careful of this part of the report summary:
There is some indirect survey evidence that suggests the existence of a potentially large number of unaffiliated, independent Christians. For example, the 2005 Pew survey found that 6% of the Chinese public expresses belief in the possible existence of “God/Jesus” (in Chinese Shangdi/Yesu), a rough equivalent of saying the “Christian God.” This is more than 50% higher than the number of people who self-identify as a Christian in the same poll. The 6% estimate is closer to the estimates of China’s total Christian population made by religious demographers and researchers.
I think one might also find that a substantial number of Hindus would “believe in Jesus,” specifically, that Jesus is a manifestation of the Godhead. That does not entail that these individuals are Christians. The point here is that monotheistic exclusivism isn’t a good standard when ascertaining the distribution of beliefs in East Asia, and on the margins it doesn’t even characterize all believers in the West. Additionally, my research on the ethography of Chinese crypto-Christians suggests that some of these groups may identify as Christians, but they are likely to be very heterodox. The movement which spearheaded the Taiping Rebellion is an example of what I’m thinking of (or, the Unification Church). So belief in God or Jesus might not mean what one would infer from it in our own cultural circumstances….
Note: There have been a few other surveys I’ve seen, and they tend to back up the broad outline of what Pew is reporting, which is why I tend to accept its veracity. Please remember that in East Asia urban populations tend to be more strongly affiliated with institutional religions, so I don’t expect that there is a broad reservoir of religiosity in rural regions that this survey is missing.
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