Religion in China
Religion in China is diverse and most Chinese people are either non-religious or practice a combination of Buddhism and Taoism with a Confucian worldview, which is collectively termed as Chinese folk religion.
The People's Republic of China is officially an atheist state, but the Chinese government formally recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, and Islam. All religious institutions in the country are required to uphold the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, implement Xi Jinping Thought, and promote the Religious Sinicization under the general secretaryship of Xi Jinping. A 2023 Pew survey found 93% of the country reported no religious affiliation. According to 2021 estimates from the CIA World Factbook, among people claiming any religious beliefs, 52.1% of the population is unaffiliated, 21.9% follows Chinese Folk Religion, 18.2% follows Buddhism, 5.1% follow Christianity, 1.8% follow Islam, and 0.7% follow other religions including Taoism.
Overview
Chinese civilization has historically long been a cradle and host to a variety of the most enduring religio-philosophical traditions of the world. Confucianism and Taoism, later joined by Buddhism, constitute the "three teachings" that have shaped Chinese culture. There are no clear boundaries between these intertwined religious systems, which do not claim to be exclusive, and elements of each enrich popular folk religion. The emperors of China claimed the Mandate of Heaven and participated in Chinese religious practices. In the early 20th century, reform-minded officials and intellectuals attacked religion in general as superstitious. Since 1949, the Chinese Communist Party, officially state atheist, has been in power in the country, and prohibits CCP members from religious practice while in office. A series of anti-religious campaigns, which had begun during the late 19th century, culminated in the Cultural Revolution against the Four Olds: old habits, old ideas, old customs, and old culture. The Cultural Revolution destroyed or forced many observances and religious organisations underground. Following the death of Mao, subsequent leaders have allowed Chinese religious organisations to have more autonomy. In the 1980s and 1990s, the central government began rebuilding places of worship destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.Chinese folk religion, the country's most widespread system of beliefs and practices, has evolved and adapted since at least the second millennium BCE, during the Shang and Zhou dynasties. Fundamental elements of Chinese theology and cosmology hearken back to this period, and became more elaborate during the Axial Age. In general, Chinese folk religion involves an allegiance to the shen, which encompass a variety of gods and immortals. These may be natural deities belonging to the environment, or ancient progenitors of human groups, concepts of civility, or culture heroes, of whom many feature throughout Chinese history and mythology. During the later Zhou, the philosophy and ritual teachings of Confucius began spreading throughout China, while Taoist institutions had developed by the Han dynasty. During the Tang dynasty, Buddhism became widely popular in China, and Confucian thinkers responded by developing neo-Confucian philosophies. Chinese salvationist religions and local cults thrived.
Christianity and Islam arrived in China during the 7th century. Christianity did not take root until it was reintroduced in the 16th century by Jesuit missionaries. In the early 20th century, Christian communities grew. However, after 1949, foreign missionaries were expelled, and churches brought under government-controlled institutions. After the late 1970s, religious freedoms for Christians improved and new Chinese groups emerged. Islam has been practiced in Chinese society for 1,400 years. Muslims constitute a minority group in China; according to the latest estimates, they represent between 0.45% and 1.8% of the total population. While Hui people are the most numerous subgroup, the greatest concentration of Muslims is in Xinjiang, which has a significant Uyghur population. Some scholars have argued that Confucianism can be considered a form of Humanism, primarily through its concept of "humaneness" or ren, or a form of Secularism, and that Confucianism potentially influenced secularism in the European enlightenment.
Because many Han Chinese do not consider their spiritual beliefs and practices to be a "religion" as such, and do not feel that they must practice any one of them to the exclusion of others, it is difficult to gather clear and reliable statistics. According to one scholar, the "great majority of China's population" participates in religion—the rituals and festivals of the lunar calendar—without being party to any religious institution. National surveys conducted during the early 21st century estimated that an estimated 80% of the Chinese population practice some form of folk religion, for a total of over 1 billion people. 13–16% of the population are Buddhists, 10% are Taoists; 2.53% are Christians, and 0.83% are Muslims. Folk salvation movements involve anywhere from 2–13% of the population. Many in the intellectual class adhere to Confucianism as a religious identity. Several ethnic minorities in China are particular to specific religions, including Tibetan Buddhism, and Islam among Hui and Uyghurs.
History
Pre-imperial
Prior to the spread of world religions in East Asia, local tribes shared animistic, shamanic and totemic worldviews. Shamans mediated prayers, sacrifices, and offerings directly to the spiritual world; this heritage survives in various modern forms of religion throughout China. These traits are especially connected to cultures such as the Hongshan culture.The Flemish philosopher Ulrich Libbrecht traces the origins of some features of Taoism to what Jan Jakob Maria de Groot called "Wuism", that is Chinese shamanism. Libbrecht distinguishes two layers in the development of the Chinese theology, derived respectively from the Shang and Zhou dynasties. The Shang state religion was based on the worship of ancestors and god-kings, who survived as unseen forces after death. They were not transcendent entities, since the universe was "by itself so", not created by a force outside of it but generated by internal rhythms and cosmic powers. The later Zhou dynasty was more agricultural in its world-view; they instead emphasised a universal concept of Heaven referred to as Tian. The Shang's identification of Shangdi as their ancestor-god had asserted their claim to power by divine right; the Zhou transformed this claim into a legitimacy based on moral power, the Mandate of Heaven. Zhou kings declared that their victory over the Shang was because they were virtuous and loved their people, while the Shang were tyrants and thus were deprived of power by Tian.
By the 6th century BCE, divine right was no longer an exclusive privilege of the Zhou royal house. The rhetorical power of Tian had become "diffuse" and claimed by different potentates in the Zhou states to legitimize political ambitions, but might be bought by anyone able to afford the elaborate ceremonies and the old and new rites required to access the authority of Tian. The population no longer perceived the official tradition as an effective way to communicate with Heaven. The traditions of the "Nine Fields" and Yijing flourished. Chinese thinkers then diverged in a "Hundred Schools of Thought", each proposing its own theories for the reconstruction of the Zhou moral order. Confucius appeared in this period of decadence and questioning. He was educated in Shang–Zhou theology, and his new formulation gave centrality to self-cultivation, human agency, and the educational power of the self-established individual in assisting others to establish themselves. As the Zhou collapsed, traditional values were abandoned. Disillusioned with the widespread vulgarization of rituals to access Tian, Confucius began to preach an ethical interpretation of traditional Zhou religion. In his view, the power of Tian is immanent, and responds positively to the sincere heart driven by the qualities of humaneness, rightness, decency and altruism that Confucius conceived of as the foundation needed to restore socio-political harmony. He also thought that a prior state of meditation was necessary to engage in the ritual acts. Confucius amended and re-codified the classics inherited from the pre-imperial era, and composed the Spring and Autumn Annals.
Qin and Han
The short-lived Qin dynasty chose Legalism as the state ideology, banning and persecuting all other schools of thought. Confucianism was harshly suppressed, with the burning of Confucian classics and killing of scholars who espoused the Confucian cause. The state ritual of the Qin was similar to that of the following Han dynasty. Qin Shi Huang personally held sacrifices to Di at Mount Tai, a site dedicated to the worship of the supreme God since before the Xia, and in the suburbs of the capital Xianyang. The emperors of Qin also concentrated the cults of the five forms of God, previously held at different locations, in unified temple complexes. The universal religion of the Han was focused on the idea of the incarnation of God as the Yellow Emperor, the central figure of the Wufang Shangdi. The idea of the incarnation of God was not new, as the Shang also regarded themselves as divine. Besides these development, the latter Han dynasty was characterised by new religious phenomena: the emergence of Taoism outside state orthodoxy, the rise of indigenous millenarian religious movements, and the introduction of Buddhism. By the Han dynasty, the mythical Yellow Emperor was understood as being conceived by the virgin Fubao, who was impregnated by the radiance of Taiyi.Emperor Wu of Han formulated the doctrine of the Interactions Between Heaven and Mankind, and of prominent fangshi, while outside the state religion the Yellow God was the focus of Huang-Lao religious movements which influenced primitive Taoism. Before the Confucian turn of Emperor Wu and after him, the early and latter Han dynasty had Huang-Lao as the state doctrine under various emperors, where Laozi was identified as the Yellow Emperor and received imperial sacrifices. The Eastern Han struggled with both internal instability and menace by non-Chinese peoples from the outer edges of the empire. In such harsh conditions, while the imperial cult continued the sacrifices to the cosmological gods, common people estranged from the rationalism of the state religion found solace in enlightened masters and in reviving and perpetuating more or less abandoned cults of national, regional and local divinities that better represented indigenous identities. The Han state religion was "ethnicised" by associating the cosmological deities to regional populations. By the end of the Eastern Han, the earliest record of a mass religious movement attests the excitement provoked by the belief in the imminent advent of the Queen Mother of the West in the northeastern provinces. From the elites' point of view, the movement was connected to a series of abnormal cosmic phenomena seen as characteristic of an excess of yin.
Between 184 and 205 CE, the Way of the Supreme Peace in the Central Plains organized the Yellow Turban Rebellion against the Han. Later Taoist religious movements flourished in the Han state of Shu. A shaman named Zhang Xiu was known to have led a group of followers from Shu into the uprising of the year 184. In 191, he reappeared as a military official in the province, together with the apparently unrelated Zhang Lu. During a military mission in Hanning, Xiu died in battle. Between 143 and 198, starting with the grandfather Zhang Daoling and culminating with Zhang Lu, the Zhang lineage established the early Celestial Masters church. Zhang died in 216 or 217, and between 215 and 219 the people of Hanzhong were gradually dispersed northwards, spreading Celestial Masters' Taoism to other parts of the empire.