The Pew Charitable Trusts and the John Templeton Foundation fund the Global Religious Futures project.
This report is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures project, a broader effort by Pew Research Center to measure religious change and assess its impact on societies around the world. Read the section on current scholarship to understand other reasons why social scientists may shy away from research on religion in contemporary China.
Refer to the Methodology for technical details, as well as a discussion of why surveys by Chinese universities may or may not be trustworthy. A complete glossary can be found in Appendix A.įor context, we provide a summary of the recent history of the Chinese government’s policies toward religion. The Key terms section explains words and phrases that appear in the report’s Overview. Throughout the report, we include Chinese terms because translations to English are often imprecise or incomplete. For example, we present findings from questions about cultural beliefs and practices that also have spiritual or religious elements, such as gravesite visits and belief in fengshui (风水). To capture the Chinese religious landscape as fully as possible, we consider a wide range of survey questions. Questions that measure Abrahamic forms of religion (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) are not sufficient to describe the breadth of religious beliefs and customs in East Asia.
We explain how religion in China – and in East Asia more broadly – is distinct from religion elsewhere. Since Pew Research Center, like other non-Chinese organizations, is not allowed to conduct surveys in China, in this report we analyze surveys conducted by academic groups in China, including the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS) and the World Values Survey (WVS). We also analyze Chinese government data, which is primarily released by China’s State Council and the National Religious Affairs Administration (formerly known as the State Administration for Religious Affairs), and data from state-run religious associations, such as the China Christian Council and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (CCC and TSPM) and the Islamic Association of China. These challenges include the shortcomings of available data, the awkward fit of categories used in other parts of the world, and the impact of culture and politics on religious activity in China. This report aims to explain the challenges of measuring religion and religious trends in China.
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