China Demographics Population Religion Percentage 2019 by City Immigrants The demographics of the People's Republic of China are identified by a large population with a relatively small youth division, which was partially a result of China's one-child policy. The Pew Research Center on Religion and Public Life estimated the number of Catholics (both "patriotic" and "underground") to be nine million in 2011 (Global Christianity, December 2011). Ruling, Resources and Religion in China: Managing the Multiethnic State in the 21st Century, Redeeming China’s sweatshops: Christianity and migrant factory workers in Shenzhen, The role of money in Southeast Asian politics. Other variants on Protestant Christianity, including Pentecostal movements and independent churches, may lack one or more of these elements, and their leadership and beliefs are individualized and dynamic. Shintoism has no fixed tradition of prayers or prescribed dogma, but is characterized by individual ritual. However, this figure is vigorously disputed by Muslim researchers overseas. There is a constant drum beat regarding Christianity in China. Divine revelation of principles and prohibitions in the Hebrew Scriptures form the basis of Jewish law, or halakhah, which is a key component of the faith. Voodoo/Vodun: a form of spirit and ancestor worship combined with some Christian faiths, especially Catholicism. As we shall see, these attitudes have slowly changed among many government officials, and among academics and researchers working inside Mainland China. Christianity - Descending from Judaism, Christianity's central belief maintains Jesus of Nazareth is the promised messiah of the Hebrew Scriptures, and that his life, death, and resurrection are salvific for the world. Using unregistered house-church Christians as an example, one may make a few general observations which rule out any definitive statement of detailed statistics. One of the major problems in assessing the number of Buddhists in China is that of definition. Source: CIA World Factbook - This page was last updated on December 7, 2019, Buddhist 18.2%, Christian 5.1%, Muslim 1.8%, folk religion 21.9%, Hindu < 0.1%, Jewish < 0.1%, other 0.7% (includes Daoist (Taoist)), unaffiliated 52.2%. After the nearly seven decade divide between the Vatican and China, Pope Francis agreed in 2018 to recognise bishops that China had appointed, and to jointly select bishops thereafter to overcome the schism of Catholicism in China. Political and ideological factors play a major role in this. Researchers and believers overseas, in strong reaction to the very partial and biased statistics which have emanated from Mainland official sources, until recently (and still do so, in some cases) have seized on every scrap of information coming from other sources, especially Chinese religious believers themselves, and proceeded to extrapolate, build models and estimate numbers. The first is that the government has for a long time downplayed the role of religion in Chinese society, and with it, generally underestimated, in the view of most serious researchers, the numbers of religious believers, especially Christians. This is no longer a taboo subject within China. Badimo: a form of ancestor worship of the Tswana people of Botswana. This stance reflects not only a negative reaction to foreign influence on China via religion, but also a positive nod that ‘Chinese’ religions aid the social cohesion that Xi Jinping needs both domestically and internationally. Kirant: the belief system of the Kirat, a people who live mainly in the Himalayas of Nepal. The problem, as I mentioned in the introduction, is that over the last 30 years there has been a welter of conflicting statistics emanating from government, TSPM/CCC spokespersons, house-church leaders and believers, researchers and pundits overseas. As mentioned in the introduction, statistics for numbers of Muslims in China vary as much as for Christians. Daoist priests and hermits usually avoid cities and live in remote mountainous areas. Rastafarian: an afro-centrist ideology and movement based on Christianity that arose in Jamaica in the 1930s; it believes that Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930-74, was the incarnation of the second coming of Jesus. Consequently, there is a strong resonance between Islam with ‘Chinese characteristics’ in 2019, the nineteenth/twentieth Century of Humiliation, and the eighteenth-century synthesis of Islam with ‘Chinese’ religion. The Orthodox Christian faith shares many theological tenets with the Roman Catholic Church, but diverges on some key premises and does not recognize the governing authority of the Pope. Buddhism is a foreign policy tool as well, and the Chinese government spends millions of dollars in other Buddhist-dominant countries to link their Buddhist heritage. This contains some startling information of the rapid growth of Protestant Christianity. The forms … Your email address will not be published. No one is able to visit all the house-churches or collate accurate statistics from all these heterogeneous meetings that range from groups of a handful of people meeting together to large networks which claim millions of adherents. Formulated in the 1860s, it holds that God lives in all of us and strives to convert society into a paradise on earth, populated by believers transformed into intelligent moral beings with a high social conscience. China and the Strategic Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic, India & COVID-19: Misinformation and the Downside of Social Media. new believers are added to the church in China" are ruled out of count because of the simple inability of anyone at the present to make accurate surveys of all house-church believers at the national or even provincial level. Many, perhaps the majority, of the statistics relating to the house-churches have a very shaky foundation. The core characteristics and beliefs of the world's major religions are described below. teachings of Siddhartha Gautama (also known as Gautama Buddha "the enlightened one"). A 30 Day Prayer Guide.View Full Bio, "Like everything else about China, the landscape of religious life is quite complicated.". On a recent visit to Xinjiang I was told by local Uygurs that the population statistics for the number of Uygurs in Xinjiang has been kept artificially low for many years to fewer than ten million. It is interesting that some researchers within China claim that there are more Christians than Daoists or Buddhists in certain areas. These differ in their views and observance of Jewish law, with the Orthodox representing the most traditional practice, and Reform/Liberal communities the most accommodating of individualized interpretations of Jewish identity and faith. Judaism - One of the first known monotheistic religions, likely dating to between 2000-1500 B.C., Judaism is the native faith of the Jewish people, based upon the belief in a covenant of responsibility between a sole omnipotent creator God and Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism's Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh. Buddhism has long been acknowledged as the major religious faith in China by both Mainland sources and overseas scholars. According to the Chairman of the official China Daoist Association, Min Zhiting, there are now over 1,100 temples and shrines in China and over 26,000 Daoist initiates. [This compares to a claimed five million initiates in 1950 (www.kenyon.edu, N/D).] It encompasses several forms or denominations which are extremely varied in structure, beliefs, relationship to state, clergy, and governance. This seems to be based on fairly narrow criteria limiting Buddhists to those who declare themselves to be so and are registered in some way as taking part in institutional religious practices. Its aim is to increase dialogue with, and to make an impact on, the ongoing debates within the region, together with our Chinese and Malaysian campuses. Officially according to the TSPM/CCC and the government there were only 700,000 Protestants in the whole of China in 1950. Having cleared the ground, so to speak, we can proceed cautiously to examine what evidence exists for each of the five, major, officially-recognized religious faiths in China. Our country’s religious groups and religious matters do not accept domination by foreign forces’, he said. The ‘Sinicisation of religion’ was included in Xi’s report to the party congress in late 2017 and is similarly included in the following two government work reports for 2018 and 2019. In his introduction to an article entitled "An Analysis for the Reasons for the Rapid Growth of [Protestant] Christianity in China Today," researcher Ma Hucheng states that "some people estimate there are 50-70 million Christians in Mainland China." Mormonism believes earlier Christian traditions, such as the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant reform faiths, are apostasies and that Joseph Smith's revelation of the Book of Mormon is a restoration of true Christianity. The official ideology of China is still "Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought" although this is often forgotten. They point out that a census taken in China in 1936 gave a figure of 48,104,240 Muslims in China (teachislam.com). Some interesting statistics from the new government White Paper on religious belief and practice in China. However, the local Uygurs speculated the real figure was perhaps 12-15 millionthey were not claiming a huge discrepancy. Image Credit: Ningbo Christian Church by Bill L/Flickr; Licence: CC BY 2.0. Adherents simultaneously worship Jesus Christ and Palauan goddesses. The second problem is in some ways the opposite of the first. He states: If we estimate that Christianity will continue to grow at the rate of one million per year as has happened over the past 30 years, then after 20 years there will be 60 million believers and after 50 years a conservative estimate is over 100 million Christians . Unlike Theravada Buddhism, Mahayana schools maintain the Buddha-nature is present in all beings and all will ultimately achieve enlightenment. Inuit beliefs are a form of shamanism (see below) based on animistic principles of the Inuit or Eskimo peoples. Muslim > Muslim percentage of total population: Muslim percentage (%) of total population 2014 Pew Report. In order to live an Islamic life, believers must follow the five pillars, or tenets, of Islam, which are the testimony of faith (shahada), daily prayer (salah), giving alms (zakah), fasting during Ramadan (sawm), and the pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). China's only indigenous religion (if we except Confucianism) has generally avoided the limelight. East China Normal University reported 40 million Christians in 2006 (The Guardian, 7 February 2007). This atlas provides a detailed examination of the religious landscape in China. According to official sources there are 7.6 million followers of Tibetan Buddhism among the Tibetans, Mongols, Yugur, Monba and Tu peoples. This is clearly a highly dubious estimate. The result has been, especially in the case of Protestant Christianity, wildly varying figures ranging from 23 million (the present TSPM/CCC figure) to over 100 or even 200 million. The CPA, as with the TSPM in Protestant circles, is very much despised by the majority of Catholic believers. Her most recent book is Ruling, Resources and Religion in China: Managing the Multiethnic State in the 21st Century. Variants    Ismaili faith: A sect of Shia Islam, its adherents are also known as "Seveners," because they believe that the rightful seventh Imam in Islamic leadership was Isma'il, the elder son of Imam Jafar al-Sadiq. This is typical of most cities and provinces throughout China and shows that even the official statistics emanating from the government and TSPM/CCC sources may vary widely. Statements such as that in Henan province "in 2009 there were 8,856,228 house-church Protestant Christians," as one overseas observer has claimed, are similarly ruled out of count. In 1982 the official figure was only 15 million. Basic Groupings    Catholicism (or Roman Catholicism): This is the oldest established western Christian church and the world's largest single religious body.