Daniel sent us this one — he's asking whether most Chinese people are actually atheists or if they hold to various traditional beliefs. It's one of those questions where the popular Western assumption is basically "China equals officially atheist," but the reality on the ground is a lot messier and more interesting. Where do we even start with this?
I think we start with the number that surprises most people. The best data we have comes from Pew Research Center — they did a massive survey, and they found that only about fourteen percent of Chinese adults identify as convinced atheists. For a country that's been governed by an officially atheist Communist Party for over seven decades, that's strikingly low.
So the "China is an atheist nation" story is basically wrong at the level of what people actually believe. But let me push on that number for a second — how did Pew actually ask the question? Because I can imagine someone saying "I'm not an atheist" not because they believe in God, but because they've never really thought about it in those terms, or because the word "atheist" carries a kind of strident connotation they don't identify with.
That's a great methodological question. Pew actually used multiple question formats to try to capture this. The fourteen percent figure comes from a direct self-identification question — essentially, "do you consider yourself an atheist?" But they also asked about specific beliefs and practices separately, which is how they got to the much larger numbers for supernatural belief and religious participation. So you're right that the fourteen percent is probably capturing people who actively embrace the label, not everyone who lacks theistic belief.
It's like asking Americans "are you a secular humanist" versus asking "do you believe in God." You'd get wildly different numbers.
And that distinction matters enormously for understanding China. The same Pew data shows that something like seventy-three percent of Chinese adults believe in some form of supernatural entity. That could be gods, spirits, ancestors, forces like fate or karma. The majority of the country holds beliefs that the official ideology would classify as superstition.
That's before we get into the thirty percent or so who explicitly identify as religious — Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, folk religion adherents. So you've got this fascinating tension where the state has one story about what China believes, and the population has been quietly doing something else the entire time.
Quietly, and sometimes not so quietly. The Chinese Family Panel Studies, which is a major longitudinal survey out of Peking University, found that roughly sixteen percent of Chinese adults practice some form of ancestral veneration regularly. That's a huge number in absolute terms — we're talking about more than two hundred million people maintaining shrines, burning incense, making offerings to deceased family members. And this is not some fringe thing in remote villages. It's mainstream.
The ancestral veneration piece is interesting because it sits in this gray zone. Is it religion? Is it cultural tradition? The state has been inconsistent about where the line is. I'm thinking of a friend who taught English in Chengdu for a few years — she said her students would casually mention burning paper money for ancestors during Qingming festival, and then in the same conversation say they weren't religious at all. They genuinely didn't see any contradiction.
That's such a perfect illustration of the category problem. To your friend's students, burning paper money was just what you do — like putting up Christmas decorations in the West. And that inconsistency in how the state treats these practices is by design. The official position has long been that China recognizes five religions — Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism. Everything else is either illegal or exists in a kind of regulatory limbo. But ancestral veneration and Chinese folk religion don't fit neatly into any of those five boxes. So you get this cat-and-mouse game where local officials sometimes crack down on temple festivals and sometimes look the other way, depending on the political winds.
The framework itself is the problem. The state says "five religions" as if that covers the landscape, and it just doesn't. It's like trying to describe European cuisine by listing five restaurants in Brussels.
The folk religion piece is where the numbers get really staggering. Scholars who study this — people like Yang Fenggang at Purdue, who's done some of the best work on Chinese religious demography — estimate that there are somewhere between four hundred million and six hundred million Chinese who participate in some form of Chinese folk religion. That's not a fringe phenomenon. That's potentially the largest religious grouping on the planet.
Wait, hold on. Four to six hundred million? That's bigger than the entire population of Europe. Why isn't that number more widely cited?
Because it's almost impossible to measure cleanly. Chinese folk religion doesn't have membership rolls. It doesn't have a centralized authority. It doesn't even have a single name that practitioners agree on. It's a diffuse set of practices — temple worship, deity cults, divination, feng shui, spirit mediumship, local festivals. Someone might visit a temple to pray for exam success, burn paper money for ancestors during Qingming festival, and consult a fortune teller about a business decision, all without ever thinking of themselves as "religious.
The category itself is a Western imposition that doesn't map onto how people actually live. It's like asking a fish to describe water.
That's one of the core problems with the whole "are Chinese people atheist" question. It assumes a Western model where you're either religious or you're not, and if you're religious, you belong to one religion. That model just breaks in the Chinese context. The Pew survey had to design special questions to capture what they called "diffuse religion" — beliefs and practices that don't fit into organized categories. They basically had to invent a new survey methodology just to see what was actually there.
The musical equivalent of beige wallpaper, but it turns out the wallpaper covers most of the house.
And the Communist Party knows this, which is why its approach has shifted over time. In the Mao era, the line was hard — religion was the opiate of the masses, temples were smashed during the Cultural Revolution, religious practitioners were persecuted. But since the reform era, the party has taken a more complicated position. They've realized they can't actually eliminate religion, so they try to manage it, co-opt it, and control it.
Manage and co-opt — that's the "patriotic religious associations" model, right? But how does that actually work in practice? If I'm a Buddhist monk in, say, Henan province, what does state management look like day to day?
The Buddhist Association of China is the state-sanctioned body that oversees all Buddhist activity. Every temple and monastery that wants to operate legally has to register with them. The association controls the training and certification of monks, approves the abbots of major temples, and ensures that teachings don't stray into territory the party considers politically sensitive. If you're a monk in Henan, you're probably fine as long as you stick to sutras and incense and don't start talking about Tibet or organizing anything that looks like an independent social movement. But the moment your temple becomes a gathering point for community organizing — even if it's just a charity or a meditation group that's too popular — someone from the local Religious Affairs Bureau is going to pay you a visit.
It's less about controlling belief than controlling organization.
The party doesn't actually care if you believe the Buddha is a supernatural being. It cares if your temple becomes a node in a network that isn't controlled by the party. Every officially recognized religion in China has a state-controlled "patriotic" association that oversees it. The Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, for example, appoints bishops without Vatican approval. The Islamic Association of China writes sermons that align with party doctrine. The idea is to create a version of each religion that's compatible with Communist Party rule, and to marginalize any version that isn't.
This is where the rubber meets the road with some of the more recent crackdowns we've seen — the mosque domes being removed, the cross demolitions, the re-education of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
The Xinjiang situation is its own distinct category of state repression, and I want to be careful not to conflate it with the broader management of religion. But yes, the logic is consistent — any religious expression that the party perceives as a competing locus of authority or identity gets crushed. The State Department's 2023 International Religious Freedom report on China documented systematic destruction of religious sites, mass surveillance of religious communities, and forced "secularization" programs targeting Muslims in Xinjiang, Tibetan Buddhists, and underground Christian churches.
You've got this weird landscape. At the grassroots level, hundreds of millions of people practice folk religion and ancestor veneration. The official line is state-managed tolerance for five approved traditions. And then there's active repression of anything that looks like independent religious organizing. All three things are true simultaneously. It's like a three-layer cake where each layer contradicts the others.
The fourth piece, which brings us back to the original question, is that alongside all of this, you do have genuine secularization. There's a significant chunk of the Chinese population — especially younger, urban, educated people — who really are secular in the Western sense. They don't believe in gods or spirits, they don't practice any religion, and they see religion as something their grandparents did. I've seen survey data suggesting that among university students in Beijing and Shanghai, non-belief rates are dramatically higher than the national average.
The fourteen percent atheist number is probably an undercount if you include people who are just functionally secular without the label.
It depends on how you ask the question. If you ask "do you believe in God or gods," you get a much higher non-belief number than fourteen percent. The fourteen percent figure is specifically people who actively identify with the label "atheist." But if you ask "are you religious," huge numbers of Chinese people will say no, even if they burn incense at a temple twice a year. They don't see those practices as "religious" — they see them as cultural, traditional, just what you do.
That's the category problem again. The word "religion" in Chinese — zongjiao — is itself a modern term that was imported from Japan in the late nineteenth century. Before that, there wasn't really a concept that grouped Buddhism, Taoism, ancestor worship, and folk practices into a single category called "religion" as distinct from "not-religion." So you're using a vocabulary that was literally invented to translate Western concepts, and then being surprised when it doesn't fit.
And this isn't just an academic distinction — it has real political consequences. When the Chinese state says it protects "religious freedom," it means freedom within the five officially recognized zongjiao, as defined and managed by the state. Folk practices that fall outside those categories have no legal protection whatsoever. If you're a village spirit medium, you don't have religious freedom — you have whatever tolerance the local authorities decide to extend, and that can vanish overnight.
The answer to the prompt's question is basically: no, most Chinese people are not atheists in any meaningful sense, but the actual picture is so complicated that a simple yes or no is almost useless. You've got folk religion practitioners, ancestor venerators, Buddhists, Taoists, Muslims, Christians, convinced atheists, functionally secular urbanites, and huge numbers of people who do a bit of everything.
Let me give some concrete numbers from the Pew data to ground this. About eighteen percent of Chinese adults identify as Buddhist. Roughly two percent are Christian, which sounds small but translates to about twenty-eight million people — one of the largest Christian populations in the world in absolute terms. About one and a half percent are Muslim, which is around twenty-one million people. Taoism is harder to measure, but estimates range from one to twelve percent depending on how you count.
All of these are probably undercounts because of the sensitivity of identifying as religious in an officially atheist state. I mean, if a stranger with a clipboard asks you about your religious beliefs in a country where religion has been stigmatized for decades, are you going to give them the full picture?
The Chinese General Social Survey has found that when you ask about religious affiliation indirectly, the numbers are consistently higher than when you ask directly. People are cautious. They've internalized decades of messaging that religion is backward, that religious people are less modern, less patriotic. There's a social desirability bias against admitting to religious belief, especially among urban professionals. You might burn incense at your mother's insistence when you visit home for New Year, but you're certainly not going to tell a survey researcher about it.
You've got state pressure from above, social stigma from peers, and yet the practices persist at massive scale. That tells you something about how deep these traditions run. You can't shame people out of honoring their dead grandparents, apparently.
They're not just persisting — in some areas they're actually reviving. Since the economic reforms of the 1980s, there's been a massive resurgence of temple building, ancestor hall reconstruction, and folk religious festivals across rural China. Local communities have poured enormous amounts of money into rebuilding temples that were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. The scholar Adam Yuet Chau has documented this extensively — he calls it a "religious renaissance" that the state tolerates as long as it stays local and doesn't challenge party authority.
The state tolerates it, but it also monetizes it. A lot of these temples have become tourist attractions. Local governments are happy to collect ticket revenue from pilgrims and tourists visiting "cultural heritage sites" that happen to be active temples. There's something almost comical about a local official who gives a speech about preserving intangible cultural heritage while standing in front of a temple where people are actively praying to a deity.
The cynicism of that arrangement is hard to overstate. The same local officials who might have participated in destroying a temple during the Cultural Revolution are now cutting ribbons at its reopening ceremony and talking about the importance of preserving traditional culture. Religion is fine as long as it's a revenue stream and doesn't generate independent social organization. It's the ultimate "have your cake and eat it too" — crush the institutional power of religion, then sell tickets to the ruins.
"Spiritual Disneyland with Chinese characteristics.
That's not far off. And it connects to a broader shift in how the party justifies its rule. In the Mao era, legitimacy came from revolution and class struggle. In the reform era, it came from economic growth. But as growth has slowed, the party has increasingly leaned into nationalism and "cultural confidence" — the idea that Chinese civilization is uniquely valuable and the party is its guardian. Traditional religious practices get rebranded as cultural heritage, as long as they don't challenge the party's monopoly on meaning.
Which brings us to the Confucianism question. Is Confucianism a religion? The party has been actively promoting Confucian values in recent years — filial piety, social harmony, respect for authority. But they're very careful not to call it a religion, because that would complicate the whole five-religions framework. So what is it, exactly?
Because Confucianism as a religion — with temples, rituals, a clergy — would be a direct competitor to the party's ideological authority. But Confucianism as a set of ethical guidelines that happen to align perfectly with authoritarian governance? That's useful. Xi Jinping has quoted Confucius more than any Chinese leader since the early twentieth century. There's a Confucius Institute in seemingly every university town on the planet. The party is selectively reviving tradition in ways that serve its interests. It's a curated traditionalism — pick the parts that reinforce hierarchy and obedience, leave out the parts about the scholar-official's duty to remonstrate against unjust rulers.
The state as the ultimate tradition curator. "We'll tell you which parts of your heritage are acceptable and which parts are feudal superstition." It's an extraordinary level of cultural gatekeeping.
That curation is constantly shifting. During the COVID pandemic, there were crackdowns on temple festivals and pilgrimage sites that had been tolerated for years. The party uses public health, national security, "core socialist values" — whatever rationale is available — to expand or contract the space for religious practice as it sees fit. The boundary between acceptable tradition and dangerous superstition isn't fixed; it moves based on political needs.
Let's pull this back to the core question. If someone says "are most Chinese people atheists," the short answer is no. The slightly longer answer is that the majority hold some form of traditional religious or spiritual belief, but those beliefs don't map neatly onto Western categories, and the state's official atheism creates a complicated environment where belief is simultaneously widespread, stigmatized, co-opted, and repressed.
I'd add one more layer. The younger generation is more secular in the Western sense — surveys consistently show lower rates of religious belief and practice among urban youth. But at the same time, there's been a surge of interest among some young people in traditional practices, but reframed as cultural identity or wellness rather than religion. You see young professionals in Shanghai doing tai chi, consulting the I Ching, practicing "traditional Chinese medicine" that's really folk religion in a lab coat. They're not praying to ancestors; they're "connecting with their heritage." The practices survive, but the metaphysical framework gets stripped away.
Like adopting a feral cat and calling it a wellness routine. The cat is still a cat, but you've rebranded the relationship.
And this is where the story gets interesting for the future. The party wants a population that's secular enough not to challenge its authority, but culturally rooted enough to support its nationalist project. They want tradition without transcendence. And whether that's actually stable in the long run is an open question. Can you have the rituals without the beliefs that originally animated them? Can you have ancestor veneration without actually believing ancestors are watching?
Because transcendence, by definition, points to something beyond the state. That's the threat. If you believe there's a moral order higher than the Communist Party, you've got a potential conflict of loyalties.
Every major religious tradition in China — Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Christianity, even folk religion — has resources for saying "there is a higher authority than the emperor." That's why the party has always been uneasy with religion, even when it's officially tolerated. You can manage the institutions, you can co-opt the leadership, but you can't fully control the idea that there's something more important than the party. And that idea, once planted, is remarkably resilient.
We haven't even touched on the Christianity story, which is its own fascinating thread. The growth of house churches, the tensions with the state-sanctioned Three-Self Church, the cross removals in Zhejiang province a few years back. That could be an entire episode on its own.
The Christianity numbers in China are notoriously hard to pin down. The official figure is about twenty-eight million, but independent estimates range as high as one hundred million when you include unregistered house churches. If the higher estimates are even close to correct, China would have the largest Christian population of any country on Earth. Let that sink in — the officially atheist state might contain more Christians than the United States.
That growth has been disproportionately in rural areas and among marginalized groups — which is exactly the kind of independent social organizing the party finds threatening. It's not just the theology; it's the network of mutual aid, the community structures, the alternative moral framework.
The party's nightmare scenario is a religious movement that provides an alternative social safety net, an alternative moral framework, and an alternative source of community identity — all things that the party claims to provide exclusively. That's why the crackdowns on unregistered churches have been so intense, and why the removal of crosses in Zhejiang between 2014 and 2016 became such an international flashpoint.
The crosses were literally too visible. They were a physical reminder that there were loyalties beyond the party. You could see them from the highway. You could see them on the skyline. And the party looked at that and thought: absolutely not.
The party couldn't tolerate that reminder being part of the skyline. Hundreds of churches had their crosses removed or their steeples demolished. Some churches were entirely torn down. The official justification was usually building code violations, but the pattern was unmistakable. It was a campaign of visual erasure — you can have your religion, but you can't mark the landscape with it.
"Zoning enforcement" as theological statement. The most passive-aggressive persecution imaginable.
That's the thing about studying religion in China — you have to read everything on two levels. The surface level is always some administrative rationale. The real level is always about power. Building codes, fire safety regulations, cultural heritage preservation — these are all real things, but they're also the vocabulary the state uses to regulate religion without admitting that's what it's doing.
To wrap the core answer: the popular image of China as a nation of atheists is wrong. The reality is a layered landscape where folk religion and ancestor veneration are widespread, organized religion persists under state control, genuine atheism is a minority position concentrated among urban elites, and the state oscillates between tolerance, co-optation, and repression depending on what it thinks it can get away with.
I'd add that this isn't static. The religious landscape in China today looks completely different from what it looked like thirty years ago, and it'll look different again thirty years from now. The one constant is that the party will try to control it, and people will keep finding ways to practice their traditions regardless. That's been the pattern for seven decades, and there's no reason to think it'll change.
The other constant is that Western categories keep failing when applied to China. "Religious versus secular," "atheist versus believer," "faith versus superstition" — these binaries just don't capture what's happening on the ground. You need a whole new vocabulary, and even then you're going to miss things.
Which is why the best data we have — the Pew surveys, the Chinese Family Panel Studies, the fieldwork by anthropologists — all point in the same direction. Most Chinese people hold beliefs and engage in practices that, by any reasonable definition, are religious or spiritual. The label "atheist" applies to a significant minority, but it's nowhere close to a majority. And the state's official atheism creates a distorting effect that makes all of this harder to see clearly from the outside. It's like trying to map a landscape while someone is constantly adjusting the fog machine.
The state's official atheism is basically the world's most elaborate "nothing to see here" sign, and behind it, four hundred million people are burning incense.
Ancestor money, and consulting fortune tellers, and visiting temples, and praying to Guan Yu for business success, and practicing feng shui, and attending underground church services, and doing all the things that humans have always done when they're trying to make sense of their place in the cosmos. The repertoire is ancient; only the political context is new.
The party can run the world's largest surveillance state, but it can't surveil the inside of someone's head. And it turns out, inside a lot of Chinese heads, there are gods and spirits and ancestors who've been there a lot longer than the Communist Party.
That's the core of it. The party won the state, but it never fully won the culture. And religion — in all its diffuse, category-defying forms — is where that incomplete victory is most visible. You can see it in the temple festivals that keep happening despite official disapproval, in the house churches that keep meeting despite raids, in the ancestor tablets that keep appearing in homes despite decades of modernization campaigns.
The next time someone says "China is an atheist country," the correct response is something like: well, it's complicated, and here's why the complications matter.
The complications matter because they tell us something about the limits of state power, even in one of the most powerful states on Earth. You can tear down temples, smash statues, re-educate clergy, surveil congregations — and seventy years later, most people still believe in something beyond the party. That's not just a religious studies footnote. That's a political fact of the first order.
It's worth noting that this isn't unique to China. The Soviet Union spent decades trying to stamp out religion, and when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Russian Orthodox Church came roaring back. State atheism has a terrible track record at actually producing atheists. It turns out you can't just decree that people stop believing things.
Albania under Enver Hoxha declared itself the world's first atheist state in 1967 — literally outlawed all religion, closed every mosque and church, made religious practice a criminal offense. Today, Albania is majority Muslim again, with a significant Christian minority. The project failed completely. And that's the thing — these aren't just policy failures; they're evidence of something deeper about what humans are. We seem to be meaning-making creatures by default.
The question "are most Chinese people atheists" is really a question about whether a state can reshape the deepest human impulses through policy and propaganda. And the answer, across multiple countries and decades, seems to be: not really. You can drive it underground, you can make it dangerous, you can stigmatize it, but you can't make it disappear.
Which is oddly encouraging, in a way. Not because any particular religion is good or bad, but because it suggests there are limits to what authoritarian states can do to the human spirit. There's a stubbornness to these practices that outlasts every campaign against them.
There's a Chekhov quote that comes to mind — something about how man will become better when you show him what he is like. The Chinese state has spent decades trying to show people what they should be like, and they've just... gone on being what they are. Burning paper money, consulting fortune tellers, whispering prayers to ancestors.
What they are, in large numbers, is practitioners of traditions that have survived dynasties, revolutions, and modernization campaigns. The party may be the latest in a long line of authorities that have tried to manage Chinese religion, but it won't be the last, and the traditions will probably outlast it too. The emperors tried to control religion. The Nationalists tried. The Maoists tried. And the temples keep getting rebuilt.
Alright, I think we've covered the landscape. To answer the prompt directly: most Chinese people are not atheists. The majority subscribe to various traditional beliefs — folk religion, ancestor veneration, Buddhism, Taoism, or some combination thereof. A significant minority are secular or atheist, concentrated in urban areas and younger generations. The state's official atheism creates a distorting effect that makes the real picture harder to see, but the data is clear once you look past the surface.
If you want to dig deeper, the Pew Research Center's "Religion in China" report is the best starting point. Yang Fenggang's work at Purdue is excellent on the folk religion numbers. Adam Yuet Chau's ethnographic work gives you the on-the-ground texture that surveys miss. And the State Department's annual International Religious Freedom report gives you the current state of repression and control, updated every year.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the Byzantine Empire, the emperor's ceremonial throne room contained a mechanical golden tree filled with artificial birds that would suddenly begin to sing, and a throne that could be raised toward the ceiling by a hidden hydraulic mechanism — all designed to convince foreign ambassadors that they were in the presence of a semi-divine being who could command nature itself. A French diplomat in Chad in the 1880s described a local chief employing a strikingly similar setup involving a concealed bellows system and stuffed birds, suggesting the Byzantine tradition of engineered awe may have diffused across trade routes into Central Africa.
...right. So the Byzantine Empire had animatronics before Disney. That's unsettling.
That was disorienting. I'm now going to be thinking about medieval hydraulic throne mechanisms for the rest of the day.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps people find the show. We'll be back next week with another prompt.
