Book Review

China’s growing faiths

Religious Experience in Contemporary China

Like a tree in spring, religion in China has put forth many shoots since the thaw after Mao's death  in 1976. One illustration of this was a study published by Stanford University Press in 1996 which estimated that there were between 20 million and 30 million Christians, and possibly more, in the world's most populous country; the figure is approximately 10 times that at the time of the Communist Revolution in 1949. Revival of belief has also touched Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Islam and Chinese folk religions.

Having striven to marginalise faith in the supernatural, the Communist Party has had to accept that it is here to stay. Indeed, it has tried to co-opt it as a force for social stability in the attempt to realise President Hu Jintao's goal of "a harmonious society". That recognition of religion's staying power does not, however, equate with freedom of practice. The Party maintains the "patriotic" associations which monitor the main faiths and cut believers off from their overseas counterparts, a restriction which bears particularly hard on Protestants and Roman Catholics.

Religion will be tolerated if it remains within these official bounds but it continues to be persecuted outside them, whether it be the underground Churches, Tibet's Buddhist monks, dissident Muslims in the western provinces or practitioners of Falun Gong, a form of meditation with similarities to Buddhist and Daoist practices. The Confucian virtues of propriety, righteousness, loyalty and filial piety can be harnessed by the Party to maintain its own political monopoly. Anything which challenges that will be suppressed.

Religious Experience in Contemporary China does not deal with the political implications of faith in the supernatural. It also excludes consideration of Islam and Falun Gong. Its focus, rather, is on what Confucianists, Buddhists, Daoists, Christians and folk religionists in the Han heartland believe. The method used is painstakingly detailed. Between 2004 and 2006 a total of 3,196 randomly chosen people in 10 provinces were interviewed by 110 research assistants armed with a 24-page questionnaire. The fieldwork was led by Xinzhong Yao and Paul Badham of the University of Wales, Lampeter, and funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

Its main findings are the syncretic nature of Chinese belief, and a separation between religious identity and religious belief and practice. Take, for example, Buddhism, the most popular religion in China. Of those interviewed, 4.4 per cent claimed to be Buddhists. But 27.4 per cent said they prayed to Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, and 77.9 per cent were inclined to affirm the Buddhist concept of causal retribution and the doctrine of karma.

Those claiming to be Christians represented 2.8 per cent of the respondents but 5 per cent said they had been to a Christian service in the past year and 11 per cent thought they should follow the teaching of the Christian God. "One legacy of the decades of anti-religious pressure", the researchers write, "is that few Chinese think of themselves as being religious, and even less would associate themselves with a particular religion."

The chapter on Christianity, written by Rong Qu of Ningbo University, notes the indigenisation of the Protestant and Catholic Churches following the break with their Western counterparts at the Revolution. After the Buddhists, Christians, overwhelmingly Protestant, are the largest group to lay claim to a religious faith. They are distinctive for their gender distribution (three-quarters of them are women), for being concentrated in rural areas and for having a lower educational level than the national average. Since the 1980s the number of adherents has increased rapidly.

The survey found that a higher proportion of Christians pray than do Buddhists and Daoists and that their prayer is much more exclusively directed, although a quarter said that they had worshipped non-Christian deities. The syncretism which has characterised religious life in China has influenced Christianity, whether in its acceptance of indigenous terms or the setting up of shrines in the home. However, while it provides a powerful attraction to other religions, Christianity tends to keep its distance from them.

In an essay on urban followers of Buddhism, Bo Hong, of the Chinese Association for Culture Construction in Beijing, describes a mixture of institutional and diffused belief, with the latter infiltrating the former to the extent that membership of Buddhist organisations or visits to temples have given ground to individual commitment and spiritual cultivation. Urban Buddhism has become a personalised religion which takes in beliefs from other religious and non-religious traditions. And its utilitarian orientation, whereby it is seen as a means of becoming rich, has blurred the lines between it and Communism. "Thus, Buddhism that in its original form taught the need to seek a wisdom transcending worries about this life, has become a secular religion in which most participants or followers are motivated by the hope for obtaining spiritual blessings leading to personal and material benefits," Hong concludes.

The last chapter in the book, by Professor Badham, makes an unexpected comparison between belief in Britain and China. At first sight there is a great difference: in the 2001 census, 72 per cent of the British population claimed to be Christian, while only 8.7 per cent of Chinese respondents to the University of Wales survey said they were religious. Look a little deeper, however, and similarities emerge. The Chinese figure approximates to that (10 per cent) for those Britons who attend church at least every week. According to Badham, this discrepancy can be explained by cultural factors. Official atheism has led modern Chinese to believe that it is not appropriate to call themselves religious, whereas in Britain there is still nostalgia for a corporate Christian identity. The British view Christianity as part of their national identity. In China, by contrast, nationality and religion have never been linked.

Badham notes that the revival of religion in China is accompanied by further secularisation in Britain. A 2007 survey of religious belief and practice found that 53 per cent claimed to be Christian, well down on the 2001 census level, and that 39 per cent said they had no religion (cf. 16 per cent in 2001). China may well now be a more religious country than Britain.

Appendices reprint the questionnaire put to the Chinese respondents, followed by a bibliography and a glossary of Chinese terms. That such a meticulous study is marred by several literals, including the interesting hybrid "Protestant Catholicism", is a pity. This is a groundbreaking survey which should stimulate further research into the fascinating phenomenon of religious belief in post-revolutionary China.

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