Katharina Wenzel-Teuber
Translated by David Streit SVD
Have you ever felt that the spirit of an ancestor has come to visit you in a dream? Would you describe yourself as a born-again or evangelical Christian? Do you believe in miracles? These and many other interesting questions were asked to study participants in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam in a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. The non-governmental polling institute based in Washington, D.C., published the results of this survey in 2024. The 111-page report is titled “Religion and Spirituality in East Asian Societies” (Pew Research Center 2024). It will be presented at the beginning of this year’s statistical update. The focus will be on the results for Hong Kong and Taiwan. The data from the five locations studied also offer an interesting comparison with Mainland China. Unlike there, Pew was able to survey people in Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and even communist Vietnam using its own questionnaires. In 2023, Pew had already published a detailed report on Mainland China entitled “Measuring Religion in China” (Pew Research Center 2023), in which, as Pew was not allowed to conduct its own opinion poll in China, it evaluated publicly available data from large surveys conducted by Chinese institutes.
The statistical update also includes figures on the five major religions in Mainland China. The previously known basic data remains unchanged for Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, and the Protestant churches; new figures for the Catholic Church are available from 2024.
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Statistics on Religions and Churches in East Asia and in the People’s Republic of China – Update for the Year 2024
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