Statistics on Religions and Churches in the People’s Republic of China – Update for the Year 2023

Katharina Wenzel-Teuber
In this year’s statistical update, we are once again dealing with the discussion about “denomination-based” versus “deity-based” questioning methods when collecting data on the religious situation of the Chinese population. A report from the Pew Research Center is presented which analyzes the various methods used by the large scientific social surveys in China to measure religion and their results. In a study on the freely combined “mix-match” belief in Jesus Christ, two Chinese researchers also discuss the pros and cons of the two methods of questioning. Two sociologists have investigated whether a difference of religion between spouses affects marital satisfaction and whether there are differences between the sexes. There are new data from the 7th Chinese census of 2020 on the country’s traditionally Muslim ethnic groups. For the Catholic Church in China, far more ordinations of priests were recorded in 2023 than in the pandemic-hit year of 2022. At the end of the statistical update, we present a Catholic app that uses an interactive map to find churches throughout China.

Pew Research Center: Measuring Religion in China

In August 2023, the Pew Research Center published a 160-page report on “Measuring Religion in China.” The non-governmental institute based in Washington, D.C., conducts opinion research on many topics in the United States and around the world. However, since the Pew Research Center, like other foreign institutes, was not allowed to conduct its own opinion poll in China, it chose the approach of analyzing scientific surveys conducted in China itself.
In the “Methods” chapter, the Pew Research Center (here after “Pew”) describes in detail the Chinese surveys evaluated and their procedures. An appendix lists the religion-related questionnaires in Chinese and English that the various Chinese surveys have used over the years. This apparatus makes the Pew report very interesting for anyone who wants to better understand religion-related demographic research in China.
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