Chinese Folk Religion

The most consistent element across Chinese religious practice is obligation to the dead of one's own family. The dead are understood to continue, to need support, and to be able to help or harm their descendants, which makes the relationship reciprocal rather than commemorative.

The domestic form is an ancestral tablet or a photograph on a shelf or altar, receiving incense, food, tea and spirit money at set times: the death anniversary, new year, and above all Qingming in spring, when families sweep and repair graves and make offerings there. In the seventh lunar month, the Ghost Festival, offerings are made to the dead who have no descendants to feed them and are therefore dangerous, a category that explains much of the ritual concern with ghosts.

Where lineages are strong, most visibly in the southeast and in Taiwan, ancestors are also served in a lineage hall holding tablets for many generations and funding schools, temples and mutual aid from common land. This is where the tradition is hardest to separate from Confucianism, which supplied the texts and the ritual etiquette for exactly these rites, and it is one reason the boundary between the two is a scholarly convenience rather than a lived distinction.

Funerals are the point at which the traditions visibly combine. A family may engage Buddhist monks to chant for the transfer of merit, a Taoist priest for rites addressed to the bureaucracy of the other world, and a geomancer to site the grave, and see no conflict in employing all three. Paper goods (houses, cars, currency, in recent years phones), are burned to supply the dead.

Behind it lies a practical view of what the dead need: sustenance, respect, a proper place, and descendants who keep it up. Failure to provide is not merely disrespectful but risky, since a neglected ancestor may become an angry ghost.

The gods of Chinese folk religion are numerous, specialised and largely local, and many of them began as human beings. Mazu, the sea goddess whose cult spread from Fujian across the coast and the diaspora, is remembered as a girl who saved sailors; Guan Yu, honoured as a god of loyalty by soldiers, police and businessmen alike, was a general of the third century. Both received imperial titles, which is how the state historically absorbed local cults it approved of rather than banning them. Alongside these stand the earth god of a particular patch of ground, city gods, kitchen gods, gods of wealth, of examinations, of medicine, and of specific trades.

The relationship is transactional in a way that is often misread as cynical. A worshipper states a request, makes an offering, and returns to give thanks if it works, sometimes with an opera performed for the god. Divination blocks thrown on the temple floor give yes or no answers; numbered sticks shaken from a cylinder are matched to printed oracles. A god that does not deliver loses its following, and a god that does, gains one; efficacy, ling, is the working criterion.

Temples are built and run by neighbourhoods, lineages, guilds and merchant associations rather than by any church. There is no central authority, no ordination that covers the whole system, and no canon. Ritual specialists are hired: Taoist priests for major offering rites, Buddhist clergy for merit, spirit mediums, feng shui practitioners and diviners as needed.

Festivals are the visible core, the god's birthday procession, the incense-dividing pilgrimages that link daughter temples to a mother temple, lion and dragon dances, opera, firecrackers, feasting. These are simultaneously religious events, community organisation and local economy, and in Taiwan the largest Mazu pilgrimages mobilise hundreds of thousands of people over several days.

Chinese folk religion has been under attack from reformers, of several political persuasions, for more than a century, and its present condition cannot be understood without that.

Late Qing and Republican modernisers drew a line between religion, which was tolerable, and superstition, which was not, and local cult fell on the wrong side of it. Campaigns from the 1900s onward seized temple property and converted buildings into schools. The People's Republic continued in the same direction with more force, and the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976 targeted temples, images, ritual texts and lineage genealogies as part of the Four Olds. Most assessments hold that the great majority of temples on the mainland were destroyed or put to other uses in those years, and specialists were persecuted.

The revival after 1978 was fast and largely unofficial. Temples were rebuilt from village funds and from remittances by relatives in Taiwan, Southeast Asia and the West, often on their original sites and from surviving memory. Because the state recognises five religions and folk religion is not among them, a very large number of these temples occupy an ambiguous position: unregistered, tolerated in practice, sometimes reclassified as Taoist, sometimes promoted as intangible cultural heritage for tourism, and sometimes demolished. Enforcement varies by province and by year.

This is the direct reason adherent figures should be distrusted. There is no membership, no conversion, and no exclusivity: the same person may make offerings at a temple, keep ancestral rites, consult a Buddhist monk and describe themselves on a form as having no religion, because in Chinese usage "having a religion" implies a formal affiliation they do not have. Estimates of Chinese folk religionists accordingly range from a few hundred million to most of the population depending on the question asked. The honest statement is that the practices are extremely widespread and that the number of people they belong to is not a well-defined quantity.