A recently published academic paper may imply that Christianity in China has stopped growing.
“In 19 nationally representative surveys conducted since the early 2000s, the authors find no clear evidence that Christianity continues to grow as a share of China’s population,” said an academic paper titled "The Growth of Christianity in China May Have Come to an End."
Co-authored by Conrad Hackett, associate director of research and a senior demographer at the Pew Research Center, and Yunping Tong, a research associate at the Pew Research Center specializing in international religious demography, the article is an expanded version of an earlier report “Measuring Religion in China” published by Pew Research Center on August 30, 2023, which concludes that there is no evidence that Christianity in China is growing after 2010.
Released in Sage Journal on January 10, the paper first contrasts evidence for claims that "Christianity in China is still expanding in the twenty-first century" with the results from two decades of survey data.
“Some influential scholars have even said that China is on track to have a Christian majority by midcentury." The authors wrote that "Stark and Wang (2015) claimed that Christianity in China may grow at a 7 percent annual rate in the decades to come, resulting in about 580 million Chinese Christians in 2040" and "Fenggang Yang (2016) suggested that the number of Protestant Christians will grow at an annual rate of 7 percent to 10 percent, making up a majority of the country by 2050.”
“However, we find that nationally representative surveys, such as the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), do not provide any clear evidence that Christianity in China is growing. The share of self-identified Christians varies modestly between surveys but has hovered around 2 percent in recent years.”
The paper points out that many discussions that "support the narrative of rapid Christian growth" in recent decades often "cite government statistics, church membership reports, linear projections of Christian growth, and ethnographic studies," but few rely on "nationally representative surveys," which "only became publicly available in the 2010s."
Moreover, the paper indicates that "Christian identification is more common among seniors than among young adults" rather than "Christianity is rising in popularity among young Chinese."
The article states that some surveys, "based on small nonrepresentative samples," suggest that "younger people were more likely than their elders to identify as Christian," but nationally representative surveys show the opposite. According to the data from the 2010 CGSS, "Lu and Zhang (2016) showed that Christian identification is more common among older and rural Chinese (based on either their type of household registration or place of residence), and self-identified Christians tend to have fewer years of formal schooling than the average population.”
In regards to questioning the reliability of those surveys, the paper finds no evidence that "Christians were more likely than others to decline to participate in recent surveys" and "the government’s tightened control over religion since President Xi Jinping came to power has had little impact on survey responses in recent years."
"China’s Christian population seems to be plateauing," the paper summarizes. "The government’s scrutiny and crackdown on unregistered Christian activity in recent years may have prevented some Chinese people from becoming or remaining Christian. The official ban on religious education and activity for children, for example, may be inhibiting the transmission of Christian identity to the next generation, as evidenced by the fact that younger cohorts, those born in the 1980s and later, are less likely to identify as Christian in the CGSS."
Meanwhile, the paper acknowledges its limitations due to the "lack of repeated measures of Christian belief and practice in surveys" and its descriptive approach. "This study is not the first to wrestle with the complexities of measuring religion in China and understanding Christian trends. But we aim for this study to be the most thorough and comprehensive investigation of what the best available data reveals about the trajectory of China’s Christian population."
"The fate of Christianity in China is consequential for our understanding of both religion in China and of Christianity in a global context. Given the vast population of China, any significant shifts could influence the global trajectory of Christianity."
