Key Findings

• Members of China’s urban middle class — long assumed to be the most secular segment of Chinese society — are turning to religion and spirituality in greater numbers. Rejecting officially sanctioned religious institutions and state-promoted ideology, many urbanites are seeking alternatives considered less tainted by party-state interference.
• Independent Christian churches, Tibetan Buddhist teachers, and New Age workshops are attracting increasing numbers of affluent, well-educated urban Chinese looking for authentic spiritual experiences and a sense of community, some of whom mix aspects of different religions to create their own personal spiritual practices.
• Growing interest in religious communities at the margins of state control reflects the failure of official ideology to provide spiritual comfort and the party-state’s lack of moral authority. Attempts by Beijing to co-opt religious institutions through “Sinicization” have undermined their spiritual authority.
• “Boss Christians” fund their own churches to gain social status and legitimize their wealth, while a growing number of intellectuals see Christian values as a model for reforming China’s government and society.
• Members of China’s elite who convert to Tibetan Buddhism say they value its purity and intellectually rigorous philosophy, which they contrast to the corrupted, diluted teachings of Han Chinese Buddhism. 

Guided by Marxist theory, China’s leaders once believed that religion would wither as the country became more educated, scientifically advanced, and economically developed. However, many policies meant to hasten modernization have created the very conditions for religion to flourish. As rapid economic development allowed urbanites to become more materially comfortable, many began searching for deeper forms of meaning, guidance, and solace in times of personal or financial crisis. Beijing has attempted to meet these spiritual demands with nationalism and Confucianism-Leninism, but its attempts to win over its most important constituency — the urban middle class — are losing out to other forms of faith. Educated, affluent Chinese have increasingly sought sources of spiritual and religious authority at the margins of party control and influence, including Protestant Christianity, Tibetan Buddhism, and various New Age–inspired forms of spirituality that mix religious concepts with self-help.

As China’s cities have become more atomized and social trust has eroded, many affluent Chinese are drawn to the sense of community provided by faith-based groups.1 While worshippers can still be found at state-administered temples and churches, unofficial and semi-legal forms of religious activity have attracted the most affluent and well-educated. Despite the heavy-handed crackdown on unsanctioned religious sites and practices under Xi Jinping, many Chinese perceive alternative spiritual venues — house churches, dharma centers, and weekend seminars — as offering the most authentic, undiluted, and potent spiritual teachings. Attempts by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to promote state-sanctioned religious institutions and leaders and demonize those deemed politically unreliable have backfired, pushing spiritual seekers toward the forms of faith that Beijing finds most politically concerning. 

The Middle Class Finds God

At the start of the reform-and-opening period, the party-state rapidly dismantled the organizational and ideological supports for Maoism, which many scholars view as having functioned as a de facto religion for much of the socialist period.2 The sudden abandonment of Communist utopianism created a spiritual void in Chinese society. Rural-to-urban migration and upward social mobility exacerbated this void by dismantling many of the traditional social networks, rituals, and modes of belief that once oriented people in rural Chinese villages. 

The lives of Chinese people in all social strata improved rapidly in material terms throughout the post-Mao period, fueling forms of religious and cultural revival in many regions. However, intellectuals, along with some ordinary Chinese, began to speak of a moral crisis, pointing to rampant corruption, food safety scandals, unethical business practices, and a general loss of trust. High-profile incidents such as the death of Wang Yue, an injured child ignored by passersby, and the Sanlu milk tragedy were cited as evidence of a society unmoored from moral principles and beliefs.3

In the 1980s and 1990s, religious practice primarily attracted groups left behind by the transformations brought about by economic liberalization. Gareth Fisher’s study, From Comrades to Bodhisattvas, examined lay Buddhist preachers in Beijing in the early 2000s who found their most eager audience in laid-off factory workers angry about their loss of status and alienated by the calculated, transactional nature of interpersonal relations during the reform era.4 These Buddhist followers espoused a social order in which they were morally superior to money-obsessed, career-striving, middle-class Beijingers.

David Palmer’s study of the Qigong craze in the 1980s and 1990s, Qigong Fever, describes a similar demographic of working-class, unemployed, and retired urbanites drawn to the instant community and promised health benefits of Qigong teachings and exercises.5 The largest sect to emerge from the craze, Falun Gong, explicitly rejected dominant social norms based on wealth in favor of the values of “truth, benevolence, and forbearance.”6 It sought to give meaning to practitioners’ suffering in the present by interpreting it as paying karmic debt and offered a path to spiritual transcendence that led to a state far superior to the material success valued by ordinary people.

Similarly, in the first few decades of reform and opening, Christianity grew most rapidly in underdeveloped rural areas, attracting those who felt left behind by marketization. Congregations skewed older and were predominantly women.7 Some of the sects to emerge in rural communities, such as the infamous Church of Almighty God (Quannengshen), promoted the millenarian and politically charged message that the imminent coming of Christ would cure the decadence of Chinese society.8

By the end of the 1990s, however, Christianity began making inroads in urban areas, where congregations saw an influx of young, well-educated converts. Fenggang Yang argues that this demographic associated Christianity with the cosmopolitan West and saw it as embodying “progressive, liberating, modern, and universal” values.9 While Protestant churches under the umbrella of the state-controlled Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) saw their congregations grow, the fastest expansion occurred in unregistered “house churches” (jiating jiaohui).10

In the 2000s, Christianity rapidly spread among rights lawyers, professionals, and artists, a trend that persists to the present.11 The term “cultural Christians” emerged to characterize the growing numbers of intellectuals who are attracted to Christian ethics as a model for reforming China’s government and society. Those captured by this term vary widely in their expressions of faith, with some not attending church services or affiliating with a congregation but feeling guided and empowered by Christian values.

Many well-educated, middle-class Chinese convert to Christianity while studying or working abroad, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom. Overseas Chinese Christian churches deliberately target this group with campus outreach programs and community-building events. While some gradually lose their faith after returning home, others have set up special “overseas returnee churches” (haigui jiaohui) or have been explicitly trained to spread the gospel in China.12 In general, middle-class worshippers associate unofficial urban churches with more theologically rigorous teachings and better-trained pastors compared to TSPM churches and rural house churches.

“Boss Christians” in “China’s Jerusalem”

In the 1990s, a distinctive Christian subculture emerged among successful entrepreneurs in the city of Wenzhou, a global manufacturing hub, which became known as “China’s Jerusalem” due to its numerous churches and sizable Christian population. Wealthy Wenzhou businessmen donated millions of RMB toward the construction of large, Western-style churches, with each seeking to outdo the other in the size of the building and the congregation. Most of these entrepreneurs were of humble, rural origin and came to view their business success as a sign of God’s grace.13 Supporting church-building and Christian evangelization served an important role in establishing their newly acquired social status, legitimizing their wealth, and building social connections with other Christian entrepreneurs.

In addition, many Christian business owners incorporated Christian teachings into their management practices by encouraging workers to attend Bible study or by simply preaching the gospel at company meetings.14 Wenzhou congregations are also tightly linked to Wenzhou community churches in Italy, Spain, and France, sites of large Wenzhouese immigrant communities that run manufacturing and import businesses throughout southern Europe.

Due to their close ties to local officials, boss Christian churches occupy a gray area between the officially sanctioned Protestant churches and unregistered house churches, a status that facilitated their rapid expansion and high degree of visibility until the Xi era. In 2015, many Wenzhou churches had their large crosses forcibly removed under orders from the central government, and several were demolished. Most, however, seem to have survived the more restrictive environment under Xi but have significantly scaled down both their in-person and online activities. Elsewhere, prominent unofficial churches, such as the Early Rain Church in Chengdu, have been shut down and had their pastors imprisoned.

The 300,000 “Free-Range Rinpoches” of Chaoyang

In 2015, a video circulated online of British-Chinese actor Zhang Tielin, famous for playing the Qianlong emperor on a TV series, being ordained as a “reincarnated lama” at a ceremony in the large banquet hall of a Hong Kong hotel. The video quickly went viral, prompting anger from Tibetans and comments ridiculing the gullibility of wealthy, spiritually hungry Chinese. Netizens began researching the background of the supposed “lama” who had recognized Zhang Tielin as a reincarnation, and he turned out to be a Hong Kong businessman who possessed a fake certificate from a Tibetan monastery attesting to his own “reincarnated” status. This scandal prompted a response from the chairman of the central Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee, who warned of the dangers posed by fake “living Buddhas” (i.e., reincarnated lamas) who seduce followers and cheat them of money. In response, the National Religious Affairs Administration set up an online database of government-authorized reincarnated lamas where users could ostensibly check to see if their guru was real.

The Zhang Tielin scandal drew public attention to a growing fad among China’s elite — the rising popularity of Tibetan Buddhism and the financial patronage of Tibetan lamas, some of whom are treated by wealthy Chinese as personal spiritual and financial advisors. Around this time, the phrase “300,000 free-range Rinpoches of Chaoyang” (Chaoyangqu sanshiwan sanyang Renboqie) circulated in various forms to satirize the sudden appearance of numerous Tibetan monks, some with nonmonastic backgrounds, offering teachings and soliciting donations among the well-heeled residents of Beijing’s Chaoyang district.15 This fad followed similar surges of interest in Tibetan Buddhism in Taiwan and Hong Kong beginning in the late 1990s. Several well-known Chinese celebrities became devotees, including the singer Faye Wong, martial arts film star Jet Li, and the mainland-based actor Kun Chen. The popularity of Tibetan Buddhism among celebrities helped establish it as a form of faith appropriate for China’s economic and cultural elite.

In 1980, Khenpo Jigme Punsok established a small Buddhist encampment, Larung Gar, in a sparsely populated valley in western Sichuan Province. This became the most significant institution for the diffusion of Tibetan Buddhism to urban China.16 By the early 2000s, it had grown into what many believed to be the largest Buddhist academy in the world, with over 10,000 monks, nuns, and lay practitioners in residence, including around 2,000 Han Chinese.

The government periodically closes Larung Gar to outsiders and has sought to restrict the number of people residing there, but it remains a popular destination for Chinese studying Buddhism as well as tourists who are spiritually curious. Buddhist study groups organized around the Larung Gar curriculum were common in urban areas in the 2010s before a 2018 crackdown forced most to disband or move underground. These groups, combined with the growing presence of Tibetan monks in major Chinese cities and on social media, fueled a surge in Buddhist conversion in the 2010s.

In 2014, after several years spent researching wealthy entrepreneurs in urban China, I began an ethnographic study of Han Chinese followers of Tibetan Buddhism in Chengdu, an important locus for this phenomenon due to the large numbers of Tibetan religious figures residing in the city. I was drawn to the topic by accounts from previous research contacts of growing numbers of their wealthy friends and business associates becoming disciples of prominent Tibetan monks. At the height of the anticorruption drive in 2013, real estate entrepreneurs and business owners were showing up at a friend’s car dealership to purchase luxury SUVs for Tibetan monks in the hope that their offerings might offer some cosmic protection during the campaign.

Most of my interviewees’ conversions to Buddhism were precipitated by a life crisis — divorce, financial trouble, or the death of a loved one. They typically described themselves as lacking conceptual or therapeutic tools for making sense of and managing their suffering and misfortune before finding Buddhism. In my study, interviewees described being drawn to Tibetan Buddhism over other faiths due to the purity and potency of its teachings along with the supportive community they found among fellow devotees. They viewed Chinese Buddhist institutions as corrupt and criticized Chinese temples for being overly commercialized and producing “low quality” monks. Middle-class Buddhist devotees also perceived the esoteric philosophy and techniques of Tibetan Buddhism as intellectually more rigorous than the “low class” sutra recitation practiced by elderly women at Chinese temples.

In the 2000s, travel to Tibet became popular among China’s middle-class urbanites in search of pristine landscapes and clean air. There, they often had their first direct encounter with Tibetan Buddhism, witnessing pilgrims engaged in repeated prostrations in front of temples and other holy sites. Influenced by the impressions they gathered as tourists, my interviewees described Tibetans as living happy lives free from the stresses of middle-class Chinese life and explained that they hoped to emulate Tibetans’ worry-free state through Buddhist study. They believed that Tibetan monks were immune from the corrupting influence of China’s cutthroat competitive society and thus possessed a moral authority superior to that of officially sanctioned Chinese religious institutions. Some even went as far as expressing a desire to be reborn as a Tibetan in their next life.

New Age with Chinese Characteristics

While some middle-class Chinese identify as Christian or Buddhist, others might best be classified as spiritual seekers sampling different religious traditions, sometimes settling on one but at other times combining multiple faiths. Several in my study began as Christians before discovering Tibetan Buddhism, and a few abandoned Tibetan Buddhism to pursue intensive study of Confucianism, which they viewed as part of rediscovering their own cultural heritage. Others mixed together aspects of Buddhism, Daoism, Qigong, Confucianism, and Christianity, creating their own syncretic spiritual practices.

The rise of interest in spiritual pursuits overlaps with the boom in psychotherapy: both attract a similar demographic of young, predominantly female, urban professionals.17 Some of the Tibetan monks with the largest social media followings package their teachings as therapy and offer explicit advice about the career, relationship, and family struggles faced by middle-class Chinese. In my own research, I witnessed urbanites turning to Tibetan monks for guidance with their most vexing personal problems.

In addition to these hybrid practices, spiritual entrepreneurs have developed a variety of self-help courses that combine Buddhism with Qigong, traditional forms of health cultivation (yangsheng), Hinduism, and Western New Age techniques imported into China via Taiwan and Hong Kong. They promise both to heal the physical and mental suffering caused by intense market competition and to provide special techniques for winning that very competition. Anna Iskra’s study of the Body Heart Soul movement describes how participants are encouraged to verbalize their suffering and release their pent-up feelings through “emotional release sessions” in which they “scream, cry, and laugh.”18 The ultimate goal, however, is not simply therapeutic but rather to learn to manage one’s self and emotions to channel energy toward financial success. Unlike Buddhist teachers who solicit donations indirectly, these courses are modeled on Western self-help seminars and typically operate as businesses. The organizers charge fees for attendance, and advancing through the program can be expensive.

China’s Youth Hope for Divine Intervention in the Job Market

The desperation of unemployed and underemployed youth was captured in a 2023 Chinese internet meme: “Between going to work and advancing, young people are choosing to burn incense” (Nianqingren zai shangban yu shangjin zhijian xuanze shangxiang). While this poked fun at the frustrated exam takers and job seekers resorting to temple offerings to give them a leg up in China’s hypercompetitive society, it also captured a real phenomenon: a huge upsurge in educated, urban youth visiting temples to burn incense, pray, and purchase consecrated bracelets and amulets.

However, as I found in my research, this results-oriented, practical engagement with religion can evolve over time into a sincere religious faith that leads believers to question their worldly pursuits and, in some cases, reorient them entirely. More than a few of those young temple-goers are likely to become practicing Buddhists. Many young urbanites who have already chosen to opt out of the competition by “lying flat” (tangping) have gathered inspiration and courage from religious ideals that reject the mainstream values of materialism and career success.

Filling the Moral Vacuum

Under Xi, the CCP’s management of religious activity has become stricter and more intrusive, leading to crackdowns on groups without official sanction. Beijing has also pushed the “Sinicization” of religion, with more patriotic education for clergy and the inclusion of political messages in religious activities. While religions perceived as part of traditional Chinese culture — Chinese Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism — have received state support under Xi, Beijing has tightened its leash on religious activities perceived to have “foreign” linkages, such as Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism, and engaged in a brutal suppression of Islam.

Beijing has also revived efforts to cultivate faith in the CCP and promote its ideology through projects such as the “Study the Great Nation” (Xuexi Qiangguo) app. However, such efforts are much more challenging now than they were during the Mao era. Despite tight media controls, Chinese citizens are inordinately more well-educated, cosmopolitan, and media-savvy than a generation ago. Moreover, the distance is greater than ever between the state’s abstract, stilted exhortations and the dilemmas people face in their everyday lives. State-promoted ideologies have little to offer people in their daily struggles, from the mundane to the existential.

The fact that the middle class has been drawn to spiritual traditions perceived to be the least tainted by party-state interference, such as Christianity and Tibetan Buddhism, is telling. Under Xi, the CCP’s attempts to co-opt official religious institutions and steer their teachings to promote patriotism have undermined their credibility. Even more concerning to Beijing, trends in middle-class spirituality reflect a loss of the party-state’s moral authority. Facing a stagnating economy, demographic challenges, and a less hospitable international order, Beijing will increasingly seek to pull ideological levers to coax its citizens to have more children, eat bitterness for the sake of the motherland, and shun nontraditional “foreign” values. However, molding the beliefs and values of affluent, educated urbanites will prove increasingly challenging. Given the option, growing numbers of China’s middle class would rather turn to the teachings of Christ or the Buddha for guidance and spiritual sustenance. 

Endnotes

• 1

  The middle class’s turn to religion is distinct from the post-Mao resurgence of traditional culture that followed the Cultural Revolution, when many Chinese people revived local religious practices. Most of the urban middle class was raised in secular households, and they are turning to faiths foreign to their own familial or community traditions.

• 2

  More specifically, Maoism offered Chinese citizens across all social strata common rituals of worship, sacred texts, techniques for examining and remolding one’s self, and a transcendent ethical guide for how to evaluate and treat others based on their assigned class backgrounds. See Richard Madsen, “Secularism, Religious Change, and Social Conflict in Asia,” in Rethinking Secularism, ed. Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Johnathan Van Antwerpen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

• 3

  The CCP has at times echoed this sentiment, suggesting that “loss of faith” was responsible for the widespread corruption during the Jiang and Hu eras.

• 4

  Gareth Fisher, From Comrades to Bodhisattvas: Moral Dimensions of Lay Buddhist Practice in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014).

• 5

  David Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

• 6

  David Palmer, “Modernity and Millennialism in China: Qigong and the Birth of Falun Gong,” Asian Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2003): 101.

• 7

  R.G. Tiedemann, “Protestant Christianities in Contemporary China,” in Handbook on Religion in China, ed. Stephan Feuchtwang (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2020), 380.

• 8

  Richard Madsen, “Epilogue. Multiple Sinicizations of Multiple Christianities,” in Sinicizing Christianity, ed. Yangwen Zheng (Boston: Brill, 2010), 245.

• 9

  Fenggang Yang, “Lost in the Market, Saved at McDonald’s: Conversion to Christianity in Urban China,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 44, no. 4 (2005): 425.

• 10

  The term “house church” is somewhat of a misnomer, as some grew large enough by the 2010s to purchase or lease meeting spaces in urban office buildings.

• 11

  Fenggang Yang, “Christianity’s Growth in China and Its Contribution to Freedoms,” Georgetown University, Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, October 31, 2017, https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/christianity-s-growth-in-china-and-its-contributions-to-freedoms. 

• 12

  Yuqin Huang, “Taking Jesus Back to China: New Gospel Agents in Shanghai,” in Zheng, Sinicizing Christianity, 84.

• 13

  Nanlai Cao, Constructing China’s Jerusalem: Christians, Power, and Place in Contemporary Wenzhou (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).

• 14

  Cao, Constructing China’s Jerusalem, 66.

• 15

  This phrase is part of a joke: “There are only 1,000 rinpoches in the world, but you can find 300,000 of them in Chaoyang.”

• 16

  For a history of Khenpo Jigme Punsok and the founding of Larung Gar, see David Germano, “Remembering the Dismembered Body of Tibet: The Contemporary Ter Movement in the PRC,” in Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet: Religious Revival and Cultural Identity, ed. Melvyn C. Goldstein and Matthew T. Kapstein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 53–94; and Antonio Terrone, “Khenpo Jigme Puntsok,” Treasury of Lives, October 2013, http://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Khenpo-Jigme-Puntsok/10457.

• 17

  I estimate that 70% of the participants in the Buddhist rituals and teachings I attended were women—similar demographics are commonly given for urban Christian gatherings. While the reasons spirituality and psychotherapy have disproportionately attracted women are too complex to adequately address here, it is important to point out that, in addition to their therapeutic aspects, they provide women with a language of critique and a means of opting out of the normative trajectories of marriage and motherhood. 

• 18

  Anna Iskra, Fabian Winiger, and David A. Palmer, “Remaking the Self: Spirituality, Civilization, and the Chinese Quest for the Good Life in the Reform Era,” in Feuchtwang, Handbook on Religion in China, 67.