Taoism and Chinese Religion

Taoism, or Daoism, takes its name from the dao, the “way,” and its first text from the Laozi, also called the Daodejing. Britannica gives the traditional date for Laozi as the 6th century BCE; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says the text “probably had reached a relatively stable form” by the middle of the 3rd century BCE. Taoism is one of five religions China’s government recognizes, with Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism, according to Pew’s 2023 report on religion in China.

Texts, schools and the canon

The oldest surviving copies of the Laozi are bamboo slips from a tomb at Guodian dated to about 300 BCE, by the dating Russell Kirkland reports; silk copies came from the Mawangdui tomb closed in 168 BCE. By the Celestial Masters’ own account, as the University of Colorado Boulder reports it, Lord Lao established their covenant in 142 CE. The Quanzhen school was founded in 1163 and the Zhengtong Daoist canon published in 1445. During the Cultural Revolution, 1966–76, “all religious activities were banned,” in the words of Pew’s history of state policy (Exhibit 31).

Counting religion in China

Taoism shows how much a religious count depends on the question. In the 2018 Chinese General Social Survey fewer than 0.5% of adults named Taoism as their religion and 10% named any religion; in the China Family Panel Studies, 18% said they believe in Taoist deities, 33% in the Buddha or a bodhisattva and 47% in fengshui, which Pew notes “has roots in Taoism.” In the 2018 Chinese General Social Survey, three-quarters had visited a family gravesite in the past year (Exhibit 32). Pew explains the gap by the Chinese word for religion, zongjiao: the survey question using it, the report says, “is understood in China to measure formal commitment to an organized religion or value system.”

The number of officially registered Taoist temples tripled between 2009 and 2018, to 9,000, while Buddhist temples rose by about 68%, to 33,500; Taoist clergy fell by about 20% over the period, to 40,000, according to figures from China’s State Council Information Office that Pew reports (Exhibit 33).

A century of folk religion

Gordon-Conwell’s World Christian Database counts Chinese folk-religionists as a separate group. Its series falls from 380 million in 1900 to 238 million in 1970 and rises to 448 million in 2025, with a projected decline to 393 million by 2050 (Exhibit 34). Pew does not report the group separately; its 2025 study places Daoists and folk religions within “other religions.”

Taiwan

Taiwan is the one place in Pew’s 201 where that “other religions” category is a majority, 51.7% in 2020, which Pew attributes to large numbers of Daoists and followers of folk religions (Exhibit 35).