Last year Pew Research Center released a poll surveying global attitudes of religion and its relation to morality. Unsurprisingly, “rich countries” have more people thinking that you don’t need to believe in God to have moral values or be a good person, and in poor countries more people think belief in God is necessary. But one country stood out from this pattern: China had only 14% of its people thinking belief in God as necessary for morality. None of the post-communist countries scored that low, nor did other East Asian countries like Japan or South Korea. We hear lots of stories about religion rising in China, so what gives?

China analyst Ian Johnson quickly saw what was wrong. The question that Horizonkey (which had conducted Pew’s poll for China) asked used the word shangdi for God. The word shangdi does have its roots in Chinese cosmologies that refers to a supreme being of sorts, but is now mostly associated with Protestant Christianity. Jesuit missionaries had appropriated the term when trying to spread the faith to China, but were eventually forced to ditch the term along with the rest of the Catholic Church in the Chinese rites controversy in favour of tianzhu. (doing a quick search I see that Muslims in China apparently use the term zhuzen, and even some Protestants don’t like using shangdi). If anything, he results are actually kind of surprising in showing how many Chinese apparently associate morality with Protestant Christianity.

And obviously this leaves out the majority of Chinese people who don’t fall into the Abrahamic faiths:

An alternative way of phrasing this question is found in the 2007 book Religious Experience in Contemporary China by Yao Xinzhong and Paul Badham. It is based on a study of 3,196 people, who completed a twenty-four-page survey. The authors found that 77 percent believed in moral causality—there is a long folk tradition of Baoying (报应) which holds that you reap what you sow, that consequences for moral failure are a form or divine retribution—and 44 percent agree that, “life and death depends on the will of heaven.”

How did Yao and Badham end up with results so different from the Pew survey’s? The crucial difference was that they were framed in a much broader way. One term the authors used was “heaven,” or tian (天), which literally means “sky” or “heaven” but also the idea of a supreme deity or force. It also included fo (佛) or “Buddha.” This is why their findings directly contradicted the Pew poll, which uses an Abrahamic paradigm to survey cultures with completely different religious traditions.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/mar/24/chinese-atheists-pew-gets-wrong/

To their credit, Pew realized the error they had made and excluded the results for China in updated editions of the survey. With a big mistake like that, you would think polling agencies would take a little more care when it comes to doing religious surveys on China... But no.

WIN/Gallup recently made a poll surveying how religious 65 different countries are. Not only did it show China as being the most atheistic country in the world, but only 7% of Chinese people identified as religious. But since the Chinese language(s) didn’t have a word directly equivelent to “religion” until the 19th century, the results for how religious China actually is can be kind of awkward. Again from Ian Johnson:

“‘Religion’ in China is a contested term,” Professor Yang said. “You have to look at how the questions are posed.”

WIN/Gallup asked respondents in every country to characterize themselves as “a religious person,” “not a religious person” or “a convinced atheist,” with a fourth option of “do not know/no response.” In China, the first two options used the term xinyang zongjiao, literally “a person who believes in religion.”

“Xinyang zongjiao is a very formal term,” Professor Yang said. “People may not respond the way the researchers intend.”

Robert Weller, a professor of anthropology at Boston University, said xinyang zongjiao was probably understood to refer to formal members of one of China’s five officially recognized religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism and Catholicism. Most Chinese practice an amalgam of Buddhism, Taoism and folk practices that is often described as “traditional belief” (chuantong xinyang) or simply “belief” (xinyang), avoiding the contentious term zongjiao.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/01/a-problem-of-religion-and-polling-in-china/

We can argue all day over whether or not “Chinese traditional belief” is really religious or a series of “superstitions” (and what such a distinction would actually mean) as has been done since Imperial times, but to simplify this into (Abrahamic / Christian-like) religion or atheism kind of misses the mark.

There may be other problems with these surveys (discussed in those articles), but they aren’t really /r/bad_religion material.