Fenggang Yang

The Center on Religion and Chinese Society is funded by the Templeton Foundation, an American organization accused of promoting Christian-biased research in the field of religious studies. Fenggang Yang was granted $9.5 million by the Templeton Foundation to develop his projects. His statistics and projections about Christianity in China have been disputed by authorities in China and scholars including Shen Guiping. In 2014 he claimed that “China will be home to the world’s largest Christian congregation by 2030”, despite in 2010 he said that “Christians remain a small minority in China today”, based on a survey which found that they were “33 million, much less than most of the popular speculations”. Surveys conducted in 2014 by Chinese research institutes found a similar number of Christians, or around 2% of the population. The 2014 claim was, as proclaimed by Yang himself, “based on the Pew Research Center’s report of Global Christianity”, another project backed by the Templeton Foundation.

In 2010, Yang further articulates a theory of “shortage economy,” arguing that when religious supply was suppressed by the state, religious demand was reduced to some extent, but also expressed as forced substitution, semi-forced substitution, searching for alternatives, and searching for religion. He claims that he borrows the shortage economic concepts by economist Janos Kornai, but Kornai’s economics focus on the supply-side. In contrast, Yang’s theory focus on the demand side, claiming that the shortage economy of religion explains the churning of alternative spiritualities as well as conventional religions in Communist China. The supply-side theorists, such as sociologists Rodney Stark and Roger Finke, and economist Lawrence Iannoccone, strongly disagree on this theory.

In 2006, Yang advanced the theory that, under heavy regulation, various religions are divided into three “markets”: a “red market” of recognized religions, including the five officially approved religions of Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestant Christianity, a “gray market” of unrecognized and legally undefined religions, including folk religions and others, and a “black market” of illegal religions, including what the Chinese government has called xiejiao (evil cults). According to him, the more the red market is controlled and co-opted by the state, the more this leads to the growth of the black and the gray markets.

The Chinese scholar Mou Zhongjian advanced an alternative paradigm to that of the “religious market”, actually preceding the latter in time. In 2006, Mou put forward the model of “religious ecology” for the study of religion in China, which has been welcomed ad developed by a number of other scholars, including Chen Xiaoyi and Li Xiangping. Mou’s theory is based upon Julian Steward’s idea of multilinear evolution and views Chinese religions as a self-contained and internally structured “social life system”, which continuously develops through internal renewal and external interactions, with no distinction between the “religious” and the “secular” realm.

Ji Zhe has criticized them as “a projection of fantasy with a certain kind of Christian root”. According to Liang Yongjia, Yang’s “religious market” theory rests upon a distinction of “politics” and “religion” that is typical of liberal systems but not of Chinese culture. The theory also has an intrinsic idea of “competition” between religions that is typical of Abrahamic religions such as Christianity, but unknown to the nature of Chinese society, in which grassroots non-institutional religions prevail. Furthermore, Yang wrongly considers post-1949 China’s governance of religion to be different from that of pre-1949 China. Another critique expressed by Liang is that Yang’s theories imply that folk religions are an “inferior” form of religion, while his definition of “(true) religion” is a Biblical/Christian one. Ultimately, Yang’s “religious market” theory is regarded as functional to the neoliberal construction of the market economy.