[Buddha-l] further to how many Buddhists are in China

[jkirk]

>From Joanna jkirk at spro.net

A few weeks ago, we were on about how many Buddhists are here and there, and 
China was one of the countries for which we had scanty data. To see if more 
information might be available, I wrote to the University of the West in 
California, considering that they might be au courant with such info, and 
just got a reply from them. It cited this article, from a source (Asian 
News) that seems to be Italian Catholic missionary. The letter supplies a 
link to the Chinese language version of Asian News, but they also have an 
English language version and this is the link for that. The article quotes 
Chinese news sources:
http://new.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=9021&size=

I haven't tried to track down the 2/17/07 English China Daily that he cites 
in his letter.
Here is the letter:
Dear Ms Joanna Kirkpatrick

Greetings from Los Angeles!

Professor Ananda Guruge, Dean of Academic Affairs of the University of the 
West, asked me to answer the questions in your letter.

According to the Chinese government statistics, there are about 1,000,000 
people believing in Theravada Buddhist tradition in Yunnan Province in 
Southwest China.  Among the 7 million Tibetan Buddhist followers, 120,000 of 
them are lamas and nuns.  There are 200,000 Buddhists [monks?] and nuns in 
Chinese (Han) population.  See http://China.org.cn/chinese/ch-shuzi/

The government statistics does not include the population of lay Buddhists 
in China.  I checked a piece of news from internet: 
http://new.asianews.it/index.php?l=zh&art=9021, April 17, 2007. It quotes 
the statistics made by East China Normal University that currently more than 
[300 mill.] Chinese believe in this or other religions.  Professor Zhang 
Fenglei, Chinese People's University, says that more than 1,000,000,000 
people believe in Buddhism.  According to this internet (February 17, 2007, 
English China Daily), two professors of Peking Normal University made an 
investigation.  The statistic figure is three times that of the official 
figure.

I hope that above-mentioned information may answer your questions about the 
population of Chinese Buddhists.  If you have any other questions, please 
feel free to contact me.

All best regards,

Darui Long