| Abstract | It is quite natural that any Westerner should be curious about the relative strengths of the three religions, Confucians, Taoists and Buddhists, of the Chinese world. This article is an attempt to clarify the problem by relating the artificial nature of this debate to its historical origins, then selecting a particularly clear example of misinterpretation in the shape of two censuses carried out in Hong Kong a century ago, and offering a simple model to show the difference in the status of religion in the Western and Chinese contexts. A concluding section looks into the reasons for the continued existence of this conundrum. |
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