Ancient Chinese religious beliefs were characterized by

Religious beliefs in ancient China were characterized by the fact that the divine power was always dependent on the king's power, and there was no system of unity between church and state.

In ancient Chinese society, where "the most important thing of the state is to be found in the rituals and the military," the king held the power to sacrifice to God, the ancestors and the hundreds of gods. The king was both a political leader and the head of a group of witches. Some major sacrificial ceremonies were still presided over by them personally. The wizards were subordinate to the king's power and had no privileges, nor were they formed into an independent social force.

The wizards played the role of serving the king's authority by surrounding him, either by performing divination and rituals, or by performing summer dances to seek rain, or by driving away epidemics, or by occupying dreams. As described in the Book of Rites, "The king was surrounded by wizards in front and historians in the rear, and goze and goze were at his left and right. The king's center of inactivity was also to keep the most righteous", which illustrates the dependence of the witch officials on the king's power.

Since the priestly class in China was never able to become independent, this subordination in status determined the subordination of their social status and the instability of their social functions. Once the king's power declined and the pattern of theocracy was broken, the importance of the witch as a dependent in political life would inevitably diminish, and a decline in status would be inevitable.

In China, there has never been a priestly class independent of the king's power, and this is the difference between the Chinese witch and the priestly classes of other peoples in the world. It is also for this reason that there have been no head-on religious conflicts or religious wars in China.

Levels of Traditional Religious Beliefs in China:

The traditional religious beliefs in China are divided into different levels, with official beliefs and folk beliefs. The upper rulers, in order to maintain their privileges and status, monopolized the right to worship the so-called great and important gods among the deities, and people from different classes could only worship the deities within the scope of their own class's worship according to the regulations.

The heavenly emperor and the famous mountains and rivers could be sacrificed only by the son of heaven, while the common people, as the lower class of society, could only sacrifice their ancestors and some minor gods that were insignificant in the eyes of the rulers according to their rank. Sacrificing the gods that should not have been sacrificed is called "obscene sacrifice" and does not achieve the purpose of ancestral worship, because "the gods are not like the other gods".

This sacrificial worship hierarchy of sacrificing the noble to the noble and the lowly to the lowly has been inherited from generation to generation, and the basic pattern has been gradually fixed and standardized, creating a distinction between official beliefs and folk beliefs. The official and folk beliefs are completely different in the way they express their religious beliefs, but they influence each other.