Scientific Education and Magical Beliefs: How Chinese Youth Reconcile Rational Training with Esoteric Practice

Classical secularization theory expects formal education to weaken supernatural belief, and recent Western surveys largely confirm this expectation for astrology and paranormal belief. We ask whether the same holds in contemporary China, where schooling has long promoted science and materialism. Drawing on an online survey of 1,056 young adults and 41 interviews with diviners and their clients, we find no negative education gradient. Bachelor’s degree holders were more likely than respondents with a high school education or less to have tried divination and were more willing to pay for it. Interviewees reconciled esoteric practice with their schooling by translating divination into the language of science and psychology and by assigning science and divination to separate domains of life. Few held firm convictions, and most treated divinatory claims provisionally and selectively. We argue that education supplies young Chinese adults with a vocabulary for legitimating esoteric practice.