This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up policy, launched in 1978, brought an end to the near total ban on religious practice the Cultural Revolution had imposed across China through the 1960s and into the 1970s. Official religious freedom was restored in 1980, when the state again recognized Buddhism as one of five sanctioned faiths, alongside Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism, ending the outright prohibition that had closed or repurposed the country's monasteries for the better part of two decades.
Temples shuttered or converted to other uses since the 1960s reopened under state licence in the years that followed, monks and nuns returning to monastic training and lay believers to public worship after a period in which almost none of it had been permitted. The recovery was administered rather than spontaneous, since every reopened monastery and temple operated within licensing limits the state continued to set, and it has continued for decades since, gradually restoring institutions and practice across the country under that same continuing oversight.
What this changed for Buddhism's spread was the reemergence, within a single generation, of the tradition as China's largest organized religion, restoring numbers and institutions the Cultural Revolution had tried to erase outright. The recovery came through a state licence rather than through a free return, and that boundary, set in 1980, has shaped every year of Buddhism's growth in China since.