Abstract: While bringing impressive economic achievements, the past 30 years of reform and opening up have also drawn much discussion and concern on faith problems. Based on but different from traditional religious studies, this paper replaces the word "religion" with the concept of "faith" and reviews China's reform and opening up from the aspect of faith sociology. It is argued that the occurrence of three belief trends in current China, which respectively advocate national populism, nationalism and party fundamentalism, is basically due to the failure of faith transition while economy prospers. Such a bottleneck problem in contemporary Chinese reform is rooted in the fact that the belief mode of a revolutionary party has not realized its transition to that of a ruling party, so it is hard to unify beliefs through constitutional democracy. In this sense, the basic problem of China's faith is about the core faith of public power. When public power is disenchanted and rationalized, the national belief of law and constitution is constructed and the model of "belief politics" is broken, faith transition will become the inner power to promote social and cultural development as well as further reform.

Key words: Faith problem, reform power, faith transition