The concept of the regional religious system (RRS) 區域宗教系統 was first put forth in an article co-authored by Jiang Wu 吳疆, Daoqin Tong 童道琴, and Karl Ryavec (2013) based on spatial analysis and GIS modeling of the distribution of religious sites in Greater China.
A preliminary definition is provided in the article by Wu, Tong and Ryavec: A regional religious system is a type of spatial formation in which a group of related or unrelated religious institutions are conditioned by physical, geographical, administrative, cultural, or socioeconomic systems and are highly dependent on regionally and locally distributed variables such as economy, transportation, education, culture, ethnicity, and language, etc.
[1] According to their study, an RRS is basically a spatial formation characterized by the geographical distribution of religious sites.
The research team first studied the distribution of religious sites by implementing the kernel density estimation in ArcGIS.
Based on these initial findings, the Greater China area has been delineated into ten RRSs.