As foreign missionaries were expelled from China in the early 1950s, Western Church leaders lamented over the loss of the Church in China to the Godless Communists. Under the new sociopolitical reality in the People’s Republic of China from the 1950s to the1960s, Christianity (hereafter refers to Protestant branch of Christian faith, as Catholics in China took on a different journey beyond the scope of this article) in China was reduced into a tiny voice echoing the latest political view of the Chinese Communist Party. Dissenters were silenced by law and sent to jails and labor camps. During the Cultural Revolutions, from 1966 to 1976, virtually every visible form of Christianity ceased to exist.
In the late 1970s, leaders in China adopted a Reform and Open Policy which radically transformed China. During this past quarter of a century, China went through a revolution no less than what had been gone though in China during the past two and a half centuries! Christianity, too, went from almost obscurity to rapid phase of development, from a handful of remnant persons to tens of millions in just a couple of decades—growth achieved without any modern media technology favored by evangelistic organization. Rather it grew under tremendously unfavorable political conditions as religions are highly regulated by civil authority in China. Today, Christianity in China is attracting its largest number of followers ever since it was introduced to China two hundreds years ago.
However it seems that the Christianity in China is still hiding behind the bamboo curtain as conflicting, even contradicting, reports are published from time to time. China is currently the largest Bible producing country in the world and celebrated the publishing the 50th million copy of the Bible in December 2007. Occasionally Christians are still arrested for publishing, smuggling and distributing Bible in this country. Are there enough Bibles in China? The official figures of Protestant Christians numbers less than 20 millions (wonder who purchases the remaining 30 million copies of the Holy Writ). Another source gives an estimate as high as 100 million! It is one of the fastest growing churches in contemporary Christendom (from merely less than a million in 1949) and experienced one of the harshest religious suppressions in contemporary time. Mushrooming into tens of millions during the past two decades, this phenomenon puzzles many missiologists-lliving in a country where religious control is throughout by a state apparatus regulating every aspect of religious life.
How many Christians are there in China? Why is there such a diverse opinion? It opens new churches virtually on a weekly basis in many provinces, and news on arrest and harassment on Christians is heard also virtually every week. It is under a Government-sponsored national structure with names like Chinese Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Association and China Christian Council, with counterparts in every major administrative level (Province, Municipality, Prefecture, county…). On the other hand it is shaped into hundreds of thousands of house-churches, an ecclesial movement that defies ecclesiologists. Who is representing the Christians in China? How much freedom in religion is there that the Chinese can enjoy? It also includes a large number of non-registered, hence illegal, underground churches. It embraces virtually every Christian denominational tradition from Anglicanism to Seventh Day Adventists belief with every major tradition in between; yet it defines itself as post-denominationalism. What is the reality of the Church in China?
Perhaps a personal visit may provide some hints to answer this contemporary ecclesial mystery or may even raise more questions and puzzles!
