It's Official

China's Christian Explosion

[The article reprinted below is from the May edition of the OMF Newsletter.  The growth of the Christian church and the spread of the Gospel in China is now being officially acknowledged in government circles.  This brings some risks.  It also begs the question which many Western Christians have been asking for some years.  Since the West is turning away from the Lord, and the lights are going out on Western Christendom, will Asia in general, and China in particular, become the new Christendom of the next one thousand years of our Lord's reign?]

For many years leaders of China’s State-controlled church would cautiously tell foreign visitors that the number of Chinese Protestants, although growing, was still only “a tiny minority” of the population.

This year, leaders of the China Christian Council and the Three Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) have issued the official statistic of 23 million registered Protestants in China. That is an amazing increase compared to less than one million in 1949 when the Communist Party took power. However, it is under 2% of the total population of 1.3 billion. So is the TSPM right in sticking to its story of a “tiny minority”?


Not if researchers and academics advising the government at the highest level are to be believed.
A very different story is emerging from these researchers, who form a “think tank” which advises the prestigious United Front Work Department of the Communist Party, which in turn oversees all religious affairs at a far more senior level than the TSPM.

Last summer a book was openly published in Beijing by the China Social Sciences Publishing House which contains detailed essays of all the seminars on religion held by this “think tank” in Beijing in 2009. The most interesting essay is entitled: “An Analysis of the Reasons for the Rapid Growth of Protestant Christianity in Present-Day China.” In it the researcher, a Mr. Ma, gives some mind-blowing statistics and reveals what the government is really thinking about Christianity at the highest levels.

Mr. Ma first states that some estimates of the number of Protestants in China are between 50 and 70 million, but he himself accepts a “moderate” figure of 40 million. (NOTE: This is nearly double the “official” figure of 23 million.) But the most significant part of his essay not only confirms the explosive growth of the church but states that he and his fellow researchers see this as taking off at an even faster rate over the next few decades.

Ma states categorically that “Over the last 30 years Christianity has seen explosive growth with 1 million converts added every year, so as to become China’s largest religion.” As all serious researchers overseas would say, Buddhism and/or “folk religion” have many more adherents than Christianity, this is an amazing statement. It appears that the researchers advising the Party have a rather narrow definition of religion as organized and institutional, and on this basis they do not hesitate to now state Christianity has overtaken Buddhism and Daoism to become the “number one religion of China” (中國的一大教).

Ma himself takes a rather conservative view, stating that over the next five decades Christians will grow to [only!] “more than 100 million.” But he also states that other researchers believe – and this is a “moderate estimate” – that the Christian population in 50 years time could reach between 150-200 million people. There is even one researcher, he says, who states that in the next 20 years China’s Protestants could expand to 200 or even 300 million!

To ram the point home to the government (and also in passing show how hopelessly outdated the TSPM’s official statistics and their “tiny minority” view are), he then compares the Christian situation in China with that in South Korea. He says: “South Korea and China are similar in that both are countries with traditional cultures based on Confucianism and Buddhism. But in South Korea since the 1970s, in the short period of just 30 years, the Christian population grew to 35% of the total population, so that Christianity became the largest religion.” He sees the same situation to be rapidly developing in China.

Mr. Ma warns that this growth is upsetting the harmonious balance between the main religions in China, with Christianity on the offensive against Buddhism, Daoism and folk-religion. He also warns darkly that this rapid growth may affect national security and “cause Christianity again to become a political and spiritual tool for Western control, and the Christian church [in China] to become the vassal of the Western church.” He quotes another researcher’s estimates that the number of Protestant believers in the unregistered house churches already totals between 19-34 million, “far outnumbering those in the registered churches.” He then asks the stark question: “The day when a religion has 200-300 million followers, can it any longer be controlled?”

He recommends that the uncontrollable growth be brought under control by government policies and legal management, as well as ideological education; also, more ominously, by the nationalistic policy of “strengthening the Chinese race’s national pride and self-confidence.” This seems to tie in with recent efforts in official circles to not only tolerate but promote Confucianism and Buddhism as opposed to Christianity.

It is interesting that, just six months or so after this book was published, the government announced in January this year in People’s Daily that the chief task of the State Administration for Religious Affairs throughout 2011 is to “encourage” all the house-church Christians to only attend TSPM-registered places of worship.

It remains to be seen how all this will work out in practice. On the one hand, Christians can be encouraged by this first-hand evidence of the vast scale of the work of the gospel in China. On the other, they should pray that wise counsels will prevail at the highest levels of government to allow the church to develop freely and become “salt and light” throughout Chinese society. Just when Europe, the traditional heartland of Christianity, is largely turning its back on the gospel, could God be preparing China to become a blessing to the nations?

NOTE: For those who read Chinese, the key book mentioned above is 當代中國民祖宗教問題演究 Dangdai Zhongguo Minzu Zongjiao Wenti Yanjiu (Beijing: China Social Sciences Publishing House, 2010. ISBN number: 978-7-5004-8851-4.) Only available in China and perhaps Hong Kong.