Christian influence growing in China

By Richard N. Ostling
Associated Press

China, the world's most populous country, could someday rival the United States in global economic, military and diplomatic influence. But will the emerging China be stable, open-minded and constructive, or inward-looking and dangerously nationalistic?

Much depends on the country's burgeoning Christian minority, according to some.

Author David Aikman, an Episcopalian, was a Hong Kong and State Department correspondent and the Beijing bureau chief for Time magazine. During the past few decades, Aikman collected information about churches. He returned for three months in 2002 to gather fresh material.

China boasts one of the world's biggest and fastest-growing Christian movements, an often overlooked phenomenon.

China had only a few million Christians when communists took power in 1949, but officials there privately put today's total at 25 million. The U.S. State Department's estimate is 52 million to 115 million. Aikman thinks the total could be 80 million or more, though "no one knows for sure." Protestants well outnumber Catholics, observers agree.

If the current growth continues, Aikman says, 20 percent to 30 percent of Chinese may be Christian within three decades. That could alter China's social fabric considerably.

Aikman reports that Christians turn up in positions of cultural influence, not only as democratic activists but intellectuals, artists, businessmen, and even military officers and party officials.

Moreover, there's wide interest in Christian thought among Chinese who analyze the past progress of Western civilization. Christian studies institutes operate at many universities and study groups are proliferating.

China's Christian history dates from 635. Nevertheless, Protestants and Catholics are both split between "patriotic" churches that accept government control and semi-underground churches that insist on autonomy and — for Catholics — loyalty to the pope.