Religion in China

Well. This is weird.

Official Chinese surveys now show that nearly one in three Chinese describe themselves as religious, an astonishing figure for an officially atheist country, where religion was banned until three decades ago.

The last 30 years of economic reform have seen an explosion of religious belief. China's government officially recognizes five religions: Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Daoism. The biggest boom of all has been in Christianity, which the government has struggled to control...

Pastor Ni is in charge of this church. (NPR agreed to withhold his full name to protect his identity.) He says there is total religious freedom in China, and he characterizes relations between state and the church as extremely good.

Enlarge Ariana Lindquist for NPR

Pastor Ni leads a service at a state-sanctioned church. He says he believes there is total religious freedom in China. Relations between church and state, he says, "are extremely good."

"The government never interferes with our internal affairs," he says. "There are no orders, no coercion. That doesn't exist and we get on well."...

No one knows exactly how many Christians there are among China's population of 1.3 billion. There are an estimated 21 million members of the government-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic movement, but nobody knows how many Protestants worship in unregistered house churches.

Some recent surveys have calculated there could be as many as 100 million Chinese Protestants. That would mean that China has more Christians than Communist Party members, which now number 75 million...