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Despite this minority status, reports of Christianity's renewal are coming in from every province of China. Christians already appear to be as numerous as they were before the 1949 Communist takeover. Stories of conversions and whispered claims of miraculous healing spread from village to village. Pastors and nuns, freed from "labor reform" camps, where many had been held for 20 years, are returning to their parishes. The Communist regime is returning confiscated church properties to Christian congregations. Frequently it even collects rent from occupants of such properties so Christian groups can begin to pay for repairs. Signs of Christianity are visible even in the areas of Islamic concentration. At Urumqi (pop. 1 million), the capital of the autonomous region of Xinjaing, Catholics are now worshiping under a temporary straw roof while they rebuild their chapel.
China is lenient toward religion just now because it is seeking respect and trade overseas and pressing hard for national unity to foster economic development at home. Describing the Communist Party's "united front" religious strategy, the top Protestant leader in China, Bishop Ding Guangxun, says, "In order to get religious people to take part in national reconstruction, they have had to respect religious faith. The common ground is patriotism, the wish that China should become stronger and more prosperous."
As in the Soviet Union, permission to print Bibles and pamphlets or even to open a church must be given by the state. Religious education of the young is limited to small-scale meetings inside the churches. The new religious freedom, in fact, is anything but complete. In some places the degree of tolerance seems to depend on how sympathetic local officials are to the policies of Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping. For every church that has reopened, many more are still used as warehouses or barracks.
Christianity is an attractive, often dynamic option, given the spiritual vacuum created in China during more than 30 years of official atheism, the failure of Communism as a substitute religion and the fall of Mao as its messiah. A third to a half of the reborn church congregations comprise younger people. Last year Pan Xiao, 23, a woman worker, wrote a poignant letter to China Youth magazine: "Life, is this the mystery you try to reveal? Is the ultimate end nothing more than a dead body?" The magazine has a circulation of 3.7 million. When the letter was published, it drew 60,000 letters in response.
At Nanjing University, one of six campuses with new centers for sociological study about religion, 1,000 students showed up for the first academic lecture on Christianity. Says a young woman worker in Peking: "Communist philosophy puts so much emphasis on struggle. What I like about Christianity is its stress on kindness in human relations."
To future-minded urban dwellers, Christianity seems attractive simply because it is the traditional faith of the U.S. and most modern industrialized European nations. Officially restored churches, most of them in cities, are supervised by national Protestant and Catholic agencies that work closely with the government's Religious Affairs Bureau—separate denominations have been abolished—and Bishop Ding is the official head of all Chinese Protestants.