The company prints Bibles and other Christian book products in many languages for both domestic and international markets. In 2016, the Amity Printing Company, a joint venture between the Amity Foundation, a Chinese nongovernmental organization, and the United Bible Societies, printed its 150 millionth Bible, with one third of those coming between 20. China is also the world’s largest producer of Bibles. Today, China’s Christian population encompasses a range of citizens , from all ages, from the countryside and urban centers, including students and professionals. A surge in Christian adherents can be traced from the period beginning in the early 1980s.
Mao Zedong’s death and his successor Deng Xiaoping’s subsequent reforms reopened China to the outside world, in turn granting greater freedoms to Chinese citizens. This was especially true at the height of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when places of worship were demolished, closed, or reappropriated and religious practices were banned. “Maoist Thought,” a sinification of Marxism-Leninism that placed the future of the Chinese revolution in the hands of the rural peasants, was the dominant ideology. In keeping with its Marxist roots, the CCP declared itself atheist. The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 resulted in wide-scale religious repression in mainland China. The ensuing civil war killed an estimated twenty million people. The rebels amassed control over more than one-third of Chinese territory and established a rival political order, known as the Heavenly Kingdom.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Christianity became a mobilizing political force: Hong Xiuquan developed a Christian-influenced ideology to mount the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) against the Qing Dynasty, attracting missionaries and revolutionaries alike. The first Protestant missionary to China, Robert Morrison, traveled there in 1807 on behalf of the London Missionary Society and translated the Bible into Mandarin. Early waves of Christianity began with the arrival of Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci in China in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
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