{"id":2321,"date":"2005-09-16T09:13:53","date_gmt":"2005-09-16T09:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/a-questions-of-numbers.html"},"modified":"2005-09-16T09:13:53","modified_gmt":"2005-09-16T09:13:53","slug":"a-questions-of-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/a-questions-of-numbers.html","title":{"rendered":"A questions of numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just how many Christians – and Communists – are there in China, anyway?<\/a><\/p>\n

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Some Church scholars in Hong Kong doubt recent claims that Chinese Christians outnumber members of the Communist Party, but assert that China is deeply concerned about ever-increasing religious influences. <\/p>\n

The American Bible Society at the end of August launched a special fundraising project to help provide paper to produce Bibles for distribution throughout China during 2005 through Amity Press, the officially recognised Christian printing press of the registered church. The Society said that "only the lack of Bible paper holds us back". <\/p>\n

And in his book "Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power", David Aikman, a former senior foreign correspondent for Time<\/em> magazine writes that out of China’s 1.3 billion citizens, 70 million are Protestant and 12 million are Catholics, and he believed that Christianity will continue to grow in China. <\/p>\n

In Hong Kong, Professor Ying Fuk Tsang, a divinity professor, said the number of Protestants in mainland China could definitely be more than 14 million – the number provided by official sources without counting believers in unregistered groups known as house churches. Yet he has reservations about reports which said Christians in China outnumber members of the Communist Party, which tally about 70 million. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just how many Christians – and Communists – are there in China, anyway? Some Church scholars in Hong Kong doubt recent claims that Chinese Christians outnumber members of the Communist Party, but assert that China is deeply concerned about ever-increasing religious influences. The American Bible Society at the end of August launched a special fundraising…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nA questions of numbers - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/09\/a-questions-of-numbers.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A questions of numbers - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Just how many Christians – and Communists – are there in China, anyway? 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}