The long-awaited revision of the draft religion regulations circulated last September was signed into law last month and will take effect February 1, 2018.

My neighborhood—most of my city, actually—is currently undergoing a dramatic change, the likes of which I have not seen in my two decades of residency. I first began to notice that something different was occurring in the autumn of last year, but in recent weeks the transformation has become undeniable and unavoidable. Its duration and its effects on the local population remain to be seen.

In order to be good stewards of the resources and opportunities given us to serve in this country, China workers are always on the lookout for insights into China’s current condition and how it might affect our prospects for ministry. In 2016 fall edition of The Washington Quarterly five eminent China hands contributed their perspectives on China’s future path. 

Seeking social change outside the realm of politics—Christians in China are providing examples of how that might be done. 

Much has been written the past few weeks about the draft revision to the Regulations on Religious Affairs, the main policy document that spells out how religion is to be managed in China.

On September 8, 2016 China's State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) sent a draft amendment for religious affairs administration to the Legal Office of the State Council. The amendments were posted on-line through the State Council website, requesting public opinions on the draft before October 7 of this year. 

In April of this year, President Xi Jinping gave a speech at a national conference on religion in which he outlined his vision for the role religion can and should play in Chinese society. As is often the case with speeches from top leaders, his themes were painted in broad strokes, with very little specifics. Those are typically revealed in subsequent regulations.

The massive campaign against church crosses in China’s Zhejiang province is in the news again with the release this month of the US State Department’s 2015 Report on International Religious Freedom.

Police actions against several house churches in Guangdong province in recent weeks again point up the fragile state of China’s vast unregistered Christian community.

There was a big birthday celebration in China earlier this month. July 1 marked the 95th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. 

Does the Christian church require a sympathetic national government to thrive?

Religious persecution or illegal land grab? Understanding the struggles faced by the people of China, including Chinese Christians.

A look at possible responses to the new NGO law. 

At a long-awaited national conference on religion, held in Beijing April 22-23, CPC General Secretary Xi Jinping outlined his vision for “helping religions adapt to the socialist society” under the direction of the Party. Here are a few prominent themes from Xi’s speech.

One of my favorite China books is The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History, by Joanna Waley-Cohen. In it she chronicles China’s historical interactions with the outside world, arguing that China has never been as isolationist as historians have suggested. What the West often perceived as isolationist policies or attitudes were instead China’s insistence that authority must never be surrendered to outsiders.

Reading Cao Nanlai’s classic Constructing China’s Jerusalem  in light of the highly publicized attacks on Wenzhou churches, the obvious question is whether the “Wenzhou model,” as Cao describes it, is still intact, or whether government intervention has significantly altered the formula of church growth and cultural transformation.

A ChinaSource "3 Questions" interview with Dr. Fenggang Yang, director of the Center on Religion and Chinse Society at Purdue University.

More than 35 years after Deng Xiaoping’s ascendancy to power, a sober assessment of the political implications of Deng’s reforms is much needed. China’s Political Development: Chinese and American Perspectives proposes to fill this gap by bringing together the insights of two dozen eminent scholars, twelve each from China and the United States, to address key aspects of governance reform since 1978.

A ChinaSource "3 Question" interview with Dr. Carol Lee Hamrin about China’s National Security Commission.

In a recent post I wrote about the paradoxical treatment of religion in China’s Constitution. On the one hand, Article 36 of the Constitution guarantees freedom of religion. On the other hand, the same article puts clear conditions on this freedom, making it subject to the needs of the state as defined by the Communist Party of China.

The latest episode in the government’s attack on Christian churches in Wenzhou is the drafting of regulations outlining precise limits on the size and location of religious buildings and the size and placement of crosses.

Changes on the horizon for NGOs in China.

As anyone who works in or deals with China on a regular basis knows, so much of life and work operates in a gray area – that space which can often be described as “neither legal nor illegal” since there are not yet laws governing the space or activity.

That has been the situation for numerous NGOs operating in China. Absent an actual law governing foreign NGOs in China, they've operated unofficially or with local blessing or registered as commercial enterprises.

According to China Aid Association’s latest annual report, religious persecution in China more than doubled last year. The increase comes as no surprise, as 2014 was marked by a wave of attacks on church buildings, particularly in the city of Wenzhou and around the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang. The general social tightening that has come to characterize President Xi Jinping’s rule contributed to the pressure on religious believers, as did heightened tensions between the regime and ethnic minorities in Western China.

Is China’s church facing a nationwide crackdown?

It was just about one year ago that, while scrolling through my Twitter feed late one night, I spotted something about Christians in Zhejiang trying to prevent the demolition of their church building.

Christians throughout history have seen themselves engaged in a battle that is ultimately spiritual in nature. Forces arrayed against them, political or otherwise, are physical manifestations of this unseen battle, which will ultimately conclude with the return of Christ.

In Mobilized Merchants - Patriotic Martyrs, Dr. Timothy Conkling sheds much-needed light on the relationship between China's unregistered church and the Chinese Party-State. The dissertation research that forms the basis for the book set out to answer the question of why Chinese Christians are persecuted and how they respond to this persecution.

With literally hundreds of crosses falling prey to overzealous local officials in Wenzhou and neighboring cities, the region once seen as a bastion of extraordinary religious freedom is now the subject of worldwide attention due to an equally extraordinary crackdown on its churches.

For those in long-term service in China, one of the difficulties in discerning where things are headed politically and socially is knowing how to separate out significant long-term trends from those events that, while appearing important in the moment, may prove to be mere distractions. This is particularly true for those working with the church in China, who often attempt to "read the tea leaves," through the lens of religious policy and its immediate affect upon China's Christians.

Churches have been demolished in Wenzhou, Christian workers detained on the North Korean border, and a leading religious official proclaims that a "Chinese theology" is needed so that the church can serve socialism. These developments have featured prominently in the news in recent weeks, with more than a few commentators concluding that a crackdown on Christianity in China is underway or soon will be. However, a closer look at the events in question suggests otherwise.

On Monday, The Diplomat published an article titled "Why is China Nationalizing Christianity?" The subtitle read "Last week China announced that it was nationalizing Christianity. What are the motives behind this?"

The rigid control structures comprising the "box" within which China's church currently operates are often assumed to be merely a function of China's Leninist political system. Were this system to be dismantled, one might argue, the "box" would come apart and China's Christians would enjoy genuine freedom of religion.

China's current policy on religion is spelled out in Central Party Document no. 19, "The Basic Viewpoint and Policy on the Religious Question during Our Country's Socialist Period," issued in March of 1982.

If you work for a foreign NGO in China and have had the feeling that it has been under a bit more scrutiny lately, it seems that you are not imagining things.

I am not a regular reader of Daedalus (although I probably should be), but a few weeks back I downloaded the Spring 2014 edition of the journal Daedalus onto my kindle because the cover caught my eye: Growing Pains in a Rising China.

Is there religious freedom in China? The answer, of course, depends on the meaning of the term "religious freedom"

According to China Aid Association's 2013 Persecution Report, a total of 7,424 Christians were persecuted in China last year. This is not an insignificant number; 7,424 believers facing persecution is 7,424 too many. However, it is worth looking at this number a bit closer in order to put it into perspective.