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The Daily Telegraph, UK
July 30, 2005 Opinion
portal.telegraph.co.uk

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ReligionNewsBlog.com • Item 11853 • Posted: Sunday July 31, 2005  

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Richard Spencer reports today from Beijing that there may now be more practising Christians in China than there are members of the Communist Party.

The precise figures cannot be known, in a country in which Christians are still persecuted. But the evidence suggests that there may be as many as 80 million or even 100 million members of underground Christian churches in China, unapproved by the state.

The Chinese Communist Party, meanwhile, has only 70 million members. If those figures for worshippers are even roughly accurate, then we are looking at a very remarkable development in the history not only of Asia but of all mankind.

Christianity and communism are fundamentally incompatible – one a spiritual creed, the other materialist. Christianity lays down that a man’s responsibility to his neighbour is personal, a matter for his individual conscience, while communism decrees that all duties are collective, to be enforced by the state. At first glance, communism may look like the fairer system, and Christianity the more selfish.

In fact, of course, communism and its blood-brother, fascism, have been responsible – in Asia, Europe, Africa and South America – for more human misery over the past century than any other systems of belief thought up by man. By denying human beings their individuality, all totalitarian systems brutalise the human condition, reducing everyone in their sway to the status of ants, or cogs in a machine. Christianity teaches that each of us is a moral being, responsible for our actions to our Maker, and individually bound to love our neighbours as ourselves.

Xun Jinzhen, a Christian convert who runs a beauty salon in Beijing, put it eloquently when he said: “We have very few people who believe in communism as a faith. So there’s an emptiness in their hearts.”

The growth of the Christian churches in China is a story of great courage and belief in the special status of man as a moral creature, for whom good and evil are eternal truths that cannot be redefined by politicians. It gives enormous hope for the future happiness of a people who have suffered under the dying creed of communism for much too long.

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