China has become one of the largest producers of bibles in the world

LU GENGSHENG remembers growing up in rural Anhui province in the 1980s, where his father was pastor of a house church, an illegal congregation that refused to join with official churches it believed to be stooges of the Communist Party. His family owned the area’s only bible, and other believers would bring notebooks to copy passages of scripture to take home.

Today, Christians make up 5% of the population, some 67m people, according to the Pew Research Center, a think-tank. Unofficial headcounts say that China has more Christians than members of the Communist Party (about 82m people).

To meet their spiritual needs, a joint venture called Amity Printing was founded in 1988 between Amity Foundation, an NGO linked to the China Christian Council (CCC), a government body, and the United Bible Societies (UBS), a British-based group dedicated to providing access to Christian literature.

In its first year, using a single printing press donated by UBS, Amity produced 500,000 bibles. In 2012 it printed more than 12m bibles and New Testaments. This makes Amity one of the largest printers of bibles in the world; quite an accomplishment in a country where, not long ago, people died for their faith.

In 2008 the company moved to smart new premises on the outskirts of Nanjing, an affluent eastern city near Shanghai. The new factory employs 600 people and has the capacity to produce around 18m bibles a year in more than 90 languages, including English, Swahili, Zulu and Russian, as well as Braille editions. The 100-millionth bible, printed last year, is displayed proudly in the lobby.

Amity is the only publisher in China authorised to print bibles, leading to criticism that it is exploiting its monopoly status and low cost-base to make money in the export market. Indeed exports have increased and it says that roughly two-thirds of bibles printed in 2011 went overseas.

Read more from source: economist.com