The official church claims about 15 million people - Protestants, that is - and so we came up with an estimate of about 45 million who attend unofficial or sometimes underground churches. So that's already 60 million people. And then you add about 12 million Catholics, of whom about 6 million attend the officially sponsored Patriotic Catholic Churches and about 6 million attend underground churches.

Let's round the total off at 70 million. That compared with 1949 (when the communists took power) when there were by everybody's estimate about 700,000 Protestants and 3 million Catholics. So although the population of China has increased only 2.5 times - actually, it's less than that - the number of Christians has increased twentyfold. And this is really a remarkable development.

...

Carroll: Surely if you were able to document the existence of such a sizable number of Christians - 70-80 million - then Chinese authorities must be aware of it to a considerable extent. What is the attitude of Chinese government elites toward this phenomenon?

Aikman: It's an ambivalent attitude. At one level from a sociological point of view they're quite pleased because they have done studies that show that Christian villages and Christianized communities pay taxes and work hard. They're entrepreneurial, they tend to have lower crime rates and so on - things you would associate with the Protestant ethic. But on the other hand the authorities always feel challenged by any form of organization over which they do not have control, and they do not have control over the Christians and it bothers the daylights out of them that these people are meeting sometimes by the hundreds and the thousands.

...

Chinese Christians, for example, are very pro-Israel and they're also convinced that in the divine order of things their role has providentially been to evangelize Islam. That is very provocative. I could hardly speculate what might happen if you had a successful missionary effort toward much of Islam, but even if it wasn't successful you'd have a China in, say, 30 to 40 years time that was perhaps the second most powerful country in the world with an economy that in absolute terms by then might be bigger than that of the United States holding a view of what world power should and should not do that would be much more of the classic Christian view.

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