Christianity in China Explained

1. The Two-Track Shape of Chinese Christianity

Christianity in mainland China exists in a registered form and an unregistered form, and the split runs through both the Protestant and the Catholic communities. Protestant congregations that register do so through the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the China Christian Council; those that do not register are usually called house churches. Catholic communities that register do so through the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association; those that do not are usually called the underground or clandestine Church. The vocabulary is untidy because the situation on the ground is untidy, and any account that describes only one side of either split will mislead you.

Two things follow from that shape, and both are frequently missed. The first is that the line between registered and unregistered is a line about civil registration. The content of Christian faith is the same on both sides of it. A registered Catholic parish celebrates the same Mass, ordains through the same apostolic succession and holds the same creed as an unregistered one. The second is that the line moves. Individual clergy, congregations and whole dioceses have crossed it in both directions over seventy years, sometimes under pressure, sometimes by a considered judgement of conscience, and the situation in one province can look very little like the situation in the next.

The Legal Frame in One Paragraph

Article 36 of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China states that citizens enjoy freedom of religious belief and that the state protects normal religious activities. Five religions are recognised for the purposes of administration: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Catholicism and Protestantism, each with a state-sanctioned national association. Catholicism and Protestantism are administered as two separate religions in this system, which is why Chinese official documents never treat them as branches of a single Christianity. Since 2018 the administration of religious affairs has been carried out under the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party, following the absorption of the former State Administration for Religious Affairs.

This page covers China. For the very different story of Christian growth on the African continent, including the independent church movement there, see our guide to Christianity in Africa, which does not overlap with anything below.

2. How Christianity Reached China, 635 to 1949

Christianity has arrived in China at least four separate times, and three of those arrivals ended in near-total disappearance. Understanding that pattern explains a great deal about why the Chinese state and Chinese Christians both talk the way they do about foreign control, and why the question of whether Christianity is a foreign religion has been argued in China for more than a thousand years.

The Church of the East, from 635

The first documented arrival was in 635, when a missionary named Alopen reached the Tang capital of Chang'an, present-day Xi'an, from the Church of the East. That Church, sometimes loosely called Nestorian and continuing today as the Assyrian Church of the East, is a separate communion from the Catholic Church and also from the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and it carried Syriac Christianity across Central Asia along the trade routes. The Xi'an Stele, erected in 781 and rediscovered in the seventeenth century, records the mission in Chinese and Syriac and remains the primary evidence for it. This Christianity was suppressed in the anti-foreign edicts of 845 and had largely vanished from China proper by the tenth century.

The Franciscans under the Mongols

The second arrival came under Mongol rule. John of Montecorvino, a Franciscan sent by Pope Nicholas IV, reached Khanbaliq, present-day Beijing, in 1294, built churches, translated the New Testament and the Psalms into a local language, and was named Archbishop of Khanbaliq in 1307. This mission depended heavily on Mongol patronage, and it did not survive the fall of the Yuan dynasty in 1368.

Matteo Ricci and the Jesuits

The third arrival is the one Catholics remember best. Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit, reached Macau in 1582 and Beijing in 1601, and died there in 1610. Ricci learned classical Chinese, dressed as a Confucian scholar, made himself useful to the imperial court through mathematics, cartography and astronomy, and argued that Chinese terms for Heaven could be used for God and that the Confucian rites honouring ancestors and Confucius were civil acts of respect that a Christian could keep. His world map and his catechetical dialogue The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven circulated widely among Chinese literati.

The approach produced a serious Chinese Catholic intellectual class, including Xu Guangqi, a senior official who collaborated with Ricci on the translation of Euclid, and it produced the Chinese Rites controversy. Dominican and Franciscan missionaries argued that the ancestral rites were religious acts and therefore incompatible with the faith. Rome eventually agreed with them: Clement XI condemned the rites in the decree Ex illa die in 1715, and Benedict XIV confirmed the condemnation in Ex quo singulari in 1742. The Kangxi Emperor, who had earlier been favourable, responded by restricting Christian preaching, and the Catholic presence contracted sharply. The Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith reversed the ruling in the instruction Plane compertum est of 8 December 1939, under Pius XII, permitting Catholics to take part in ceremonies honouring ancestors and Confucius understood as civil honours.

Dates for the rites decrees follow the published Roman documents: Ex illa die (1715), Ex quo singulari (1742) and Plane compertum est (8 December 1939).

The Nineteenth Century and the Missionary Era

The fourth arrival came with the Protestant missions and with the treaties that followed the Opium Wars, and the two are tangled together in Chinese memory. Robert Morrison of the London Missionary Society reached Guangzhou in 1807 as the first Protestant missionary to China and produced a Chinese Bible translation and a Chinese-English dictionary. Hudson Taylor founded the China Inland Mission in 1865, adopted Chinese dress and pushed inland from the treaty ports. Catholic missionary orders returned in force in the same period, and the Church built schools, orphanages and hospitals across the interior.

The problem, which Chinese Christians name as readily as anyone, is that missionary access was written into treaties imposed after military defeat, and that foreign missionaries could claim consular protection under extraterritoriality. Christianity became associated in the public mind with foreign privilege. Two violent episodes fixed the association. The Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864, led by Hong Xiuquan, who claimed to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, drew on Christian material while teaching doctrines no Christian body accepts, and the war that followed killed an enormous number of people. The Boxer Uprising of 1900 targeted foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians directly; among those killed were many Chinese Catholics later canonised by John Paul II on 1 October 2000 in the group known as the 120 Martyrs of China. The Chinese government objected publicly to that canonisation, in part because 1 October is the national day.

1949 and the Break

After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, foreign missionaries left or were expelled within a few years, and Christian institutions passed into Chinese hands. The papal internuncio, Archbishop Antonio Riberi, was expelled in 1951, and the Holy See's diplomatic mission for China moved to Taipei, where it remains. What replaced the missionary structures on the mainland was a system of national patriotic associations designed to make each religion self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating, which brings us to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement.

3. The Three-Self Patriotic Movement

The Three-Self Patriotic Movement is the organisation through which Protestant congregations in mainland China register with the state, founded in 1951 under the leadership of the Chinese YMCA figure Wu Yaozong. Its charter document was the Christian Manifesto of 1950, which called on Chinese Protestants to end their reliance on foreign personnel and funding and to support the new government. Within a few years the Movement had become the sole legal channel for Protestant church life.

Where the Name Comes From

The three selves are self-governance, self-support and self-propagation. The phrase did not originate with the Chinese state. It comes from nineteenth-century Protestant mission theory, above all from Henry Venn of the Church Missionary Society and Rufus Anderson of the American Board, who argued that the goal of a mission is a native church that governs itself, pays for itself and evangelises by itself, after which the missionary should leave. Chinese Protestant leaders had been arguing for exactly this for decades before 1949, and the independent Chinese churches of the 1920s and 1930s, including the True Jesus Church, the Jesus Family and Watchman Nee's Little Flock, were already practising it.

That history matters for fairness. Chinese Christians who joined the Three-Self Patriotic Movement did not necessarily see themselves as surrendering to the state. Many saw a long-standing goal of Chinese Christianity, an end to foreign control of Chinese churches, being reached at last. Chinese Christians who refused to join saw an ecclesial principle being handed to a civil authority that would then use it. Both readings were held sincerely, and both are still held today.

The Denunciation Campaigns and the Cultural Revolution

The early years of the Movement included accusation meetings at which Christians denounced other Christians, and pastors who declined to join were imprisoned. Wang Mingdao, a Beijing preacher who argued that the Manifesto asked him to affirm what he did not believe, was arrested in 1955 and spent more than twenty years in prison. Watchman Nee was arrested in 1952 and died in labour camp custody in 1972. Yuan Xiangchen, known in English writing as Allen Yuan, spent more than twenty years in a labour camp in the northeast and returned to preaching afterwards.

From 1966 the Cultural Revolution closed everything. Registered churches were shut along with unregistered ones, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement itself ceased to function, Bibles were burned and clergy of every description were sent to labour. Public Christian worship of any kind effectively stopped for roughly a decade. Two consequences followed. Christianity in China survived that period almost entirely in homes, which shaped the house church movement permanently. And when churches reopened, they reopened into a population that had watched registration provide no protection whatever.

The Reopening from 1979

Churches began reopening in 1979, and the framework for the reopening was set out in Document 19, the Central Committee circular of March 1982 on the basic viewpoint and policy on religious questions during the socialist period. Document 19 accepted that religion would persist for a long time, restored a policy of tolerating the five recognised religions within limits, and reconstituted the patriotic associations. Church attendance grew quickly from that point in both the registered and the unregistered sectors, and it kept growing through the 1980s and 1990s.

What a Registered Church Gets and Gives

Registration brings a legal meeting place, the ability to hold property, printed Bibles and hymnals, trained and ordained clergy, and freedom from the risk of eviction. It also brings obligations: the venue is registered and religious activity is expected to happen there, the content of preaching is subject to review, clergy appointments run through the system, and the congregation participates in the political education that the associations organise. Whether that exchange is acceptable is the question that divides Chinese Protestants, and it is a question of prudential judgement rather than of doctrine.

4. The China Christian Council and Post-Denominational Protestantism

The China Christian Council was founded in 1980 to handle the pastoral and theological work that a political association could not, under the leadership of Bishop K. H. Ting, known in Chinese as Ding Guangxun. It ordains ministers, runs seminaries, publishes hymnals and Bibles, sets liturgical materials, and represents Chinese Protestantism in international church bodies. It joined the World Council of Churches in 1991.

In practice the China Christian Council and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement work as one office with two names, and Chinese Protestants call the pair the lianghui, the two organisations. A registered congregation relates to both: to the Three-Self Patriotic Movement for its registration, property and relations with the authorities, and to the China Christian Council for ordination, training and worship materials.

The Post-Denominational Structure

Registered Protestantism in China is post-denominational, and this is one of its most distinctive features. Denominational structures were merged out of existence at the end of the 1950s, when united worship was introduced and separate Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran and Baptist congregations in a given city were consolidated into single churches. Today a registered Chinese Protestant church normally carries no denominational label at all. Practice inside it may still carry denominational inheritance, most visibly on baptism, where the Council permits both infant baptism and believer's baptism by immersion depending on local tradition, and on episcopacy, where a small number of bishops from the former Anglican structure continued in office.

Readers used to the Western landscape of separate Christian denominations should register how unusual this is. There is no Chinese Southern Baptist Convention and no Chinese Lutheran synod inside the registered system. Theological education runs through a national network of seminaries headed by Nanjing Union Theological Seminary, and the graduates serve congregations of every inherited background. Chinese Protestant worship in a registered church is typically simple in form: hymns, extended preaching, extemporary prayer, and the Lord's Supper celebrated at intervals rather than weekly.

Bibles and the Amity Printing Company

Bible printing is one of the concrete achievements the registered church points to. The Amity Printing Company was established in Nanjing in 1988 as a joint venture between the Amity Foundation and the United Bible Societies, and it has since printed Bibles in very large quantities for use in China and for export. Chinese Bibles are legally sold through churches and church bookshops rather than through general retail, a restriction that unregistered congregations and foreign observers regularly criticise, and the Chinese Union Version of 1919 remains the standard translation in ordinary use. Our guide to the Bible and how its books came together covers the canon question that sits behind any translation project.

The Amity Printing Company describes its founding and its partnership with the United Bible Societies in its own corporate materials. Cumulative print totals cited elsewhere come from the company and from the United Bible Societies rather than from an independent audit, and this page repeats none of them.

The Theological Reconstruction Campaign

From 1998 K. H. Ting promoted a programme usually translated as theological reconstruction or theological renewal, which sought to soften the emphasis on justification by faith alone in Chinese Protestant preaching and to stress moral commonality between believers and non-believers in a socialist society. Conservative pastors inside the registered church as well as house church leaders objected that this diluted the gospel, and the campaign is a live example of the theological cost that registered status can carry. The doctrinal question underneath it, how faith and works relate in salvation, is set out on our page on faith and works.

How Catholics Should Regard Registered Protestants

The Catholic Church regards baptised Protestants as Christians joined to the Church in a real if imperfect communion, and nothing about Chinese registration changes that. A Chinese Protestant baptised with water in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is validly baptised. The differences that matter between Catholics and Protestants in China are the same differences that matter anywhere, and our guide to Catholic and Protestant belief compared covers them without any Chinese complication attached.

5. The House Church Movement

House churches are Protestant congregations that operate outside the Three-Self registration system, and the movement began with pastors who refused on conscience to join it in the 1950s. Wang Mingdao published an essay in 1955, known in English as We, Because of Faith, arguing that the Manifesto asked him to make a confession he did not believe. He and others like him were imprisoned, and their refusal became the founding memory of the movement. The name is now partly historical, since many urban house churches meet in rented commercial premises rather than in homes.

Rural Networks and Urban Congregations

Two broad types are worth distinguishing, though the boundary blurs. The older type is the rural network, which grew explosively from the 1970s in provinces such as Henan and Anhui, often through lay evangelists with almost no formal training, and which was organised in loose regional fellowships rather than in single congregations. These networks carried extraordinary growth and also carried real doctrinal risk, since a network with no trained clergy and no access to theological education is vulnerable to teaching that drifts. Several Chinese groups that began in this environment developed into movements that no Christian body recognises as Christian, and our guide to cults and Christianity sets out the tests that apply.

The newer type is the urban congregation, which emerged from the 1990s among students, professionals and the urban middle class in cities such as Beijing, Chengdu, Shanghai and Wenzhou. These congregations are often explicitly confessional, most commonly Reformed, with trained pastors, published statements of faith, formal membership, elders and deacons, and a self-conscious sense of being a church rather than a fellowship. Wenzhou in Zhejiang province, sometimes called China's Jerusalem, has an unusually dense Christian population with both registered and unregistered congregations and a long tradition of Christian business owners funding church building.

Why They Stay Unregistered

House church leaders give several reasons for not registering, and they are worth stating in their own terms. They hold that the Church has one head, Christ, and that submitting the appointment of pastors and the content of preaching to a civil authority contradicts that. They point to the Three-Self record in the 1950s and to the theological reconstruction campaign as evidence of what registration costs. They object to registration rules that restrict where and to whom they may preach, particularly rules touching children. Some also hold that registering would divide them from congregations that will not register, and that the unity of the unregistered churches is itself worth something.

The Catholic tradition reads Acts 5:29 alongside Romans 13:1-7 on submission to governing authorities, and holds both together. The Catechism of the Catholic Church treats the citizen's duty to obey civil authority and the limits of that duty in paragraphs 2238 to 2243, teaching that citizens are obliged in conscience to refuse when civil authority commands what is contrary to the moral order. The judgement about where a particular demand falls is a real and difficult one, and Chinese Christians on both sides of the registration line have made it in good faith.

What Happens in Practice

Enforcement varies enormously by place and by period, and the honest summary is that generalisation fails. Many unregistered congregations meet for years without interference. Others are fined, have leases cancelled by landlords under pressure, or are ordered to disband. One widely reported case is Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, whose pastor Wang Yi was sentenced in December 2019 to nine years in prison on charges of inciting subversion of state power and illegal business operations, as reported by Chinese state media at the time. Shouwang Church in Beijing spent years without a permanent meeting place after being unable to occupy premises it had purchased, and Zion Church in Beijing was closed in 2018.

The Wang Yi sentence and the charges named are as reported by Chinese state media in December 2019 and carried by international news agencies. This page reports the legal record and takes no position on any government or political party.

Where House Churches and Catholics Meet

Chinese house church Protestantism and Chinese underground Catholicism are frequently lumped together by outside writers, and they are quite different things. A house church network is congregational, its authority runs through the local pastor and the fellowship, and the question of registration is a matter of church-state prudence. An unregistered Catholic community is part of a diocese, its authority runs through a bishop in communion with Rome, and the question of registration has always been bound up with whether the Church can be governed apart from the Pope. The two communities have sometimes shared prison cells, and they have never shared an ecclesiology.

6. The Catholic Church in China: Two Communities

Catholics in China have been divided since the 1950s between communities registered through the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and unregistered communities usually called the underground or clandestine Church. The Patriotic Association was founded in 1957 on a stated principle of independent, autonomous self-governance of the Church in China, and that principle, rather than any question of doctrine, is what the division has always turned on.

Why the Catholic Split Is Different

The Catholic split is structurally harder than the Protestant one because of the episcopate. A Protestant congregation that registers does not thereby change what it is. A Catholic diocese needs a bishop, and a Catholic bishop needs a mandate from the Bishop of Rome. When the Patriotic Association began selecting and consecrating bishops without a papal mandate, starting with ordinations in 1958, the result was bishops who were validly ordained, because the sacrament of holy orders takes effect through valid matter, form and consecrating bishops, and illicitly ordained, because they lacked the papal mandate the law requires. Canon law attaches automatic excommunication both to consecrating and to being consecrated a bishop without a pontifical mandate; the provision stood at canon 1382 of the 1983 Code throughout the period described here, and the penalty was carried over when Book VI of the Code was revised in 2021. Our page on the Catholic priesthood explains the underlying distinction between what is valid and what is licit.

So the Church in China ended up with an anomaly that has no real parallel elsewhere: genuine sacraments, genuine Masses, genuine absolution, celebrated in some dioceses by bishops who were out of communion with the Pope. Catholics attending those Masses received a valid Eucharist and valid absolution. The wound was in communion and in governance.

How the Two Communities Grew Apart

The pattern set in over decades. Clergy who registered could keep churches open, run seminaries and celebrate publicly, and they lived with the Patriotic Association's stated principle of independence, which many of them privately rejected. Clergy who did not register celebrated Mass in homes, formed priests in improvised conditions, and in many cases were detained. Bishops were appointed on both sides, sometimes for the same diocese, and by the 2000s a number of dioceses had two bishops each recognised by a different authority. Family loyalties, village histories and personal grievances hardened the division further, and by the time Rome began working on it seriously the two communities in some provinces did not speak.

What the Two Communities Look Like

The Holy See has stated repeatedly, including in material published alongside the 2018 agreement, that the Bishops' Conference of the Catholic Church in China does not have the canonical status of an episcopal conference, because its statutes and membership do not meet the requirements of canon law. Conditions in the table describe general patterns and vary substantially between dioceses and provinces.

Sheshan and the Marian Devotion

The Basilica of Our Lady Help of Christians at Sheshan, outside Shanghai, is the principal Marian shrine of Chinese Catholicism, begun in the 1860s and rebuilt in the twentieth century. Pilgrimage to Sheshan during the month of May is a long-standing Chinese Catholic practice, and Benedict XVI attached the whole Church's day of prayer for the Church in China to the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians on 24 May, which is the Sheshan feast. Sheshan is a shrine with a devotional and pilgrimage history, and no apparition claim attaches to it. For how the Church now judges apparition claims, including the 2024 norms issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, see our guide to Marian apparition sites and their approval status.

7. Benedict XVI and the 2007 Letter

On 27 May 2007, the feast of Pentecost, Benedict XVI published a Letter to the Bishops, Priests, Consecrated Persons and Lay Faithful of the Catholic Church in the People's Republic of China. The Letter was written for Chinese Catholics rather than for governments, it is the document the Holy See itself points back to when explaining its China policy, and it remains the interpretive key to everything Rome has done since.

What the Letter Says

Four points carry most of the weight. First, the Letter states plainly that the Catholic Church in China cannot be autonomous in the sense the Patriotic Association's stated aims require, because communion with the Bishop of Rome belongs to what the Church is, and it says that declared purposes of independence and self-governance are irreconcilable with Catholic doctrine. Second, it says with equal clarity that the clandestine condition is not a normal feature of the Church's life, that the Church by its nature seeks to live and worship openly, and that Catholics should not treat hiddenness as an ideal. Third, it calls for reconciliation between the two communities, names the wounds each has given the other, and asks for forgiveness in both directions. Fourth, it revokes the special faculties and directives granted to Chinese bishops in earlier decades for emergency conditions, on the ground that circumstances had changed, and asks that the ordinary law of the Church now be followed.

The Letter also treats individual cases with a pastoral flexibility that surprised some readers. Benedict distinguished bishops who had accepted illegitimate ordination under heavy pressure from those who had sought it, noted that many had subsequently asked for and received reconciliation with Rome, and set out how the faithful should regard sacraments celebrated by clergy in irregular situations. He explicitly discouraged Catholics from passing judgement on one another's consciences over the registration question.

The Day of Prayer and the Sheshan Prayer

The Letter established 24 May, the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians venerated at Sheshan, as a day on which the whole Catholic world prays for the Church in China. In May 2008 Benedict composed a prayer to Our Lady of Sheshan for that day, asking the Virgin to sustain Chinese Catholics in fidelity and in unity and to support those who bear the cost of their faith. The day of prayer has been kept annually since.

Diplomacy Before 2018

Contacts between the Holy See and Beijing ran quietly for decades before any agreement was reached. A joint working group met at intervals from the early 2000s. A number of episcopal appointments in that decade were made through informal arrangements in which a candidate acceptable to both sides was selected, which is why a majority of mainland bishops already held papal mandates before 2018. The process broke down repeatedly, with unauthorised ordinations in 2006, 2010 and 2011 drawing formal Vatican protests, and with several bishops recognised by Rome unable to function publicly at all.

8. The 2018 Provisional Agreement on the Appointment of Bishops

The Provisional Agreement on the Appointment of Bishops was signed in Beijing on 22 September 2018 by Monsignor Antoine Camilleri for the Holy See and Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Chao for the People's Republic of China. It is provisional by design, it is limited in subject matter to the appointment of bishops, and its text has never been published by either party. That last fact is the source of most of the argument about it.

What the Holy See Has Said About It

The Holy See Press Office and the Secretariat of State have described the agreement in consistent terms since 2018. It is pastoral rather than political in purpose. It concerns the procedure for selecting and appointing bishops, and it does not touch diplomatic relations, which do not exist between the Holy See and the People's Republic. It leaves the Pope with the final and decisive word on every appointment, so that no bishop is named without his consent. It does not settle questions about the status of the Patriotic Association, the recognition of unregistered communities, or the Bishops' Conference. Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State, has repeatedly described it as a starting point on which trust has to be built rather than as a solution.

The Immediate Effects

On the day of signing, Pope Francis lifted the excommunications of seven bishops who had been ordained without a papal mandate and received them into full communion, among them Joseph Guo Jincai, Joseph Huang Bingzhang and Vincent Zhan Silu. The consequence was that for the first time since the 1950s every Catholic bishop in mainland China was in communion with the Bishop of Rome. Two Chinese bishops, Joseph Guo Jincai and John Baptist Yang Xiaoting, attended the Synod of Bishops in Rome in October 2018, the first mainland Chinese participation in a synod.

The first episcopal ordinations carried out under the new procedure followed in August 2019, with Anthony Yao Shun ordained Bishop of Jining on 26 August and Stephen Xu Hongwei ordained coadjutor of Hanzhong on 28 August. A further series of appointments and ordinations has taken place since, and the Holy See has published each of them in its daily bulletin, which is the best public record of how the process is actually working.

The Cost Paid Up Front

The reconciliation of the seven had a price that the Holy See did not conceal. In two dioceses, bishops recognised by Rome were asked to step aside or to accept demotion in favour of the newly reconciled bishops whom Beijing recognised. Bishop Peter Zhuang Jianjian of Shantou was asked to retire in favour of Joseph Huang Bingzhang, and Bishop Joseph Guo Xijin of Mindong was asked to serve as auxiliary under Vincent Zhan Silu. Reporting of those requests in early 2018 produced a great deal of public criticism, and the Holy See acknowledged them as painful decisions taken for the sake of a wider good.

The Criticism, Stated Fairly

Among Catholic critics, Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, has argued in print and in person that an unpublished agreement gives the state a role in choosing bishops that it should never have, that it abandons the unregistered communities who suffered for refusing to register, and that Benedict's 2007 Letter cannot be read as authorising it. Other critics have pointed to the absence of any published text as making the agreement impossible for Catholics to evaluate and impossible for anyone to hold either party to.

The Holy See's answer has been consistent as well. Rome argues that the alternative to a defective process was no process, that unauthorised ordinations were producing new excommunications every few years, that the unity of the Chinese episcopate under the Pope is a genuine good which did not exist before 2018, and that a provisional agreement is by definition a first step rather than a settlement. Both positions are held by serious Catholics, and a reader who has only ever met one of them has met half the argument.

Statements attributed to the Holy See in this section are drawn from Holy See Press Office communiques of 22 September 2018 and of the subsequent renewal dates, and from published interviews given by Cardinal Pietro Parolin. Cardinal Zen's position is drawn from his own public writing and interviews.

9. What the Agreement Has and Has Not Settled

The agreement has been renewed three times and has been publicly strained at least twice, which is a fair summary of where it stands. It was renewed for two years in October 2020, again for two years in October 2022, and in October 2024 it was renewed for four years, the longest term so far. Pope Francis, who signed it, died on 21 April 2025, and Leo XIV was elected on 8 May 2025; the renewal agreed in 2024 was made for a term that runs past that transition.

The Two Public Strains

In November 2022 the Holy See Press Office expressed surprise and regret at the installation of Bishop John Peng Weizhao as auxiliary bishop of Jiangxi, a jurisdiction the Holy See does not recognise, saying that the ceremony had taken place without the agreement of the Holy See and outside the terms of the accord. In April 2023 Bishop Joseph Shen Bin was installed as Bishop of Shanghai after a transfer from Haimen carried out without a papal mandate; the Holy See again stated that it had learned of the move from the press, and in July 2023 Pope Francis regularised the appointment, with Cardinal Parolin explaining publicly that the good of the Shanghai diocese had weighed more than the irregularity, and that the episode showed why a permanent liaison office in Beijing was needed.

What Remains Unsettled

Several large questions sit outside the agreement entirely, and it is worth listing them so that nobody mistakes the accord for more than it is. The unregistered Catholic communities have no civil legal standing and the agreement does not give them any. Bishops appointed by Rome before 2018 who lack civil recognition remain in an awkward position, able to be Catholic bishops and unable to act publicly as such. Dioceses that Rome recognises and Beijing does not, along with dioceses that Beijing has created or merged without Roman agreement, produce a map that does not match on the two sides. There are no diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the People's Republic, and the Holy See's mission for China continues to be accredited in Taipei. The 2018 accord addressed the appointment of bishops. It addressed none of this.

The 2019 Pastoral Guidelines on Civil Registration

One further Roman document deserves attention because it speaks directly to individual conscience. On 28 June 2019 the Holy See published Pastoral Guidelines concerning the civil registration of clergy in China. The Guidelines acknowledge that many clergy find registration unacceptable in conscience because the registration form contains a reference to independence, and they permit a priest who registers to add a written declaration, or where writing is impossible to state verbally before a witness, that he does so without prejudice to his fidelity to Catholic doctrine and to communion with the Pope. The Guidelines also state that clergy who decide not to register should be respected and not judged, and they ask the civil authorities not to pressure them. It is a document that leaves the decision with the individual priest and refuses to condemn either choice.

What Ordinary Catholic Life Looks Like Now

For most Chinese Catholics the accord changed very little week to week. Mass is celebrated, children are catechised, the dead are buried, and the parish gets on with its life. Seminaries in the registered system train priests under a curriculum reviewed by the authorities. Unregistered communities in some dioceses have quietly merged with registered ones as the bishop's status was regularised, and in others they have not. Chinese Catholic devotional life is intense and traditional in shape, built on the Rosary, Marian pilgrimage, long-standing family prayer and a strong attachment to the Mass. Anyone imagining a Church in crisis should imagine instead a Church in ordinary time under difficult conditions.

10. Sinicization and the Regulations on Religious Affairs

Sinicization, in Chinese zhongguohua, is the current governing policy for religion in China, and it means adapting each religion to Chinese culture and to socialist society. Xi Jinping set it out at the Central United Front Work Conference in 2015 and the National Religious Work Conference in 2016, and every recognised religious association has since produced a plan to implement it. The Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the China Christian Council jointly issued a five-year plan for the sinicization of Christianity covering 2018 to 2022, and the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association issued its own.

What It Involves in Practice

Reported implementation includes architectural changes to church buildings in a Chinese idiom, the display of national symbols in places of worship, the incorporation of Chinese cultural forms into hymnody and preaching, and a project to produce annotated editions of religious texts consistent with the policy. Between 2014 and 2016 a campaign in Zhejiang province removed crosses from the exterior of a large number of church buildings, registered ones included, under building-code justifications, and it drew protest from registered pastors as well as from unregistered ones. Provincial regulations in several places restrict religious instruction of people under eighteen.

The Regulations on Religious Affairs

The revised Regulations on Religious Affairs took effect on 1 February 2018, replacing the 2005 version. They require religious activity to take place in registered venues under a recognised religious body, tighten rules on religious education, on contacts with foreign religious organisations and on online religious content, and set out financial reporting obligations for religious groups. Later measures added specific rules for religious content on the internet, requiring a licence to publish religious material online. Since 2018 the whole system has been administered under the United Front Work Department of the Party rather than through a separate state agency.

How a Catholic Should Assess Sinicization

Catholic theology has a well-developed account of what genuine cultural adaptation is, and it is worth applying that account rather than reacting. The Church calls it inculturation, and it means that the gospel takes root in a culture, speaks its language, uses its forms, and purifies what needs purifying, while the content of the faith stays what it is. Matteo Ricci's project was inculturation. So was the 1939 instruction permitting Chinese Catholics to honour their ancestors. John Paul II described the principle in the 1990 encyclical Redemptoris Missio as an intimate transformation of authentic cultural values through their integration into Christianity, with the Church remaining herself throughout.

The Catholic test is therefore simple to state and hard to apply from outside: does the adaptation change the vessel or the content? A Chinese-language liturgy, Chinese sacred art, Chinese hymnody and Chinese theological writing are inculturation, and the Church has always wanted them. A requirement that preaching conform to a political programme is a different thing. Which of the two a given measure amounts to is a judgement that Chinese Christians themselves are best placed to make, and they do not all make it the same way. Our guide to Sacred Tradition and how doctrine develops sets out the underlying distinction between the deposit of faith and the forms in which it is expressed.

Why Foreign Commentary Often Gets This Wrong

Two errors recur in Western writing about sinicization. The first treats every Chinese element in a church as capitulation, which would condemn Ricci and the 1939 instruction along with everything else, and which insults Chinese Catholics whose faith is genuinely Chinese. The second treats the policy as merely cultural, which ignores its stated aim of adapting religion to a political order. Holding both facts at once is the only accurate position: the Church wants Chinese Christianity to be thoroughly Chinese, and the Church does not accept that a civil authority defines the content of preaching.

11. How Many Christians Are There in China?

Nobody knows, and the honest answer is that every published figure is an estimate produced by a stated method, with a wide gap between the highest and the lowest. There is no religious census in China, unregistered communities have every reason not to be counted, survey respondents in any country under-report minority affiliations, and the definition of a Christian varies between counting baptised members, regular attenders and self-identifiers.

The Main Published Figures

Three sources are worth knowing, because most numbers you will meet trace back to one of them. The Chinese State Council Information Office white paper of April 2018, China's Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief, gave 38 million Protestants and 6 million Catholics, counting people connected with the registered bodies. The Pew Research Center report Measuring Religion in China, published in August 2023, analysed Chinese social survey data and concluded that roughly 2 percent of Chinese adults identify as Christians, a much lower figure than several projections that had circulated widely in the previous decade. Independent researchers working from congregation counts have published estimates for the unregistered sector that run considerably higher than the official figures, and those estimates rest on assumptions that cannot be checked externally.

Figures above are attributed as stated: the 38 million and 6 million are from the Chinese State Council Information Office white paper of April 2018; the roughly 2 percent of adults is from the Pew Research Center report Measuring Religion in China (August 2023), which analyses Chinese survey data. This page publishes no estimate of its own and repeats no unattributed total.

Why the Growth Story Needs Care

Claims that China is about to become the world's largest Christian country have been made repeatedly, and they rest on extrapolating a growth rate observed in the 1980s and 1990s forward for decades. The Pew analysis found that the Christian share of the Chinese adult population has been roughly flat in survey data since around 2010, which is a serious challenge to that extrapolation. Growth in the earlier decades was real and very large. Whether it has continued at the same pace is a genuinely open question, and a Christian reader gains nothing from repeating a number because it is encouraging. For the parallel argument about decline in the West, see our page on whether Christianity is dying.

What the Numbers Cannot Tell You

Even a perfect count would leave the important questions open. It would not say how many of those counted attend regularly, how many were catechised, how many have access to a priest or a trained pastor, or how the age profile is moving. Chinese Catholic dioceses report shortages of priests in some regions and reasonable provision in others. Chinese Protestant congregations report large numbers of new attenders in cities and ageing congregations in emptying villages. Those textures matter more for prayer and for support than any headline total does.

12. What a Catholic Reader Should Do With This

Pray, learn the facts properly, and speak about Chinese Christians with the care you would want applied to your own parish. The Church in China is a live communion of millions of people who go to Mass and to Sunday worship in a situation most readers of this page will never have to navigate, and it is a poor use of them to turn them into a debating point in a Western argument.

Pray on 24 May

Benedict XVI asked the whole Church to pray for the Church in China on 24 May, the feast of Our Lady Help of Christians and the Sheshan feast, and the prayer he wrote in 2008 is short enough to learn by heart. Put the date in the calendar. Pray it in May, and pray it the rest of the year if you like. A day of prayer nobody keeps is a document rather than a practice, and our collection of daily prayers is a reasonable place to build the habit around it.

Get the Vocabulary Right

Several habits of speech do real damage. Calling the registered Catholic community a fake church is false: its bishops are in communion with the Pope, its Masses are valid, and its people are Catholics. Calling the unregistered community a rebel church is equally false: it exists because Catholics held to communion with Rome at cost to themselves. Treating the Three-Self Patriotic Movement as simply an arm of the state ignores the Chinese Protestant argument for independence from foreign control that long predates the Communist Party. Treating house churches as uniformly persecuted ignores how much the situation varies by province and by decade. Say what you can source, and stop there.

Read the Primary Documents

Four texts carry the primary record, and reading them puts a reader on the documents rather than on commentary about them: Benedict XVI's Letter to the Catholics of China of 27 May 2007, the Holy See Press Office communique of 22 September 2018 together with the questions and answers published alongside it, the Pastoral Guidelines on the civil registration of clergy of 28 June 2019, and the Chinese State Council white paper of April 2018 for the official Chinese framing. All four are public, all four are short enough to read in an evening, and reading them will settle most of the disputes you will run into.

Support Work That Is Actually Chinese

The consistent lesson of the last hundred years is that Chinese Christianity survives and grows through Chinese Christians. Foreign money and foreign personnel have carried real fruit and have also carried the association with foreign privilege that shaped the whole twentieth century. Support for Chinese seminaries, Chinese theological writing, Chinese Bible printing and Chinese clergy formation does more lasting good than anything organised around a Western programme, and it leaves behind institutions that do not depend on outsiders staying.

Keep the Wider Frame

The Catholic approach to divided Christians applies in China as everywhere else, and our guide to ecumenism sets out what the Church actually teaches about relations with other Christian bodies. The question of who governs the Church, which is what the Chinese Catholic division has always turned on, is the same question treated on our page about the papacy and the Petrine office. Neither page mentions China, and both explain the principles at work in it.

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