Religion

NANJING, China — On its official Web site the Beijing Olympics organizing committee advises visitors to the games that each person "take no more than one Bible into China."

But in a country where the ruling Communist Party still forbids its members from joining religious groups, a factory in this city in eastern China produced 6.7 million Bibles last year, more than 3 million of them for distribution in China.

The Nanjing Amity Printing Co. looks little different from the Ford, Motorola and Siemens factories nearby: A stone-and-glass office building stands in front of long white warehouses with tall windows. Its presses can produce 42 Bibles every minute.

Workers at the plant last week packaged some of 50,000 copies of the New Testament that will be distributed free at venues during the Olympics.

The distinction between Bibles brought in by foreigners and those printed in China is all a matter of perception in a country where proselytizing is banned.

China's leaders have a reputation for repressing faith — a history highlighted by a crackdown on Tibetan Buddhist monasteries after violent protests in Lhasa last March.

"Sometimes Western Christians don't understand the freedom that's within China, so I could imagine people arriving in Beijing with two huge suitcases full of Bibles thinking it's a good thing," said Peter Dean, a United Bible Societies consultant at the Nanjing factory.

"But what you want in China is legally printed Bibles," he added.

Religious services — Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist — will be available to athletes in the Olympic Village. But many of China's estimated 60 million Christians continue to face restrictions.

By law, Christians are only allowed to worship privately and in state-sanctioned churches.

But possibly two thirds of Chinese Christians belong to home churches outside of the state system, said Daniel Bays, a professor of Christian history at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Local officials sometimes disrupt or monitor unsanctioned churches for fear that they might lead to organized protest. The government generally tightens its control around important events and several Christians in Beijing said police had stepped up monitoring ahead of the Olympics.

Beijing also regulates the production of Bibles by barring most printing companies from publishing religious materials and by requiring China's state-sanctioned Protestant churches to apply for permission to increase production.

Chinese laws prohibit Bibles from being sold outside of registered churches and seminaries and their affiliated bookstores.

Particularly for some 700 million Chinese living in rural areas, getting a Bible can be difficult.

During the rule of Mao Zedong, China's leader from 1949 until 1976, foreign missionaries were largely forced out of China. During the Cultural Revolution, the violent decade in the 1960s and '70s, being caught with Christian books could lead to harsh punishment.

After Mao died, China's leaders initiated liberal reforms and in 1979 the government began to allow factories to print Bibles. To make Bibles more accessible in China, United Bible Societies — a partnership of 145 national Bible societies — donated printing equipment to the Amity Foundation.

From 505,000 Bibles printed in 1988, production rose to 1.6 million in 1993 and to 3.1 million last year.

Chinese officials have never turned down a request from the state church to print more Bibles and with its new $20 million facility and a planned expansion, the printing company "has the capability to meet whatever needs are in China," said Dean, the consultant at the factory.

"If you're a Christian, you see it is a wonderful foundational base in China for the things God wants to do," he said.