Samuel Gregg: 'One more Christian, one fewer Chinese' tenet dying
Religious freedom is not yet a reality in China, but thanks partly to free markets its dawn seems less far off
February 28, 2007

COMMUNIST regimes rarely advertise their failures. This makes all the more striking the recent report about religion's resurgence in China on the front page of the Chinese Communist Party's English-language flagship, China Daily.

Basing its comments on a poll of 4500 people by Shanghai university professors which found that 31.4 per cent of people over 16 considered themselves religious, the newspaper reported that extrapolating these results across China indicated that about 300 million Chinese regard themselves as religious. Of these, about 40 million are Christian, far higher than the 2005 official estimate of 16 million.

Even more striking are the demographics associated with China's religious growth. the rest