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Among the most fertile grounds for religious flowering are the sterile skyscrapers of China's cities. In the countryside, citizens stripped of life-long job security and health care are turning, perhaps unsurprisingly, to religion for spiritual solace. But China's yuppies have everything they were taught should make them happy: money, jobs, status. Three years ago, Beijing resident Liang (she would only give part of her name), a manager at a multinational company in Beijing, was approached by her expat boss, who asked her why she wore a cross on a chain around her neck. Liang, a prosperous young woman with a taste for expensive jewelry and clothes, explained that the necklace was more of a fashion statement than a symbol of religious conviction. Nevertheless her boss invited her to a Bible study held during lunch hour in the office. After a few prayer sessions with her colleagues, Liang was secretly baptized in 1999. She soon persuaded her mother, sister and two other fellow employees to join her. Now she and other worshipers exchange church notices by thinly coded e-mails.
The cities are ripe for proselytizing because many upwardly mobile Chinese, having attained a measure of commercial success, say they are dissatisfied defining their lives by how much they earn and what they own. "We had all tried to let money fill our lives," Liang says. "But it was always a race for the nicest shoes, the nicest cell phone, the nicest apartment. I just got tired of constantly running around without anything real to believe in."
Increasingly, people like Liang are turning to Christianity, which is the mainland's fastest-growing religion. Still viewed with suspicion by the government as an agent of Western imperialism, the faith now attracts some urban Chinese precisely because it is foreign. If an M.B.A. from an American school is desirable, these Chinese yuppies wonder, why not subscribe also to Western theology? Each year, 2 million Chinese are secretly baptized through Christian churches, whose ranks have swelled to 50 million in China, according to Hong Kong Protestant groups.
While China's Christian soldiers were once predominantly the rural elderly—farmers converted to the faith by foreign missionaries roaming the countryside before 1949—the crusade nowadays is led by young people previously untouched by religious tradition. Li, a fresh-faced advertising major at a Beijing university, likes to read her Bible in the privacy of her dorm room. She's not alone in her spiritual quest. Her roommate has taken to reading Buddhist scriptures. "Some older people think that religion is bad," says Li. "But young people are more open to it, because they realize that the things their parents believed in—like communism—just aren't relevant anymore."
Sentiments like that rankle the Beijing establishment, especially because charismatic faiths have the power to inspire and organize citizens more effectively than the Communist Party itself. Among government leaders, the resurgence of religion brings back memories of the animist-led Boxer Rebellion, which nearly toppled the Qing dynasty a century before. China also bridles at foreign influences that threaten to spill into politics; more than half of new worshipers turning to underground Protestantism in the past decade were converted either by an overseas evangelist or someone trained by one, according to Taiwanese and Korean Christian organizations that conduct missionary work on the mainland. The Vatican, too, is still seen as a meddlesome foreign power, especially when it announces ordinations and new saints without first consulting with the official Chinese Catholic Church. "That these illegal religions exist is a loss of face for the government," says a university professor of theology in Beijing. "They went to the trouble of setting up official churches, but some people continue to defy the government by believing in illegal religions."
Still, Beijing is beginning to recognize that the majority of underground Christian congregations are the least of their problems. China's leaders are focusing their ire on politically active groups like the Muslims in the western province of Xinjiang, who have been clamoring for independence for decades. Fringe Christian sects such as the South China Church and Lightning from the East have also been punished for requiring a devotion that supersedes the Party's authority. And Qi Gong sects like Falun Gong and Zhong Gong, which have made their antigovernmental sentiment part of their very essence, are undergoing wholesale extermination. Beijing's harsh crackdown on Falun Gong, the group branded an "evil cult" by the government, was galvanized by the fact that it was able to mobilize 10,000 acolytes in front of China's leadership compound in the capital in 1999, the largest protest in the country since Tiananmen. "The government does not want anyone challenging its power," says Frank Lu, a human-rights advocate based in Hong Kong, "especially a religious group that has more control over its followers than the Communist Party has."
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