World's biggest Bible factory opens in China

NANJING: It is a country where people caught smuggling religious texts or organising illicit services can face years in jail. Yet China is about to become home to the world's biggest Bible factory, producing a staggering one million copies a month.

The aircraft hangar-sized plant in an industrial park outside the eastern city of Nanjing will be capable of producing more than one Bible every second and is expected to supply one quarter of all the world's Bibles by 2009.

Amity Printing, a joint venture between a Chinese Christian charity and the UK-based United Bible Societies, is already printing up to 800,000 Bibles a month, 80 percent of which are distributed to officially-approved churches across China.

In its existing factory complex, overgrown with creepers and dwarfed by new high-rise apartment blocks on the outskirts of the city of 7 million, a 600-strong workforce of mostly non-Christian locals work on imported machines to print Bibles in 90 languages ranging from Slovakian to Swahili, as well as Braille.

But the 20-year-old company is about to move from its suburban factory to the new 85,000-square-metre plant on an industrial park neighbouring new Ford and Motorola factories after cornering a huge slice of the world Bible market. Amity Printing already supplies 600,000 Bibles a year to the UK and twice as many to the US.

The first Bibles will roll off the presses at the giant new factory before the end of the year with the help of a state-of-the-art $4 million Timson publishing press shipped to China from Europe.

There is a massive irony in China becoming the leading exporter of Bibles at a time when religious freedoms in the nation of 1.3 billion remain tightly restricted and smuggling of unauthorised Bibles can still lead to a jail sentence.

Earlier this year, one of the leaders of China's underground Protestant church was released after serving three years hard labour for possessing thousands of unauthorised Bibles. He reportedly spent his sentence making soccer balls for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Bibles were effectively banned everywhere in China until 1979 when the virtually the only book most Chinese families were allowed to keep in their homes were red-bound copies of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book of quotations. More than 1 billion were published and top officials would have several copies each.

The easing of anti-religious laws under Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping enabled the Chinese Protestant charity Amity Foundation to set up an officially endorsed Bible factory in 1986 using printing machines and paper supplied by the United Bible Society.

More than 50 million Bibles have since been produced, over 40 million of them were Mandarin-language editions sold through official churches within China for as little as 9.50 yuan ($1.30) per Bible thanks to the paper donated by overseas Christians. China still prohibits the sale of Bibles through regular bookshops.

The only westerner employed at the factory, New Zealand engineer Peter Dean, said he was staggered at the factory's growth.

"Sometimes I sit there and think 'Where on earth are all these Bibles going?" he said before turning to a map. "But look at the size of China. These Bibles are going all around the country from Beijing to Shandong to the very edge of Mongolia."

There are 55,000 state-registered Protestant churches in China while estimates of the total number of Christians vary from 40 million to 100 million.

"There are something like five churches opening every couple of days across the country," said Dean.

There is no religious paraphernalia or portraits or even a single crucifix to be seen anywhere in the Nanjing factory, a courtesy to China's strict religious laws.

Workers - many of them former farmers who had no books in their homes when they were hired and trained up as printers - go about their work in plain blue overalls. "This is a printing company," said Dean. "Some of our workers are Christians. Some aren't. That is their business."

Ironically, all but one of the dozens of workers we spoke to insisted they were not Christians. One woman, a Ms Li who has worked at Amity since 1987 and now earns $320 a month, said, "I work here for the salary, not because of my beliefs. I print the Bibles but I have no time and no interest in reading them."

Another worker, 35-year-old production line manager Mr Wang, said, "I do not believe in God but I am much happier to be working for Christian bosses than Taiwanese or Japanese bosses. They are kind people.

"Also, there is no need to worry here that we will one day be out of work. More and more people in China celebrate Christmas so we are sure that more and more people are Christians - and this is about the only factory in China where they can print Bibles."

Dean said the factory's quiet success was evidence of growing spirituality in China.

A simple, low-key religious commemoration will be held attended by church and Bible society officials when the new plant has its official opening in May.

By then, the biggest miracle of all may be that the number of Bibles in communist China, still an officially atheist state, outnumber the remaining copies of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.