Time magazine has the story. Excerpt:
. . . But in the face of China's larger restrictions on religion, some overseas aid groups say, a boom in Bible production doesn't mean much. "It reflects the rapid growth of the number of Christians in China," says Bob Fu, who runs the U.S.-based China Aid Association, an advocacy group for mainland Christians. "But I don't see that can be a sign of increasing religious freedom." Several Chinese have recently been arrested for illegally bringing Bibles into the country, Fu points out. On Nov. 28, police raided the house of Beijing bookstore owner Shi Weihan, confiscating Bibles and other
religious publications and placing him under detention. And Zhou Heng, a businessman and leader of an underground church in China's western Xinjiang region, was arrested in August for receiving three tons of Bibles from South Korea.
Daniel Bays, head of the Asian Studies program at Calvin College in Michigan, argues that China's restrictions on Christianity aren't necessarily a fear of religion, but of the possible threat to the Party's leadership that comes from any organized group. "On the whole the authorities don't really care what people believe," he says. "What they are afraid of [is people] getting together and meeting in secret and not registering [with the government]. It doesn't bother them that people believe in Jesus. It bothers them that they don't want to register and they don't know who [the] leaders are."
Under Chinese law, the Bibles Amity prints can be distributed only through officially sanctioned churches. But in recent years it has become easier for house churches to procure Bibles, often buying them through registered churches. Some Bibles are even appearing in bookstores, despite lacking the registration numbers required of any printed work. Jean-Paul Wiest, an expert on Chinese Catholicism who teaches at the Beijing Center, says his students have no problems getting religious materials. "Bibles are very widely available," he says. . . .