I think people cannot live very well without belief in something. Across Communist China, religious belief is exploding as millions of people such as Ms. Guo embrace Christianity and other major faiths. The wildfirelike spread of religion is a potentially explosive challenge for China's officially atheistic Communist Party as it struggles to maintain its iron rule in this vast country. At the same time, China's effort to restrict religious freedom has emerged as one of the most charged issues in tense U.S.-Chinese relations. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom says that religious persecution worsened in China last year.
Chinese officials reject such criticism as uninformed and unfair.
In their defense, they point to the millions of new believers such as Ms. Guo who practice their faith openly, in churches filled to capacity across China. Chinese officials say that more than 100 million of China's 1.3 billion people are religious believers. Many people outside the country, including America, don't understand the real religious situation in China. But while many Chinese say they are freer to practice their faith than at any point since the Communists took power in 1949, a closer examination of religious practice in China today reveals a complicated mosaic of freedom, restraint and persecution, church leaders, believers and foreign experts say. China's estimated 20 million Christians, for example, are free to attend government-licensed churches.