Professor Fenggang Yang from Purdue University’s sociology department has announced that China will have the largest Christian (Protestant) population in the world by the year 2025. Specifically, it is expected to reach approximately 160 million by then. However, the expert also expressed that the global community may not be ready for such a drastic change.
Yang, the author of Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule, stated that China currently has around 58 million Protestant believers, but in less than a generation it is expected to exceed that of the United States (158 million). This is not even including constantly growing Catholic population. Yang had this to say: "Mao thought he could eliminate religion. He thought he had accomplished this. It's ironic – they didn't. They actually failed completely," he said.
For the past 60 years, China was an officially atheist nation, where students are taught from a very young age that there is no such thing as God and science is a highly favored field. When the communist party came to power in 1949, Mao Zedong expelled all the foreign missionaries.
Although churches were allowed to function under strict government regulation, Chinese Christians had to go through some serious persecutions until the 1970s when the Cultural Revolution came to a close for Mao had termed religion as “poison”. Even to this day, though there is freedom of religion, it is still illegal to participate in evangelical activity or spread the faith.
However, thousands of small house churches and even underground churches were there to witness great revival in China, and even today the nation is considered an important stepping stone in reaching the unreached nations such as the Middle East and North Korea where American and Korean missionaries are unwelcome.
