The Bible is America’s best-selling book,... Yet a single Chinese company has a near monopoly on Bible printing, meaning that
any rupture in the supply chain—say, from U.S. or Chinese government policies—would lead to a Bible shortage in America. This poses a serious threat both to American Christians’ fundamental religious liberty rights and to national security...... More than 20 million Protestant and Catholic Bibles are printed annually by America’s largest Bible publishing companies. But few are aware that most of these Bibles are printed in China,.... Thanks to American publishing decisions, American Christians rely on a state that represses Christianity for their Bibles
While China intensifies religious persecution at home and is considered by U.S. Intelligence to be “
the greatest threat to America today,” this Bible supply chain is increasingly precarious. Yet the Bible publishers have no plans to use alternative printing presses.....the supply chain was tested in 2019, when the Trump administration proposed broad trade tariffs to better balance U.S.-China trade relations. As the plan included tariffs against Bibles, America’s Bible publishers found themselves alongside Beijing vociferously lobbying Washington against the measure.
HarperCollins Christian Publishing (HCCP)....CEO Mark Schoenwald
denounced the proposed tariff before the U.S. Trade Commission last year. He called it a “Bible tax,” and argued that it would force his company to reduce sales and discontinue some Bible editions. The Trump administration quickly exempted Bibles from the China tariffs....
.It’s not difficult to imagine that if the Chinese government put a bit of pressure on the supply chain, American Bible publishers would be motivated to lobby against other policies that are similarly tough on China, effectively making them soft power assets of Beijing. ......The tariff threat is over, but the Bible continues to be at risk—most imminently from Chinese Communist Party policies, not Washington. National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe
notes that many of China’s prominent companies offer only “a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.” Amity is no exception. It is linked to the
China Christian Council (CCC), which came under direct CCP oversight and guidance in 2018
.... Beijing
announced it was launching a plan to retranslate or reinterpret the venerable Chinese Union Bible ( the chinese bible not the one they sell to america ) in order to align it with CCP policies. This was part of a new five-year plan to “Sinicize” Christianity. Chinese Christian experts have reason to fear that the forthcoming version will drop the
book of Revelation and distort moral lessons through new scriptural commentaries—the account of Jesus forgiving the adulterous woman in John 8, for example, was already altered in 2020 Chinese textbooks (used in government-run secondary vocational schools) to claim that Jesus
stoned the woman....So far, there has been no vociferous protest from the American publishers. They have not used their leverage to stop the ongoing crackdown on house churches.
