World’s biggest Bible factory opens in a ‘Godless’ China

The aircraft hangar-sized plant on 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-meter plant on an industrial park neighboring 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 U.S.

The first Bibles were to roll off the presses at the giant new factory before the end of this year with the help of a state-of-the-art US$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 unauthorized 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 labor for possessing thousands of unauthorized 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 the 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 Mandarin-language editions sold through official churches within China for as little as 9.50 yuan (US$1.30) per Bible thanks to the paper donated by overseas Christians. China still prohibits the sale of Bibles through regular book shops.

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