NANJING, China – Guo Heng was out for a Sunday morning stroll two years ago when she found herself outside St. Paul's Church. She had never attended a religious service, but she wandered inside on a whim.
"What I heard moved me, so I became a Christian," said Ms. Guo, 32, a primary school teacher. "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. In its annual report to the White House and Congress last month, the bipartisan commission accused China of "egregious violations of religious freedom," torturing believers, interfering in the selection of religious leaders, and destroying up to 3,000 unregistered religious buildings.
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.
"Just because some officials maybe make some mistakes in China doesn't mean the Chinese government's policy on freedom of religion has changed," said Bishop Fu Tieshan, who heads the Beijing diocese of China's government-approved Catholic church. "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. They read the same Bible, sing the same hymns and listen to the same sermons as Christians in the United States.
"If somebody says or writes there is no religious freedom in China, please ask them to come here and see with their own eyes," said the Rev. Kan Renping, 35, one of three pastors at St. Paul's, which has seen its membership triple to 4,000 people in the last seven years.
Aggressive persecution
But Chinese Christians face a host of government-imposed restrictions, ranging from a ban on evangelizing to strict criteria for new church construction. And those believers who reject the authorized churches as tools of the Communist government – and instead meet secretly in "house churches" – face far worse.
The Chinese government aggressively persecutes these "underground Christians" and destroys their unregistered churches, according to international human-rights organizations and church leaders and believers. Scores, and maybe hundreds, of Christians are in jail or labor camps for pursuing religious activities outside China's government-approved churches, say Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Last month, Chinese authorities arrested a 79-year-old underground Roman Catholic bishop and several priests and lay Catholics just before Easter celebrations.
The government makes similar attempts to control other major religions, including Buddhism and Islam. Chinese authorities have taken a particularly harsh stance toward zealous religious sects and spiritual groups such as Falun Gong, denouncing them as dangerous cults and arresting their followers.
"We guarantee the free practice of religion, but we also have laws and regulations regarding religion that must be followed," said Zhang Wei Da, deputy director of the government Religious Affairs Bureau's department of policies and regulations. "For example, if you establish a temple or a public place for religion, you must be registered. If you are not registered, that activity must be forbidden."
The aim of registration "is to protect the legal position of these religious groups," Mr. Zhang said.
House churches are forbidden because they could promote the spread of cults by allowing "untrained" leaders to lead services, Chinese officials say.
"They are cults," Mr. Zhang said. "They are evil. They are not based on formal, professional religious beliefs. This activity disturbs security and stability. A lot of illegal activity in the guise of religious practice are held in houses."
Mr. Zhang also makes no apologies for the church destruction, which has been denounced by the U.S. State Department and international human-rights groups.
"They build those places not for religious practice, but to collect money from people and cheat people," he said. "Most of the buildings also violate city planning regulations. Genuine religious places have never been destroyed."
At the same time, Chinese officials deny that the government systematically arrests underground Christians simply for their beliefs.
"If somebody is arrested and detained, they must have committed a crime," Mr. Zhang said. "It's not because he is a believer of some religion."
Official wariness has been deepened by the role of religion in separatist struggles being waged by Muslims in the Xinjiang region and by Buddhists in Tibet. Crackdowns by Chinese authorities in both places have fueled further charges of religious persecution.
Da Ji Ci Li, 20, an ethnic Tibetan who lives in Beijing, said he worships the two exiled leaders of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama and Panchen Lama. But he does so discreetly, because of the government's fierce condemnation of the Dalai Lama, he said.
"I think most Tibetans feel like I do," he said. "Some things we are free to do, and some things we aren't."
For example, on July 6, the Dalai Lama's birthday, Tibetans in Beijing cannot follow custom and offer free goods to their customers.
"If I offered free tea to my customers, I would get in trouble," he said.
'So much progress'
But leaders of China's government-sanctioned churches say the registration requirements and other restrictions are a small price to pay for the relative freedom and legal protection they have gained over the last 20 years.
"I am not intending to paint too rosy a picture of the church in China, but the church situation is not quite as terrible as painted in the West," said Dr. Wenzao Han, president of the China Christian Council, the governing body of China's authorized Protestant church. "We've made so much progress over the last two decades."
Church leaders say the treatment of Christians varies from province to province and locality to locality. But they reject suggestions that the central government is systematically trying to stifle religious freedom.
"China being so vast, you can't expect all the government policies, including the policy on religious freedom, would be implemented everywhere the same," Dr. Han said. "The general atmosphere is getting much better than before."
China's underground Christians and international monitors disagree. But for Christians content with attending government-authorized churches and following the rules laid down by the Communist authorities, life is good, believers say.
New generation
Even though evangelizing is prohibited, more and more Chinese are flocking to churches, temples and mosques, driven by what many people here say is disillusionment with the Communist revolution and a growing hunger for spiritual fulfillment.
Zhang Li Guan, a 19-year-old Beijing bookkeeper, grew up in a family of Catholics but became a Christian only last year. Her parents and grandparents have told her about how they worshiped at home during the 1950s and 1960s, when Christians faced widespread persecution and discrimination in China, she said.
To Ms. Zhang, whose life has come to revolve around the church, those stories sound like ancient history.
"It's not like that now," she said as she prepared to collect the offering at Beijing's South Cathedral one recent Sunday morning. "We feel completely free."
There are no Communist Party trappings at the Sunday morning services at St. Paul's, an ivy-cloaked church built by Presbyterian missionaries in 1922 and today one of seven legal Protestant churches in Nanjing. The pews are filled with men and women poring over Chinese-language Bibles and singing hymns.
The Bibles are yet another symbol of the Chinese government's more tolerant attitude toward religion. They are printed on the outskirts of the city, at the Nanjing Amity Printing Co., a joint venture formed by Chinese Christians and the British-based United Bible Society. The plant has printed 28 million Chinese-language Bibles since 1987.
Lu Qian, 35, works at the plant. And like a growing number of her co-workers, she is a Christian.
Every Thursday, a group of 20 to 30 workers gathers at the house of the plant's deputy general manager to read the Bible and pray, she said.
"At the beginning, I felt a little bit of fear," said Ms. Lu. "Now, I don't. China is open to the outside world, and the government gives a lot more freedom to people."