Why Your Bible Was Made in China
Does
it matter that the Good Book is printed where many Christians lack one?
By Sarah
Eekhoff Zylstra in
Christianity Today
Should consumers worried about the origins of their clothing, coffee, and chocolate focus on a more spiritual item: the Bible?
Chances
are good that your favorite Bible was printed in China. The overwhelming
majority of Bibles sold at Christian bookstores or Barnes & Noble were
printed there, said Mark Bertrand of Bible Design Blog. And more publishers are
joining in.
“A lot of
people have misgivings about that,” he said. “Some of it is, ‘Oh, our Bibles
are printed in Communist China.’ Others are concerned about the economic
situation, about what conditions these Bibles were produced under.”
The
Chinese government’s restriction of Bible distribution is also troubling, said
ChinaAid’s Bob Fu. “When brothers and sisters are being persecuted and arrested
for their beliefs based on the same Bible, what does it mean to purchase an
exported copy that says Made in China?”
Since
China’s only legal printer of Bibles, Amity Printing Company, published its first
Bible in cooperation with the United Bible Societies (UBS) in 1987, 117 million
Bibles have followed. More than half of those were printed in the last six
years, including 12.4 million in 2013, making China the world’s biggest Bible
publisher. Three out of four of last year’s Bibles were produced for export.
“The
simple reason is that China is a manufacturing powerhouse in world trade,” said
Amity board member David Thorne. “The more complex and interesting answer is
that it is the outcome of God’s hand on the mission of the church.”
Choosing a
printer comes down to “quality and competitive price,” said Tim Bensen, a buyer
at Tyndale House Publishers. “We print all over the world,” he said. “Amity
does good work.”
Printing
Bibles is more difficult than printing other types of books, and requires a
certain amount of expertise, he said.
Randy
Bishop, director of Bible production at HarperCollins Christian Publishing,
agrees. “Bibles have more steps in the production process,” he said. “However,
the main feature that makes a Bible unique is thin paper. It takes a special
expertise to print, fold, gather, and bind Bible paper.”
Along with
providing skilled employment at above-market salaries, Amity maintains
government standards in work practices and uses environmentally friendly
materials, said Thorne. And the UBS share of Amity profits is used to subsidize
Bible distribution in rural China, where Scripture is harder to obtain.
So when an
American purchases a Bible made in China, it doesn’t mean a Chinese Christian
will now lack one. The difficulty Chinese Christians have in acquiring Bibles
isn’t because of Amity’s printing abilities, but because of government
restrictions on sales, said Barry Werner, chief operating officer of Bibles for
China.
The
official Three-Self Patriotic Movement churches are the only ones who can
order—and sell—the Bibles. That leaves organizations like Bibles for China,
which gave away about 200,000 Bibles in rural China last year, to place their
orders through the church.
But the
bigger problem is Christians’ lack of money, said Thorne. “As demand has
increased year-by-year, larger publishing quotas have been approved. Because of
funding shortfall, sometimes the church has not managed to utilize its entire
annual quota.”
While the
current sales arrangement is often frustrating, it’s eased by technology, said
Brent Fulton, president of ChinaSource. “China leads the world in terms of
people accessing the Web via their smartphones, and you can get a Bible app
just like you can anywhere,” he said. “There’s no limitation to that.”
And maybe
Westerners seeing Made in China on their Bibles, Fu said, “can be a reminder to
pray for those who made these Bibles.”
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