Churches at the Margin

Abstract

The role of border regions in Chinese politics highlights a paradoxical significance for official political borders in geospatial research. Even though border regions have been physically remote from political and cultural centers, the zones have served as critical places of resistance and social change. For example, the border regions (邊區/边区 bianqu) played important roles for the rise of the Chinese Communist Party during and after the Sino-Japanese War. Ethnographic case studies of churches in China led us to think that Christian groups might operate in border regions in similar ways. To test this on a national scale, we have drawn upon a data source on religious sites documented in the 2004 China Economic Census to visualize the geographic concentration of Protestant and Catholic sites across China, and to predict Christian growth over time in China using a set of predictors derived from theories specific to China. Our analysis shows that Christian churches in China grew more rapidly in counties closer to provincial borders. The fact that Christianity thrives in border regions is not surprising since leaders of resistance movements have been using similar tactics of evasion over the provincial border in the past century.