How has the Chinese Patriotic Society modified the Bible in China?

How has the Chinese Patriotic Society modified the Bible in China?

As far as any Christian denomination is concerned, China is a messy affair when it comes to Christianity in general. Believers are persecuted, arrested and often sentenced to prison without trial.

The Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association in China would have to follow all the directives of the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping. The Vatican has never declared the Chinese Catholics attending CPCA-sponsored church services to be schismatic, though organizations outside of China have urged this.

All CPCA must follow XI Jinping in the new norms he is establishing throughout China.

Chinese authorities have reportedly become nervous about the rise of Christianity and the protests in Hong Kong, in which Christians have played a key role. Official estimates put the number of Christians in China at 30-40 million, but the persecution watchdog Open Doors estimates there are up to 100 million believers. China is forecast to have the world’s largest population of Christians by 2030, overtaking the United States.

As well as in larger centres such as Beijing, Christianity is booming in rural regions such as Hebei, Henan and Anhui, with large areas of disadvantage or poverty. The Christian population is split between membership of state-sponsored churches, such as the so-called Three-Self Patriotic Movement, and underground or house churches.

Persecution is worsening: Churches have been forced to change the 10 commandments

The religious liberty magazine Bitter Winter has reported several recent incidents that show persecution is worsening. The magazine says churches in the central province of Henan have been forced to replace signs showing the Ten Commandments with quotes from President Xi Jinping.

“The core socialist values and Chinese culture will help to immerse various religions of China," reads one of Xi’s quotes. "Support religious community in interpreting religious thought, doctrines and teachings in a way that conforms with the needs of the progress of the times.”

Church leaders say it is part of eroding Christian doctrine in the official Three-Self churches, which can be blacklisted or shut down if they don’t display the messages.

Another report says the Communist Party has begun to restrict Christian activities for children, in line with a long-standing law against religious conversion under the age of 18.

The Religious Affairs Bureau has reportedly begun to enforce the law by closing Sunday schools and ordering churches to erect signs accordingly. - China replaces Ten Commandments

I can find no direct proof that XI Jinping has ordered the Bible itself to be altered, but it would not surprise he if he wanted to. The wording of most articles are indicative of this move, but they do not state it outright. Churches are forced to replace Ten Commandments with Xi Jinping quotes. If he could, he would alter the Scriptures. The problem with that directive is that the West would react to such a governmental rule, infringing on the rights of religious believers.

Do Chinese Catholics have access to vatican.va to see the Chinese Bible posted on their resource library?

Possibly, but it is highly doubtful. The Chinese government obvious does not trust the West and the Vatican in high on that list. The Vatican website featuring Bibles in various languages including Chinese are almost certainly blocked by the Chinese mainland authorities.

Unlike, for example, the United States or European countries, China has placed its internet behind a strict screen of censorship dubbed the Great Firewall. It’s a highly sophisticated system that can block connections from Chinese IP addresses to ones that are considered harmful to the Chinese public. This includes adult entertainment and gambling sites as well as those featuring particularly violent content.

Most striking of all, though, is that so few foreign media sites are accessible to people in the People’s Republic. The Chinese Communist Party tightly controls information flow and prefers that its people not read sources that haven’t been vetted by the regime. That being said, it’s not necessarily a rule set in stone: For example, How-To Geek isn’t blocked on the Chinese internet (at least, not yet).

Another bugbear of the Communist regime is non-Chinese social media sites with their supposedly lax moderation. As such, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a number of other similar sites are not accessible from China and are instead replaced with home-grown versions of those services.

Besides blocking sites directly, the Great Firewall also doesn’t allow most search engines to work on the Chinese internet: For example, DuckDuckGo is banned, as is the world’s biggest search engine, Google, which includes products like Drive and Docs.

Google suspended operations in the Middle Kingdom in 2010, citing an unwillingness to cooperate with the Chinese government’s censorship. In 2018, however, it was reported that Google was working on a censored search engine for China dubbed Dragonfly, although the project was quickly suspended once the news leaked. Microsoft seems to have even fewer scruples than Google, and its search engine, Bing, has been working for years under censorship rules, although it did get switched off for a day in 2019, presumably as a warning from the regime to Western corporations. - What to Expect from the Internet in China

Many can make their own conclusions about the Chinese Communist Party and XI Jinping in particular. He wants to create himself a god and thus possibly becoming the Beast of the Apocalypse.

On a personal note: I am very leery of Xi’s intentions. These statements in the press just before the Coronavirus started in the Wuhan province of China. What if this virus was actually a laboratory released air-born virus? What if this was just a trial run of the Communist Regime in China. (Was Covid-19 made inside a Chinese lab? ) This reminds me of the Criminal Minds series S4 E24 TV movie Amplification. Just recently China has threatened the USA with reprisals if they withdraw from the 2022 Olympic Games to be held in China!

I have not found anything regarding the Chinese Patriotic Society but there are reports that Xi Jinping has done as you suggest :

Catholic churches were torn down or denuded of their crosses and statues. Images of the Madonna and Child replaced with pictures of “People’s Leader” Xi Jinping. Signs posted outside evangelical churches forbidding anyone under the age of 18 from entering. The Ten Commandments painted over with quotes from Xi.

These are just some of the ways that the Chinese Communist Party is persecuting Christians in China.

How Xi Jinping Destroyed Religion and made himself a god

(Publicised by the Central Tibetan Administration)

The Chinese President, like Chairman Mao before him, is trying to propose himself as an object of worship worthier than god. Bitter Winter has selected some typical reports about this bizarre, yet worrying development.

The Ten Commandments have been removed from nearly every Three-Self church and meeting venue in the county and replaced with quotations from Xi Jinping.

Bitter Winter .org