STORY BY TARA MALONE | Daily Herald Staff Writer

SHANGHAI, China - Politics alone did not brand Xiao Meilin's family an enemy of Communist China.

Their Christian faith proved just as potent a scarlet letter.

Christianity - a religion ferried to China along the storied Silk Road linking East to West - and its native devotees received sharp scrutiny.

The stigma of the Western faith weighed heavily on Xiao Meilin, her family and countless others.

Christianity did not drive her father from China. Nor did it cause her mother to be imprisoned or her family to be divided for more than 30 years. But it was a factor.

"I may not be a good Christian," the 64-year-old Elmhurst woman says, "but God is always in my heart."

Nearly six decades after the Communist Revolution, Christianity remains taboo in many parts of China.

Official government policy touts religious tolerance, but in some corners, organized worship remains an affront to communist ideals.

An estimated 5 million Catholics live in China, less than 1 percent of the country's 1.3 billion residents, U.S. State Department reports show. The reports also suggest the actual number likely is much higher. The Protestant faith claims 15 million believers in China, official records show. Buddhism is most widely practiced with 100 million devotees. Though banned in China, the Falun Gong religious movement claims more than 70 million members, according to Amnesty International.

State-approved churches preach a message of self-governance, self-support and self-propagation. Universal themes like love, humility and respect are espoused, while larger questions of faith typically go unanswered.

Independent Christian churches, called "house churches," are freer to tackle thornier faith issues, but membership can be risky.

Yet pockets of religious tolerance exist throughout China.

Shanghai - long viewed as China's portal to the West - is paramount among them.

On one Sunday morning, worshippers flocked to the St. Ignatius Catholic Cathedral in Shanghai's tree-lined Xujiahui neighborhood.

A tired-looking man clad in a guard uniform and a threadbare wool hat paused by the offertory basket on his way out after the 7:30 a.m. Mass. Quietly, he dropped a thick wad of yuan into the basket and walked away.

Near the front of the church, a group gathered around an image of a Christ child surrounded by angels and chanted a prayer for those who have died.

Cheng Zhihua raised his voice in the chorus, freely expressing the prayer of remembrance. The 55-year-old man said he walks to Mass every Sunday, without fear.

"Now it's quite independent," Cheng said. "People who believe in Christianity go to church quite freely."

St. Ignatius, built in 1906, holds 2,500 people.

On this Sunday, Yang Junting was one of them. The 47-year-old man from Henan, an eastern province called the cradle of Chinese civilization, knelt in a pew, a rosary dangling from hands roughened by years as a soldier.

"I didn't believe in any religion," Yang said.

He found it, though, in 1981 when he returned to his family after years of soldiering to find they had become Christian.

"I found a photo of the Virgin Mary hanging on the wall. I asked, 'Why did you put a woman's photo at home,'" Yang recalled. "My father pushed me to become a man who believes in the Catholic church. Little by little, my religion grew stronger and stronger."

Continue:
• A childhood interrupted
• Keeping the faith can be a test of it
• Strung together