If they were not advertising for fear of reprisals, you wouldn’t notice 1 in 17.
Oh, absolutely. I saw a program, (trying to remember if it was the same one,) that mentioned the different variations, some more like new age spiritualism.
All of that was mentioned in the program I saw, too. That last one was quite an interesting character.
Your basic Christian that does nothing to challenge the government and isn’t part of an in your face “underground” church doesn’t realistically have a fear of reprisals. My mother in law certainly would be a case in point and would never have been an obnoxiously public Christian for that year if she had been in fear. And that’s someone who’s family had had bad experiences in the cultural revolution and through the 1980’s. Some people put being a Christian on their resume (not many so it really stood out when I read them). The China of 2012 is a lot different from 1989 and Tiananmen, and the totalitarian all encompassing police state down to the neighborhood watch has been largely dismantled.
Capitalism is great. Since the government no longer assigns your job, where you live, access to restricted goods like a bicycle, etc, then the government has also given up the old style control. Make no mistake that there is still an apparatus but it’s a pale shell of it’s former self.
Isn’t there still a Chinese Pope though?
And is it true he knows kung fu?
Thank you for the links. I’ll look into them. BTW how much of China have you been around? Perhaps you should start a “Ask a …” thread on that/ 
Like Buddhism and other foreign doctrines China has accepted over the centuries, Communism is increasingly taking on a Chinese form-there’s lots of praise for Confucius nowadayus for example/
Chinese Communism has always been Chinese in nature. The concept of a “peasant revolution” doesn’t even make sense in a Marxist light. Communism is a gritty post-industrialist dream, and it was supposed to be the next step after capitalism had done its work building industrial infrastructure. A bunch of rural farmers marching to power while avoiding the cities is a different kind of revolution than anything Marx envisioned.
Here is a good article about popular myths of about the Chinese Communist Party. In short, it is Communist, and it’s not going anywhere any time soon.
Gordon Chang, who previously predicted the fall of the Chinese Communist Party by 2011, now says it will fall in 2012.