China Christian Council

(Zhongguo jidujiao xiehui)

The China Christian Council (CCC) is the officially authorized representative organization for China’s Protestant population. Established in 1980, the CCC was designed to work alongside the Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM), purportedly to tend to the Church’s internal and ecclesiastical affairs as opposed to the TSPM’s explicitly political function of serving as a ‘bridge’ between the CCP and China’s Protestants. Headquartered in Shanghai, the CCC maintains a nationwide representative system, but its national agenda is set by a small group of elites who comprise its Executive Committee and Standing Committee. The Executive Committee is made up of the CCC’s President, eight Vice-Presidents and a General Secretary, who also preside over the forty-two-member Standing Committee.

Its top leaders have all been active in the TSPM since the early 1950s, most notably former CCP Presidents Ding Guangxun (currently Honorary President) and Han Wenzao (currently Director of the CCC Advisory Committee), and the current President Cao Shengjie. The committees oversee a hierarchically ordered organizational structure that extends to the district/municipal level. At lower levels, the CCC and the TSPM share the same officials, and the two organizations are commonly identified together as the ‘two committees’ (lianghui).

Together with the TSPM, the CCC supervises the country’s eighteen Protestant theological schools and its 12,000 registered churches, and manages several printing presses, which print Bibles, hymnals and other Christian literature and publish the journal Tianfeng [Heavenly Wind]. In 1996, the joint CCC/TSPM Standing Committee issued a ‘Church Order’, which aimed at establishing organizational, doctrinal and ritual boundaries for China’s entire Protestant population. The China Christian Council is a member church of the World Council of Churches.

Further reading

(n.d.) About the China Christian Council. Available at http://www.amityfoundation.org/ANS/AboutCCC.htm

(28 December 1996) ‘Zhongguo jidujiao jiaohui guizhang’ (Church Order for Chinese Protestant Christian Churches) Tianfeng 2 (1997). Reprinted in Chinese Law and Government 33:6 (2000): 43–51.

JASON KINDOPP