|TOP|The U.S.-based World Bible Translation Centre has announced plans to distribute a massive 300,000 Bibles across China in a concerted effort to get more Bibles into the officially Communist country.

World Bible Translation Centre is currently printing its Easy to Read Translation before distribution takes place later in the year, reports Mission Network News.

Bibles are in particularly high demand in China, explains World Bible’s Gary Bishop: “China remains the place in the world where there are more believers and seekers that have never even seen, nor held, nor read a Bible, than in anywhere else in the world."

The Bibles to be distributed by World Bible are also considerably easier to read than the existing Bibles, he explains: "Most people cannot really read the Union Edition, which was translated a century ago now, and understand. So, we're getting them the Easy to Read Bible."

According to Bishop, the major challenge at the moment is getting Bibles to the approximately 100 million Christians in China today: “If you go back and look at all the Bibles that have been printed both inside China and smuggled into China and distributed in any form, the very best estimates are that maybe 60 million people could have at some point in time had a Bible."

|AD|World Bible is appealing for donations to help meet at least some of the need for more Bibles in the country. Bishop estimates that World Bible needs to raise around US$1.2 million or around US$4 per Bible. “That includes all the preparation it takes to print one, the actual printing and the distribution of them,” he said.

One of the ways the Bibles will be distributed is through the autonomous regions of China. “Those are zones that are part of the Peoples Republic of China, but they're locally governed. Because of that, there's an openness and a more liberal approach to what we're hoping to do,” said Bishop.

The Centre has not been put off by a recent crackdown on Christians which saw 36 people arrested in a raid on a Bible school run by an underground Protestant church in China earlier in the month. Around 10,000 copies of Christian literature were also confiscated by officials in the raid and have yet to be returned.

China Aid Association said in a letter to Associated Press that students, teachers and leader of the underground church were rounded up and taken away in vans after around 50 officers surrounded the school in the eastern province of Anhui.

According to the US-based group, the owner of the school, Chu Huaiting and the vice president of the Chinese House Church Alliance, was later arrested at his home.