If the CCP feels compelled to lace even sports competitions with warnings against practitioners or unregistered Christians, it suggests that the real endurance test is not on the hills of Yiwu, but in the Party’s relentless race to control belief itself.

One writes out of one thing only — one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.