Chinese Orthodox Church
| Metropolitan | |
| Founding | 1921 |
| Headquarters | Xinjing |
| Territory | Beihanguo, Nanhanguo, Hunan, Nanchang, Shanghai, Meizhou, Canton, Fujian, Taiwan and Hainan, Zhuanguo, Hong Kong, Nam Viet, Myqan Daij, and possibly Tibet, Mongolia, Uyguristan, & Bornei-Filipinas |
| Adherents | Approximately 14,922,018 |
| Arms |
History
Adherents
The number of Orthodox Christians within the states made up of the former Empire of China are a little of 14 million people. However, if one includes the number of members from parishes in countries that surround China such as Mongolia, Tibet, & Uyguristan, that number increases to a little under 15 million. The Church has done the most amount of its proselytization in Beihanguo, which has nearly 10 million of the Church's adherents. Nanhanguo has the next amount of followers at nearly 2.25 million members. The number of Orthodox Christians could be slightly higher as it does not include the number of unbaptized followers that choose to remain as catechumens. Such a phenomenon is rather common in East Asia. The Church has helped found parishes across Southeast Asia, including three parishes in Nam Viet and 11 parishes in Myqan Daij. In all of the non-Chinese lands, the Church in China works closely with the Moscow Patriarchate, for better or worse. The Moscow Patriarchate has been influenfial in helping establish the parishes in Southeast Asia (Bornei-Filipinas especially), but both Churches lay claim to the faithful in Uyguristan and Mongolia. The situation of the Church in Tibet is in a curious position. Officially, there is only one parish in Lhasa, located on the grounds of the Russian embassy. The Tibetan government is notoriously religiously intolerant, and mandates that only people on a weekly guest list that present a non-Tibetan passport maybe attend services there. While the Moscow Patriarchate legally claims jurisdiction over the parish in Lhasa, in reality it is administered by the nearest Chinese Orthodox bishop, in neighboring Nanhanguo. The Tibetan government only asks for the weekly roster sparingly, and the church both underreports weekly attendance and Russian and Nanhanese diplomats have been known to give temporary residency permits to ethnic Tibetan faithful. There are also two secret parishes in Ziling (Xīníng/西宁), capital of Qinghai, on the northern and southern ends of the city. Divine Liturgy is celebrated rotationally in the homes of the faithful, away from prying eyes. There were also Russian missionaries amongst the Kazakhs fled into Tibet after the upheaval of the Great Oriental War ,founding "nomadic parishes," yurt-churches that could be reassembled and had an altar cloth with which to serve Divine Liturgy on. However, after the Tibetan coup and subsequent massacres and ethnic cleansing of the Kazakh refugees, these Christian converts fled with their Sunni Muslim and Tengriist brethren to Nanhanguo. It is estimated that less than 24 people in Tibet can claim descent from Orthodox Kazakhs, most of them elderly and housed for free on the grounds of the Russian mission courtesy of the Chinese Orthodox Church. Several of them also live in Ziling and in the small village of Tserkalo (Yerkalo/Yanjing), where they have melded seemlessly into the Tibetan Catholic populace there. As the Tibetan government is smart enough to want to avoid a diplomatic row with either Russia or Nanhanguo, the generals in charge turn a blind eye to the quiet proselytization of the Orthodox Church within their borders—for now.
There is also a rather awkward parish-overlap situation between Korean-speaking Orthodox Christians in the Autonomous Prefecture of Yanbian, where although all of Beihanguo is under the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Beijing and all China, some (but not all) Korean-speaking parishes commemorate the nearest bishop in Corea instead of their actual bishops. Both the Chinese Orthodox Church and the Japanese Orthodox Church are working to find a solution to this potentially embarrassing situation.
