Did you know that China makes about half of the world's jewelry?  According to the linked report, this amounted to more than $650 million worth of goods in the first 3 quarters of last year alone, a fifty percent increase for year before. 

A wide selection of this jewelry will be on display at this week's China International Gold, Jewelry & Gem Fair.  While this one has quickly grown into one of the region's largest, here at the BofG the race does not go to the swift (or the large). 

Rather, what we find most intriguing about the China trade in jewelry & other assorted tchotchkes is that a fair amount of it is explicitly religious.  Diamond crosses, Jesus medallions, Hindu gold and Buddha figures--look around the web and local stores, and you'll soon find an endless supply of Chinese-crafted goods.

China, of course, is a communist nation.  Even as the government is imprisoning Chinese evangelical Christians in forced labor camps, American Christians are buying the cheap religious trinkets that such camps produce.  Moreover, even if the item in question isn't made by prisoners, a portion of the profits still goes to the support of the state's religious persecution.

Which brings us back to Karl Marx's maxim that religion is "opium of the people."  Many in the U.S. are now working hard to end religious persecution in China, whether it concerns evangelicals & Catholics or Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong.  Is China's burgeoning supply of religious trinkets a sign of positive change or our own willful intoxication?