Nanjing, China —- On its official Web site, the Beijing Olympics organizing committee advises visitors to the Games that each person "take no more than one Bible into China."

But in a country where the ruling Communist Party still forbids its members from joining religious groups, visiting Christians are likely to find no shortage of the Good Book.

A factory in this city in eastern China produced 6.7 million Bibles last year, more than 3 million of them for distribution in China. Workers at the plant last week packaged some of 50,000 copies of the New Testament that will be distributed free during the Olympics.

The Nanjing Amity Printing Co. looks little different from the Ford, Motorola and Siemens factories nearby: A stone-and-glass office building stands in front of long white warehouses with tall windows.

Its presses are capable of producing 42 Bibles every minute.

China's leaders have a reputation for repressing faith —- a history highlighted by a crackdown on Tibetan Buddhist monasteries after violent protests in Lhasa last March and the ongoing repression of the Falun Gong movement, which the government considers a subversive cult.

Despite limits, however, the once-forbidden practice of religion is finding outlets as China gradually opens to the world.

"Sometimes Western Christians don't understand the freedom that's within China, so I could imagine people arriving in Beijing with two huge suitcases full of Bibles thinking it's a good thing," said Peter Dean, a United Bible Societies consultant at the Nanjing factory.

The Bible factory is co-owned by the Amity Foundation, a Chinese Christian charity, and United Bible Societies, an organization based in England that is working to make the Scriptures available worldwide.

Because of China's troubled history with religions, some foreigners are surprised the factory exists, said Kua Wee Seng, who oversees the operation.

"Many people don't believe that we've been printing Bibles legally in China for the last 20 years," Kua said. "What they hear is prosecution and arrests of pastors."

During the Games, which open Friday, religious services —- Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist —- will be available to athletes in the Olympic Village. But for China's estimated 60 million Christians, there are still many restrictions, which may only grow worse during the Games.

By law, Christians are only allowed to worship privately and in state-sanctioned churches. Yet possibly two-thirds of Chinese Christians belong to home churches outside of the state system, said Daniel Bays, a professor of Christian history at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich. Such congregations are subject to disruption and monitoring by local officials, who fear they might lead to organized protest.

Aides organizing President Bush's trip to China for the Olympic Games considered having him worship at a house church, but dropped the plan as Chinese authorities ordered pastors, lawyers and other political activists whom Bush considered meeting to leave Beijing during his visit, the New York Times reported Monday.

Xu Yonghai, a 48-year-old Christian in Beijing who was jailed between 2003 and 2006 for publicly criticizing the destruction of an unlicensed church in southern China, said police began monitoring him last month. They arrived at one home-church meeting last month and forced all of its members to register, he said.

For the government, "social stability is paramount," Kua said. "They do not want any particular religion to create a spark that will set a fire."

Beijing also regulates the production of Bibles by barring most printing companies from publishing religious materials and by requiring China's state-sanctioned Protestant churches to apply for permission to increase production. It prohibits the sale of Bibles outside of registered churches and seminaries and their affiliated bookstores.

Particularly for some 700 million Chinese living in rural areas, getting a Bible can be difficult. Yet Amity's story is evidence that for many Chinese Christians, life has become easier in recent years.

During the rule of Mao Zedong, China's leader from 1949 until 1976, foreign missionaries were largely forced out of China. During the Cultural Revolution, the violent era in the 1960s and '70s, being caught with Christian books could lead to harsh punishment.

"If you had a Bible or even a traditional novel during the Cultural Revolution, you could get into big trouble," said Li Chunnong, general manager of the Amity plant.

After Mao died, China's leaders initiated liberal reforms, and in 1979 the government began to allow factories to print Bibles. To make Bibles more accessible in China, United Bible Societies —- a partnership of 145 national Bible societies —- donated printing equipment to the Amity Foundation.

From 505,000 Bibles printed in 1988, production rose to 1.6 million in 1993 and to 3.1 million last year. To highlight that progress, the societies in 2006 sponsored an exhibition on the Bible in China at sites that included Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta.

Chinese officials have never turned down a request from the state church to print more Bibles, and with its new $20 million facility and a planned expansion, Amity "has the capability to meet whatever needs are in China," said Dean, the consultant at the factory.

"If you're a Christian, you see it is a wonderful foundational base in China for the things God wants to do," he said.

Several Bible societies continue to collect donations to subsidize Chinese-language Bibles. The New York-based American Bible Society gave the Chinese church $500,000 last year to use toward printing the Scriptures, helping to reduce the price of a pocket edition Bible to $1.35.

Partly because hundreds of millions of Chinese live on a few hundred dollars a year, that funding is important, said Philip Towner, dean of the American Bible Association's Nida Institute for Biblical Scholarship. "The mission goal is not just to provide Scriptures in languages that can be understood but to provide them at a cost that can be affordable," he said.

Because the Amity factory uses its excess capacity to print books for export, it has also helped to reduce the cost of Bibles worldwide. The factory has printed Bibles in 75 languages for export to more than 60 countries.

Besides printing Chinese Bibles in eight minority languages, the press also printed the first Chinese Bible in Braille.

"It's important that everyone is able to read the Bible," said Ma Wei, a blind employee who first read the Bible in 1995 and became a Christian in 2001.

"Because of the factory, there are more and more believers," he said.