I joined a UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office human rights delegation to China last month. The talks, held in Nanjing, took religion and civil society as their theme. Both ideas are especially controversial in the Chinese context. Religions are subject to state regulation and in some cases, notably the Falun Gong, to persecution. Likewise civil society can be a troubling concept in a state-dominated society which finds it difficult to tolerate the debates and alternatives which emerge in the spaces between state and individuals. Outside the talks, on a series of highly stage-managed visits – to a prison, a Protestant seminary and a Bible Press – the delegation was invited to sample the fruits of an emerging civil society. Inside the talks the challenge was to consider our own human rights and civil society experience after MPs’ expenses, the phone tapping affair and last summer’s riots.

Chinese counterparts came at religion from such a distinctive starting point – convinced that theirs is a religiously free society, and that the versions of religion permitted and regulated by the state are unquestionably right and determinable. This makes for a certainty and singularity which RLLP challenges at the outset. Religious literacy has to be about both the ability for quality exploration of religious faith and identity AND the freedom to debate, disagree and dissent. The really high quality of conversation about religion is one which can welcome uncertainty, doubt and disbelief – and engage with certainty too in ways which don’t stop the conversation. It isn’t just the Chinese who find this difficult to achieve.