God Is Red puts a human face on the battles staged by ordinary Chinese Christians against the officially secular state, as they effectively fight to practice their religion in a hostile environment. Liao began researching the church in China and learned about the thriving underground Christian movement. In villages impoverished by isolation and largely neglected by modernization, Liao stumbled upon a vibrant Christian community that had sprung from the work of western missionaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was granted rare access for an outsider.

While each story explores the rarely glimpsed world of contemporary Chinese Christianity, the pieces also capture the dark years of the Mao-era, when the claws of political persecution left no place untouched in China and when thousands of Christians, and numberless others besides, were tortured and murdered. Liao provides an unprecedented glimpse into a deeply human story of a complex, religious and political reality.