It’s understandable that you’re worried about this, considering the stories you’ve heard about censorship and persecution in China. However, it’s important to clarify a few things here that may alleviate your concerns:

Anonymity and online reach: The Internet is vast and mostly anonymous, particularly in the context of a platform like itch.io. Unless you’re a very high-profile individual, the chances of a foreign government being able to identify you and take direct action against you based solely on a game you’ve uploaded to itch.io are virtually nonexistent. Especially if you practice good digital hygiene and avoid giving out personal information.

China’s censorship practices: While it’s true that the Chinese government does engage in censorship and has restrictions on religious content, they are more likely to simply block access to certain materials rather than retaliate against creators, especially those based outside of China.

Case of Salman Rushdie: The Salman Rushdie case was quite unique and involved a complex set of religious, political, and historical factors that are quite different from what you’re describing. It was also a pre-digital era event. The infrastructure of the Internet allows for a much higher degree of anonymity.

Your idea for geoblocking features on itch.io is a thoughtful one, and might be worth suggesting to the site administrators for reasons beyond your specific concern. However, based on your described scenario, it seems unlikely that the Chinese government would single you out for creating a game with Christian themes. It is more likely they would just block the game within their jurisdiction if they found it objectionable.

Remember, you can always seek legal advice or talk to a security consultant if you’re seriously worried. But hopefully, this gives you a bit more peace of mind as you continue your creative work.

Do you equate havin a game on itch with distributing it to that place  ? 

Of course there are severl good reasons to boycot each and everything possible related to them. They are closed, you can not become acitizen. Not even by marriage.  They have substandard environment protection and undercut world market prices with knockoffs, monopolizing where they can . It is not a free country, where you can speak your mind, get indipendent information - or play any game you want.  Putting money there by purchasing stuff made there    supports all those things. Including the censorhship.

They banned Winnie the pooh, exposing their unfittness for global community.  Lets hope the young people  there grow up as decent , making the country decent as well. (and that goes for many countries, even the us. especially the us.)

If i were you, i would be more worried that you get picketed by westboro  baptist church for desecrating christian imagery by putting it in some ungodly computer game. Because, you know, usually you do offend some christians by having christian "references" in games. Not people that are indifferent or even against the source material. 

I’m sorry but with all due respect, I don’t see how the Chinese gov would have any access at all to your information (Itch.io isn’t going to have it, the only thing they may have is your IP address if you have not used VPN, but they would violate so many privacy laws if they give that to china). So unless you explicitly put in your name, phone number, address into your game or game description, there’s literally no way the Chinese gov is going to even know who you are.

I'm Chinese player and your worries are so redundant, first of all China is not what this article and what you say it is.why do you think goverment need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire an assassin to kill you...It’s funny.And itch is not a Chinese site, so any information you post has nothing to do with the Chinese government.