More Suffering for Chinese Christians

New Persecution Wave?

We have blogged before on how the Government of China is greatly intimidated by loss of control of its vast subject population. John Garnaut, the China correspondent in the Sydney Morning Herald recently posted two articles on Chinese government oppression of its people. The second deals with a new persecution of "house churches".

Firstly, he reports on how people who complain against officials are ending up being imprisoned and persecuted.

How a complaint led to an ordeal in a secret prison

November 14, 2009 - 12:00AM

Liu Yuhong's problem began as a private land dispute with the family's landlord. But small troubles have a habit of escalating in China, a country that lacks institutions for effectively resolving disputes.

Last year Liu's parents lodged a complaint at the local government's petitions office. Since that brave and perhaps foolhardy move, the family has been drawn into a vortex of state-sanctioned kidnapping, violence and possibly worse.

''My father is 69 years old and he is in a re-education-through-labour camp,'' she told the Herald on Wednesday.

''A baby has died … and I don't know whether my mother is dead. For a rural woman, that is too much.''

In the absence of an effective legal system, citizens are officially encouraged to take their grievances - everything from high-level corruption to land disputes - to a unique Chinese institution: the petitions office.

These were established in imperial times and have since been replicated at almost every tier of government.

The design flaw of the petitions system is a fundamental one: the offices are typically run by the same officials that the petitioners are complaining about. When ''petitioners'', as they are called, don't get results at the local level they tend to aim higher, in Beijing.

Yu Jianrong, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, surveyed 632 Beijing petitioners and found only one case that had been satisfactorily resolved.

Professor Yu has warned that officials had incentives to subvert the petitions system because complaints relating to their jurisdictions count directly against their performance appraisals. He says the petitions system is strained to breaking point because the party refuses to loosen its grip on the political and legal systems, thus choking off alternative ways for disputes to be debated or independently adjudicated.

The Communist Party ignored his advice, choosing instead to reassert its primacy over the country's media and courts.

And so China's enormous security and legal apparatus devotes ever-increasing resources to preventing complaints from being officially registered or publicly aired, rather than resolving them.

The remainder of the article documents the particular sufferings and abuse suffered by Liu as an example of the cruelty and oppression of the regime.

The second article looks at how the Chinese Government is flexing its muscles against Christians.

BEIJING: President Barack Obama, scheduled to arrive in China last night, is under pressure to press the Chinese Government to halt a new campaign of "persecution" against the country's flourishing network of unregistered churches.

The largest of these "house churches" in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Linfen have been evicted from their buildings in recent weeks and a number of their leaders have been questioned, detained or arrested.

"Obama should tell President Hu Jintao to stop the persecution of China's house churches," said Zhang Mingxuan, the president of the Chinese House Church Alliance, speaking by phone from a hotel in Nanyang where he was being detained for the duration of Mr Obama's visit to China.

Fan Yafeng, a prominent church leader, legal scholar and human rights activist, told the Herald that the growing crackdown against house churches was larger and more important than campaigns earlier this year against human rights lawyers, the media and the internet.

He said the informal Christian church network was a more formidable adversary than any other section of China's civil society because of its capacity to mobilise within China and abroad. "This is the Communist Party's battle of life and death," said Professor Fan, who was sacked from his Government think-tank job two weeks ago.

He did not think the party could win this battle because of the "contrast" between Christian and Communist Party commitment to their respective faiths.

The house church movement has been growing rapidly in China in recent decades.

China's Christian population has surged from about 3 million during the Cultural Revolution to 130 million, according to the highest Chinese Government estimate.

The majority of Chinese Christians are members of "official" Catholic and Protestant church organisations that are closely linked with government organisations. But the fastest growth has been seen in hundreds of informal "house churches" which began as Bible study groups but have swelled into large congregations.

The crackdown on China's larger house churches began in Shanxi province's Linfen city in September, with the demolition of a church and arrest of two pastors. This month it spread to Beijing and Shanghai.

Eight days ago Beijing's Shouwang congregation was forced to hold their Sunday service outdoors during a snowstorm after government officials had intervened to prevent property owners from renting or selling them any premises.

Yesterday 800 of Shouwang's mainly young and professional followers were authorised to use a university auditorium, but preachers were prevented from leaving their houses to attend.

One preacher negotiated his way past police and plain-clothes security officials to arrive 90 minutes late, into the arms of elated church leaders. The Shouwang congregation has attempted to keep a low profile and its leaders did not accept interviews yesterday.

"The Government wants unregistered churches to go back to the mode of operation where they remain small, take place in apartments, and are not very public in their practice," said Carsten Vala, of Loyola University, Maryland, who has researched China's registered and unregistered Protestant churches.

"Most important is how the rank and file react to the Government stopping their meetings," he said. "In Chengdu they have continued to meet, and that presents a real problem for the Government."

In the Roman Empire, persecution of Christians came in waves. It was sporadic and swept the Empire, or parts of it, from time to time. The simple fact was that the Gospel's spread could not be stopped. It would appear as though a similar bottom-up, grass roots conversion of the Chinese people is occurring now. It is of God's Spirit. His means are preaching and teaching, worship and service against which guns and prison have little permanent effect. All the evidence indicates that such oppression only serves to make the churches more powerful and influential in the long run.

We do not know whether the current oppression of house churches will continue and widen into a fully fledged relentless persecution, as is the case against the Bhuddist Falun Gong, or whether it will die away in this case. But succeed it will not. The Spirit of God is moving across the face of China and when He changes hearts they do not change back again.