China Crisis
The stranglehold against Christian activity relentlessly continues.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is stepping up enforcement of its ban on the printing of Christian and other religious material by threatening printers and reprographics businesses with closure, and owners and staff with large fines or imprisonment..
The manager of a print business in Luoyang city, in the central province of Henan, said he was refusing all orders relating to religious books and materials. “Any religious content makes the issue political, not religious,” he said. “Although banners on the streets say people are allowed religious beliefs, the only faith they can practise freely is that in the communist party.”
The business was rigorously inspected by CCP officials in September 2020. “They scrutinized all records, and even looked at paper sheets on the floor to see if they have prohibited content,” explained the manager. “If any such content is found, I’ll be fined, or worse, my business will be closed.”
The manager of another print works said CCP officials are particularly strict about Christian texts. “Anyone who takes on such orders breaks the law and might be put into prison,” he said. “This is a line that we absolutely can’t cross. A printing house in the city was closed down for printing religious books and some of its staff were arrested.”
Photocopying businesses are experiencing similar tough controls. “I don’t even dare to make copies of two sheets with religious hymns because of strict investigations,” said a staff member. Another manager added, “If businesses are discovered, they could be fined as much as ten times their monthly income or workers could even be arrested.”
Religious materials sent via postal or courier services are labelled “contraband”. “Only the mailing of government-approved books is allowed,” said a staff member at a courier business. “All books with ‘bad information’, including religion, are not allowed to be dispatched. If public security authorities discover violations of these regulations, the company will be fined and closed down.”
Chinese pastors threatened with jail in CCP crackdown on persecution “leaks”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is stepping up attempts to prevent information about religious persecution in China from reaching overseas media by threatening pastors with long prison sentences and punishments that could also affect their families. Leading Party members have ordered officials to “spare no cost” to find sources “leaking state secrets” to report the CCP’s growing persecution of Christians and other minorities.
More than 100 pastors in northern China were grilled by local authorities about documents their churches had received, according to Bitter Winter, which has itself been declared an “overseas hostile website” by the CCP for its reporting on the persecution of minorities and human rights violations in China. “Interrogations were extremely rigorous: questions were very detailed, asked time and again, to find out if answers are consistent,” said a three-self (i.e. state registered) church leader. Many of the pastors questioned said they would no longer be willing to talk about religious persecution.
In southern China, pastors from three-self churches were summoned to a meeting last year to be told that any sharing of documents would be thoroughly investigated. Posts of information on social media and the taking of pictures in church or the distribution of photos were also forbidden.
“The government may deem any shared information as leaks of state secrets or a danger to state security,” explained a three-self church leader. “Anyone taking a photo with a cellphone in the church can be questioned now,” he added.
All government-issued religious meeting venue shutdown and demolition notices issued since 2018 will also be classified as secret under the new rules. Hundreds of “house churches” and three-self churches have been either shut down or demolished across China as part of the government’s accelerating crackdown against Christianity. Authorities are introducing increasingly repressive measures to force religion under the control of the Chinese Comm-unist Party, including the introduction of stringent new regulations in February 2020 that placed CCP approved officials in all Church management committees.
China’s extreme surveillance, forced sterilisation of non-atheists in camps “much worse” than Soviet gulags
The full horror of the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against non-atheist minorities, particularly Uighurs and other ethnic groups, is emerging from detainees who have managed to escape communist “re-education” camps where 24-hour close surveillance and apparent forced sterilisation are the norm.
Ethnic Kazakhs, who have fled the camps, have spoken out describing the CCP’s notorious internment camps, officially known as “centres of professional development,” as an “anti-religion exercise targeting non-atheists”.
“You must be an atheist”
The clash of religious belief with Marxist ideology is not a new one says a Barnabas contact. “This is what we faced in the USSR. Only in China, everything has become much worse, since there are surveillance cameras and listening devices everywhere in the camps,” he explained.
“It doesn’t matter for the Chinese authorities who you are – a Muslim, a Christian or a Buddhist – you must be an atheist, Chinese and believe in the victory of the Communist Party.”
Christians “did not manage to escape this hell yet”
While the systematic persecution of tens of thousands of ethnic Muslims who have been interred is well documented, little is known about the Christians and other minorities also held in the camps. The contact explained, “We do not have a testimony of Christians because they did not manage to escape from this hell yet. Those who could escape are those who had Kazakh citizenship or a residence permit in Kazakhstan. There are also those who crossed the border illegally.”
Gulzira’s story
A newspaper in Kazakhstan has published harrowing testimonies from Kazakh Muslims who somehow managed to flee the camps and China. Gulzira, originally from the Ili-Kazakh Autonomous Region in China, told her story. A resident of Kazakhstan, where she moved with part of her family in 2014, she went back to China to visit her seriously ill father and eldest daughter. But she never saw them.
Immediately after crossing the border, Gulzira’s passport was confiscated and she was interrogated. A few hours later she was transported to a re-education camp, where she spent the next 15 months, including several months of degrading forced labour. Her fate is similar to hundreds of Kazakh emigrés from China who, for some reason, have returned only to find themselves interred.
“They took my passport in Khorgos [border crossing between Kazakhstan and China] and handed it over to the local police,” Gulzira recalled. Then the police interrogated her, took fingerprints and asked her to read a book aloud while recording her voice, before transferring her to the camp.
“Here you will worship Xi Jinping”
“In the camp I was dressed in camp clothes from head to toe. They told me, ‘Here you will worship Xi Jinping [China’s president] and learn Chinese’ … I never found out why I was taken to the camp,” she said.
There were about 800 women in Gulzira’s camp including Uighurs, Kazakhs and women of other nationalities. But two Kazakh women or two Uighurs were never accommodated together so that roommates could not communicate with each other.
“In the morning we went to class like a flock of sheep, and in the evening they drove us to the hostel. When they said – go to bed, we went to bed, and got up when they said to get up. On Sunday we were locked outside and we (10-20 women) were imprisoned. Some had a toilet, some didn’t. We used a bucket for toilet … We were not allowed to sleep on our back, because they thought that we would have time to make ‘namaz’ [ritual Islamic prayers] during this time.”
Chinese Communist Party rewrites Gospel story to depict Jesus Christ as “killer and sinner”
Communist party officials in China have rewritten one of the Bible’s most powerful accounts of Jesus Christ’s grace and divinity by blasphemously claiming the Saviour stoned to death the woman caught in adultery.
The well-known New Testament account in John’s Gospel (8:3-11) is completely altered to depict Jesus Christ as a devious murderer, and self-proclaimed “sinner”, in a “prof-essional ethics and law” text book used in Chinese vocational secondary schools.
The textbook’s amended version of the account states, “The crowd wanted to stone the woman to death as per their law. But Jesus said, ‘Let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone.’ Hearing this, they slipped away one by one. When the crowd disappeared, Jesus stoned the sinner to death saying, ‘I too am a sinner. But if the law could only be executed by men without blemish, the law would be dead.’”
The Biblical account describes how the scribes and Pharisees attempt to set a trap for Jesus in the temple courts, asking if an adulterous woman should be stoned as Moses commanded in law. Jesus replies, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Each of the men drops his stone on the ground and departs. And Jesus, who has been stooping down writes on the ground, looks up and asks the woman, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”
Christians in China are protesting the blatant distortion of the Gospel and undermining of Jesus Christ’s divine authority to forgive sin. However, according to the website Bitter Winter, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which mercilessly persecutes Christians and other minorities in China, is not simply attempting to negatively portray Jesus and the Gospel. The rewritten account is intended to convey that the CCP and its laws are “good and pure” and transcend the “impure” human beings who happen to enforce them. However corrupt the CCP officers of the law are, the law of the Party should “never be questioned.”
In 2018, the CCP unveiled its new five-year plan to “sinicise” (i.e. make Chinese) Christianity, with the intention of selectively reinterpreting Christianity and Scripture. Authorities erased the words Bible, God and Christ from classic children’s stories in August 2019, and some churches in Henan province were forced to take down the Ten Commandments and replace them with quotes of President Xi Jinping as part of the government’s escalating crackdown on Christianity.