Author: Indira A.R. Lakshmanan
Publication: The Boston Globe
Date: February 25, 2002
Last Thursday at 11:04 a.m., as
President Bush was welcomed to China in a ceremony at the Great Hall of
the People, police surrounded a home in the outskirts of Beijing and arrested
47 Christians holding a prayer meeting.
In talks an hour later with President
Jiang Zemin, Bush said he prayed for an end to restrictions on religious
practices in China, oblivious of the latest arrests. As the underground
Protestants were being interrogated and their gathering place ransacked,
Jiang told reporters that China guarantees freedom of religion, and that
people who are detained are lawbreakers, not prisoners of conscience.
Speaking out yesterday for the first
time since their release - despite the probability that they will be rearrested
- two of the detained Christians said that their faith is unbowed and that
nothing can break them or tens of millions of others who refuse to pay
allegiance to government churches.
The men are ''absolutely not'' trying
to undermine the Chinese state, as officials seem to fear, said Liu Fenggang,
43, who before this latest arrest, lost his job, was sent to reeducation
camp, and was nearly beaten to death for his faith in the last decade.
''Our God is in heaven, our home is in heaven, not on earth. So whoever's
in power, it doesn't matter to us,'' he declared.
The arrests in Haiqingluo village
are the latest chapter in a long catalog of restrictions on religious practice
since the 1949 communist revolution, and one that has received heightened
attention in the United States since Bush began pressing the issue. The
Chinese Constitution guarantees freedom of religious belief, but the law
forbids any activity that is seen to disrupt public order, giving the state
considerable leeway in cracking down on groups viewed as a threat.
Two weeks ago, a New York-based
advocacy group released seven internal Chinese government documents that
offered an inside look at a systematic campaign over the last two years
to brand unauthorized religious groups as cults, and crush them. The secret
directives and speeches, authenticated by a former government journalist
and some China scholars, were given to Christians by disenchanted security
officials and smuggled out of the country, according the Committee for
Investigation on Persecution of Religion in China.
The group claims it has identified
23,686 Christians arrested, 4,014 sentenced to labor camps, 129 killed,
208 maimed, 20,000 beaten, and 10,000 fined for unauthorized religious
activities in 22 provinces since 1983.
While the practice of religion is
undeniably freer now in China than at almost any time in the last 50 years,
the 74 pages of directives attributed to authorities as senior as Vice
President Hu Jintao indicate the government crackdown on unofficial religions
goes far beyond the campaign against Falun Gong, the meditation group that
Beijing has labeled an ''evil cult.''
Christians targeted in the campaign
belong to ''house churches'': their worship sessions are held in private
homes. According to official figures, there are 15 million Protestants
and 10 million Catholics in China. Some scholars estimate house Christians
number twice those figures.
House Christians complain that official
churches are loyal to the state above God, and ply a watered-down dogma,
omitting the creationist teachings of Genesis and the belief in the resurrection
of Jesus, for example. The official Catholic church here does not recognize
the pope.
The Protestants arrested in Haiqingluo
have no name for their denomination, because they don't want the government
to turn a label against them. But their emphasis on damnation and salvation
resembles fundamentalist Christianity.
Their prayer meeting had just begun
and they were reading from the Book of Matthew when 70 police officers
burst into the home and seized everyone there, including a dozen residents
and the employees of an old-age charity home next door, said Wu Lishan,
43, one of those arrested. Six officers stayed behind to watch the four
oldest and most infirm Christians who could not be hauled off.
Liu said police wrongly thought
their meeting had political significance tied to Bush's visit, and asked
if they were connected to Falun Gong.
''They don't even understand the
difference between Falun Gong and Christianity. The Communist Party doesn't
make a distinction. As soon as you believe in something, they lump you
together as one group,'' Wu said.
The group was held overnight, their
Bibles seized, and they were denied drinking water and the use of the bathroom,
they said. A 65-year-old blind woman begged twice for water and the toilet,
and early in the morning, police relented. At 5 a.m., Chen Zhongxin, the
70-year-old host of the prayer meeting, had a heart attack, but police
demanded the group provide the cost of his transport and treatment before
they would take him to the hospital, Wu said.
When police let them go Friday night
after Bush left, ''they told us never to meet like this again,'' Wu said.
Four people were rearrested 10 minutes later and released Saturday, they
said. Chen's home, meanwhile, was vandalized, and he was told he had two
days to leave town. The group fears police will shut down the old-age home,
leaving the elderly Christians nowhere to go.
Liu said the harassment is nothing
new, nor will be it be the last time. A year after his baptism in 1989,
he was called in by authorities at his factory, and asked if he ''believed
in God or work.'' Liu replied God. Asked who built the factory, Liu replied,
''God, since God created the world and us all.''
''You really seem to be a deep believer.
You don't need to come to work anymore,'' Liu recalls the factory's Communist
Party chairman telling him. Like many vocal house Christians, he has never
been hired for a job since.
In 1994, he was kicked until his
ribs broke for insisting on visiting a prominent underground priest when
police told him not to. The next year, he was sent to labor camp for two
years for writing a letter to New York-based Human Rights in China, complaining
of persecution.
Liu said he is often arrested during
visits of foreign leaders and every June 4, even though he had no involvement
in the June 4, 1989, democracy movement. ''Once I was in a shopping center,
once I was in a public shower'' when he was arrested, he said. Authorities
from the religion police unit of State Security were outside his home Thursday,
unaware he was at that moment being arrested elsewhere.
The two men appreciate Bush's pressure
on Jiang to allow free religious practice, but they don't believe it will
have any effect. ''All religious followers are treated as enemies here,''
Liu said.
They have no priest, and are hungry
for contacts with overseas ministers ''to get fresh ideas,'' Wu said. ''So
many people here have no faith. Without that, so many other things are
not possible - democracy, human rights, these all derive from a spiritual
mindset.''
But ''politics is not important
to me. How can you believe in human beings to save China? Only God can
save China,'' he said.
