China to Christians: You Have a Mind Problem
Aikman, David
China to Christians: You Have a Mind Problem BY DAVID AIKMAN Y CHINESE LEGAL STANDARDS, IT WAS AN OPEN-AND-SHUT CASE. The three defendants were convicted last August 6 by the Intermediate...
...She died without leaving a single fragment by which she could be remembered...
...why Zhang had been held on the basis of private thoughts and prayers, the interrogator in true Orwellian style replied: "Zhang does not have a criminal problem, he has a mind problem...
...After that, John Winthrop designed a mild Christian political entity in the North American Colony...
...I think this is more important than converting people...
...Why would the authorities be suddenly con-cerned with a phenomenon—Christianity's rapid growth in China—that has been widely reported for several years...
...It is the most serious crackdown in several years...
...For this Liu got three years in prison, Xu two years, and Zheng one year...
...Brother James hopes to arrange a network of Christians in China's cities who can report events to the outside world and respond quickly to any development that affects religious or political freedom in the country...
...Addressing an appeal to the court against his sentence last February, Zhang summoned references to a series of Christian writers going back to St...
...We will certainly hear much more about Ren Bumei...
...Jesus Christ came to save people from sin so that we may act justly and love mercy...
...The three defendants were convicted last August 6 by the Intermediate People's Court in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province, for "illegally soliciting, and providing national intelligence to overseas organizations...
...Christians should do more to organize peaceful protests, to encourage and mobilize others...
...According to the latest State Department Report on International Religious Freedom, China, which is considered "a country of particular concern," decided to get tough (again) on Christianity after a high-level Communist Party meeting in Beijing in November 2003...
...Yu Jie's appeal and Zhang Yinan's remarkable court defense appear to have stirred several Chinese outside of China to try to nourish the embryonic movement of Christian intellectuals in China who have started to protest in public...
...If Christians are being targeted so intensely, intellectuals are saying, perhaps they are playing a more important role than we think...
...China is in the middle of a concerted central government crackdown on its unregistered (hence, in effect, underground) Chinese and Protestant churches (which are commonly called "house churches...
...in the late spring of 2004...
...And what about Li Siyi...
...Surprisingly, Yu was not arrested or harassed for his proposal, and was even permitted to travel to the U.S...
...Communist Party officials are concerned that Chinese professors quietly promote Christianity to the detriment of public confidence in Marxist-Leninist doctrines...
...What lurid acts of espionage had they committed...
...We need to take a more pro-active role...
...Yu Jie, 30, and five other intellectuals became controversial earlier in the year when they proposed that Mao's corpse be removed from its mausoleum in Beijing's Tiananmen Square...
...I also give my support to China's entry into the WTO...
...Mao's cadaver ought to be removed, Yu Jie said, before the Olympic Games of 2008, as a sign that China had finally overcome "the bitterness and hatred generated during Mao's reign...
...And increasingly, it is Christian...
...August 6 must have been a very bad day for China's Christians, because in addition to the events already described, there was a mass arrest of more than 100 Christians in Henan Province...
...Both national and provincial authorities were then ordered to reflect carefully on how they would respond to worrying new information, conveyed especially vividly in the documentary, that Christianity was far more widespread and influential in China than most government officials had suspected...
...Meanwhile, something of an informal network is organizing itself spontaneously in China among dissidents who have recently become Christian...
...But the leaders who compiled the document, with a few exceptions, had little more than an eighth-grade education...
...The proposal, of course, could be published only in Hong Kong, and in China through the Internet...
...Brother James (as we will call him to protect his identity) is a young Chinese who has spent several years studying outside of China and is burning with passion to see the emergence of a genuine Christian intellectual movement in China...
...DAVID AIKMAN of China, the Chinese government received a deluge of protest letters from around the world and ordered the Henan authorities to find a face-saving way to release Zhang...
...Both the young Internet dissident Yang Zili, whose website "Yang Zi's Garden of Ideas" was very popular in China before his arrest in 2001, and the Tiananmen-era protester Ren Bumei have become Christians in the past year...
...That's why I think it's sourgent to inform Christians inside China that now is the time...
...David Aikman is the author of Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity Is Transforming China and Changing the World Balance of Power (Regnery Publishing) and A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush (W Publishing...
...Li Siyi `never lived' and her death 'never happened...
...Paul and including Johann Andreae, a little-known Puritan author of a 1619 Christian utopian work called Christianopolis...
...One prominent Chinese writer who announced his conversion to Christianity about a year ago is Yu Jie, whose first collection of essays, Fire and Ice, became a best-seller in Beijing in 1998...
...In their memoirs," Ren writes, "Auschwitz survivors have reported the horror of the gas chambers...
...I want to increase the influence of Christians on society," he says...
...Previously, Chinese intellectuals didn't pay much attenNOVEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19 CHINA TO CHRISTIANS: YOU HAVE A MIND PROBLEM tion to Christianity," he said, "but since the government announced the crackdown recently, they are coming round to the view that Christianity must be an important element in the struggle for more freedom in Chinese society...
...Important note: there is no 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2004 DAVID AIKMAN evidence of any specific individual having been arrested after being identified in the documentary or the book...
...Liu Fenggang, Xu Yonghai, and Zheng Shenqi had sent the overseas Chinese Christian magazine, Christian Life Quarterly, court information about the trial of a Christian lady, Li Baozhi, along with the story of a police beating: "How I was interrogated by police during my preaching tour of a mountainous suburb of Beijing...
...Along with the crackdown on house churches, provincial authorities have been ordered to promote "scientific materialism" as a counter to the impact of what they call October 2003's "one book, one VCD incident...
...and this is what makes this Chinese tragedy unique, and what provides such a vivid depiction of the Chinese soul fleeing the scene of the crime only to enter a new life...
...Explaining by phone to a Chinese in the U.S...
...They concluded a covenant that hoped to build an ideal Christian society...
...And to demonstrate that their latest government crackdown on Chinese Christians is ecumenically even-handed, Chinese officials arrested eight underground Catholic priests and two underground seminarians in Hebei Province during a religious retreat on the very same day...
...Several dozen Chinese universities now have institutes of religious studies, or departments of similar nomenclature, and several of the professors who teach there are known to be professing Christians...
...No human eye witnessed the slow death of this three-year-old girl...
...She did not die in war, or at the hands of a murderer, and there will be no post-war academic symposia to discuss her death...
...Zhang declared to the court: "In 1620 the British Puritans crossed the Atlantic and reached the land of America to seek religious freedom...
...NOVEMBER 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 21...
...But China's moral conscience is alive and well...
...Worship of a corpse," Yu Jie wrote, was a sign of a "slave-based society...
...As of late September, they were still trying to do this...
...China to Christians: You I Taw a Mind Problem BY DAVID AIKMAN Y CHINESE LEGAL STANDARDS, IT WAS AN OPEN-AND-SHUT CASE...
...Seeking to deflect constant harassment by the police for holding unauthorized religious meetings at all, several leaders signed "A United Appeal of the Various Branches of the House Church" and had it published overseas and then transmitted back to China via the 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 2004 Internet...
...of a book in English called Jesus in Beijing (of which I am the author...
...He worries that ordinary Chinese, while generally sympathetic to Christian activities, generally feel that Christians ought to stay out of politics for fear that their moral authority will be corrupted either by identification with a political movement that eventually falls out of favor, or worse, with foreigners who for more than a century have been accused of using Christianity as a way to control China...
...ANOTHER REASON FOR THE RENEWED CRACKDOWN n Christianity was explained to me in Beijing ast July by an intellectual who is deeply involved in Beijing's house church movement...
...The documentary, widely available in China as a DVD and a VCD, was reportedly shown to the Politburo, and the book was given a rough-and-ready Chinese translation by SARA researchers, who then distributed it both to the highest levels of the Communist Party and to provincial leaders of SARA...
...ZAHANG YINAN IS A REMARKABLE EXAMPLE of a uni- versity-educated Chinese intellectual who has both closely observed the progress of Chinese Christianity in the countryside and is conscious of a Christian tradition of protesting dictatorship that goes back to America's Pilgrim Fathers...
...Zhang Yinan, well acquainted with the original compilers of the United Appeal, was arrested in September 2003 for possession in his home of a "Christian Constitution" for China that he had penned (and never published) several years earlier...
...China's Christians may be experiencing a sharp increase in repression amid the government's latest crackdown, no doubt another doomed attempt to prevent the spread of the Gospel in China...
...The authorities didn't bother with any old church service, but specifically targeted Christian leaders of large underground groups who were meeting for a teaching session at a private location...
...I also advocate the unity of the country, the advancement of modern society and economic development...
...On each occasion, more than 100 people were detained by police, who mobilized more than 200 officers for the arrests...
...One reason is that Christianity is penetrating outside of its traditional growth areas, going beyond the countryside to urban, and especially academic, communities...
...Beijing, he wrote, could then "represent a civilized city, one worthy of hosting the Olympic Games...
...His commentary on the death from starvation in June 2003 of a three-year-old girl, Li Siyi, whose mother was arrested for drug-taking but who was forbidden by the authorities from taking any measures to look after her daughter, is one of the most moving moral documents to come from China in recent years...
...Throughout history, Christianity has always been a stabilizing power for authority...
...The first clear sign of the new crackdown was no less than three mass arrests in as many months in three different parts of China, ranging from Henan in the center of the country to Xinjiang in the far west...
...Towards both the Party and the reform policy I am open and positive...
...Even while Yu Jie was expressing his daring opinion about the need for Christians to stand up against state power, one man who would have agreed with him was serving a two-year sentence in a labor camp for expressing Christian political thoughts in private...
...The Christian community in China should realize that they are part of a global community" In other words, the rural-based house church leaders, hitherto the spokesmen for Christianity in China, haven't grasped this point...
...Other Chinese Christian intellectuals, notably documentary maker Yuan Zhiming, are not entirely comfortable with Christians' becoming increasingly political...
...The authorities may be grateful that Yu Jie is calling for "a reconciliation process" and not outright opposition to the Communist Party...
...What particularly worried the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) was a documentary produced by a famous Chinese documentary maker, now living in the U.S., called The Cross and the publication in the U.S...
...In effect, they were in no way part of China's historical tradition of intellectuals speaking truth to power...
...But in speaking out at all in a way that challenges the authorities, Yu Jie is departing from a tradition of noninvolvement in politics that China's house church Christian leaders attempted to establish during a meeting held in August 1998 in Zhengzhou, Henan Province...
...Yu, by contrast, told Newsweek last May, "Every day there are human rights violations [in China], but very few Christians are standing up and doing something...
...In their raid on his apartment, the police also came across a private prayer journal in which Zhang had expressed hope that some day there would be Christian leaders in China's government...
...When this became widely known outside Asked why Zhang had been held on the basis of private thoughts and prayers, the interrogator in true Orwellian style replied: "Zhang does not have a criminal problem, he has a mind problem...
...The United Appeal stressed that China's Christians were patriotic (the implication: they didn't oppose the Communist Party) and were more than willing to sit down with the authorities to discuss a satisfactory working relationship...
Vol. 37 • November 2004 • No. 9
