China harasses Christians ahead of Beijing Olympics

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House churches in Harbin, China, meet weekly for several hours at a time. To avoid attracting too much attention, the groups often move from home to home, meeting in different locations each week. Reports have surfaced of the Chinese government cracking down on house churches to silence voices that may raise awareness to human rights abuses during the summer Olympics.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) — With increased frequency, the Chinese government is persecuting house churches and banishing foreign Christians from the country, presumably to squelch voices who might draw attention to the plight of religious minorities in the nation surrounding the Beijing Olympics.

“We seem to be seeing a crackdown ahead of the Olympics. Whether that’s to send a message to the church to lay low or whether it is to make sure that anybody who might cause international embarrassment is taken care of ahead of time, I don’t know,” Todd Nettleton, a spokesman for Voice of the Martyrs, told Baptist Press. “But we do see an increase in the level of arrests, the level of house church services being raided, that sort of activity.

“We also have seen a number of foreigners who are Christians who, when the time came to renew their visa they have been denied a new visa and told that they had to leave the country,” Nettleton added.

Letter details hardships

One of the most significant cases of persecution in China is the imprisonment of Zhang Mingxuan, president of the Chinese house church alliance, who has been arrested, beaten, and incarcerated 12 times since his conversion to Christianity in 1986, according to China Aid.

Most recently, Zhang was forced to close an orphanage he had been operating with his two sons, and they were not able to take up residence elsewhere because of landlords being threatened by the government not to house Zhang.

In February, Zhang wrote an open letter to the international community, detailing the hardships and injustices he and others have endured.

“Many church leaders have been imprisoned, forced to work on labor camps, and had their homes searched. The Christians are said to be the enemy of the Communist Party,” Zhang wrote in the letter circulated by China Aid. “The small number of corrupt government officials try to grab money by seizing Christians, beating them up, sending them into exile, and harming them in person.”

Nettleton noted that about 20 percent of China’s Christians are part of the official church – the Three-Self Patriotic Movement or the Catholic version approved by the government – while the other 80 percent go to unregistered or unofficial churches.

“They don’t actually have permission from the government to meet together, so their activities are illegal and they can be arrested …[and] serve time in prison,” Nettleton said of the 80 percent.

Persecution stats up

Nettleton said his best guess for the increase in persecution is that the Chinese government views the Beijing Olympics, scheduled for Aug. 8-24, as sort of a coming out party where the eyes of the world will be on them.

“The Olympics are a huge event, there will be a huge amount of international attention focused on China,” he said. “They want to make sure that they put their best foot forward, and having Christians doing some sort of protest or drawing attention to the religious freedom situation there would not be good PR.”

China Aid Association, in its 2007 Persecution Report released in February, said the 60 reported cases of persecution against house churches in China last year was up 30.4 percent from 2006. CAA, a Christian rights defense organization, is based in Texas.

The total number of people persecuted last year was 788, up 18.5 percent from 2006, China Aid said regarding 2007 statistics, and the total number of people arrested and detained was 693, up 6.6 percent. Sixteen people were sentenced to imprisonment, down 5.9 percent, according to China Aid records.

“Besides these figures, two types of cases need special attention: There are 17 cases of physical abuse in the persecution (beating, torture, and psychological abuse), up 325 percent from that of 2006, and the number abused was 35, up 400 percent,” China Aid said. “The other type is that many foreign Christians also suffered persecution mainly in the form of arrest, interrogation, and expulsion from the country. The total number of people in this category is over 100 (84 of them are confirmed), up 833 percent from the year before.”

Nettleton said that despite the crackdown he doesn’t see a high probability of Western Christians being harassed during the Beijing Olympics.

“I don’t know how it will be different from what [evangelical groups] did in Athens [in 2004] other than the fact that in China they will need to keep a little lower profile,” Nettleton said.