In China, authorities say that cross removal is part of the government’s “Three Rectifications and One Demolition” campaign. To justify the demolitions, they say these buildings and crosses are constructed illegally.
Some of the Christians who protest the Church demolitions and cross-removal campaigns are arrested. There was a case of one pastor’s wife, Ding Cuimei, whose opposition to the forced demolition of the Beitou Church had her ending up dead. A demolition crew buried her alive after she and her husband tried to fight off the team tasked to destroy their Church in Zhumadian, Henan province.
At a long-awaited national conference on religion, held this April in Beijing, China’s president Xi Jinping called on leaders to take an initiative in reasserting Communist Party of China (CPC) control over religion.
Xi’s speech, his first specifically on religion since coming to power in 2012, delineates a clear hierarchy in which religion is subordinate to state interests. According to Xi, uniting all believers under CPC leadership is necessary to preserve internal harmony while warding off hostile foreign forces that may use religion to destabilize the regime.
In an environment in which the CPC is moving aggressively to rein in all expressions of civil society Xi’s message on religion comes as no surprise for it comes with tightened supervision over religious doctrine and organizations.
For China’s Christians, such legislation could be a two-edged sword.
The CPC’s control over religion is to be exerted not only through law, but also by reconciling religious doctrine with the party’s socialist values. While “religion serving socialism” has been in the CPC lexicon for some time, direct intervention in the beliefs and practices of individual religions—including calls for the “Sinification” of Christian theology—have become more common under Xi.
Amid all this however, as of 2010 there were 68 million Christians in China according to Pew Research.
“[The government does] not trust the church, but they have to tolerate or accept it because the growth is there,” one house church leader told The Telegraph. “The number of Christians is growing – they cannot fight it.”
The People’s Republic of China, which is officially an atheist country, has a population of nearly 1.4 billion. As of 2010, just 5% of China’s population, or roughly 67 million people were Chrisitian, according to Pew Research, making it the seventh largest Christian country.
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editor@ugchristiannews.com. Photo – Clergy arrive for the funeral of the late head of the underground Catholic Church in Shanghai, Bishop Joseph Fan Zhongliang, as he lies in a funeral home in Shanghai on March 22, 2014. Thousands of mourners packed the funeral home to bid farewell to the “underground” Catholic Bishop whose faith, they said, led him to endure decades of suffering at the hands of China’s ruling Communist Party. AFP PHOTO/Peter PARKS
