From Newsmax

Officials in China’s Zhejiang province have launched what Christian activists call an “anti-church” campaign that has reportedly damaged or demolished some 360 church buildings and crosses.

One recent attack on China’s Christian community came with officials’ attempts to remove a cross from the Guantou church in Wenzhou.

Wenzhou, a port city on the South China Sea, has for centuries been a hub of Christian missionary activity and is known as “China’s Jerusalem.” Before 1949, it was home to around 115,000 Christians, more than one-tenth of China’s total at the time.

On June 11, security guards with batons and riot shields were deployed to prevent members of the Guantou church from entering the building and attempting to halt the removal of a large red cross from one of the church’s domes, The Telegraph reported.

The demolition workers were forced to retreat after church members got past the security personnel and disconnected the power supply. Several churchgoers were slightly injured in the scuffle.

But the demolition workers returned early on Tuesday, and the cross “was secretly taken down between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m.,” said Zheng Legou, a local church leader.

Officials had threatened to tear down the entire church — as they did with the Sanjiang church in Wenzhou in April — if church members tried to stop the removal a second time, Zheng claimed.

The Telegraph published a photo showing a crane lifting a large red cross from the church. Another photo showed the damaged cross discarded on the church grounds.

Another church in Wenzhou scheduled to open to worshippers next year had its cross removed on June 15, according to The Telegraph.

Authorities have notified at least 15 churches that if they don’t remove their crosses by the end of June they will face demolition, according to China Aid, a Christian advocacy group that claims some 360 church buildings and crosses have already been attacked.

Activists believe the Communist Party is attempting to rein in the growth of Christianity.

The government maintains that the demolition campaign is aimed at all illegal buildings and “eyesores” and not just churches. But government documents obtained by The New York Times disclose that the campaign is intended to bring “excessive religious sites” and “overly popular” religious activities under control.

Christian activists are increasingly convinced, The Telegraph observes, that the “anti-church” campaign in Zhejiang “may be a precursor for similar actions across the country.”

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PHOTO: www.telegraph.co.uk Another Chinese church is stripped of its cross as a Communist Party ‘anti-church’ demolition campaign continues in Zhejiang province

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Is this the scariest Doomsday Sect in China?

With Lizzie Crocker in New York From Daily Beast

China has declared a massive crackdown on a so-called religious cult in the wake of a brutal murder of a woman at a McDonald’s restaurant.

HONG KONG — On May 28, Zhang Lidong beat a woman to death in a McDonald’s restaurant in eastern China after she declined to give him her phone number. When staff at the restaurant pleaded for him to stop, his daughter shot back, “Do you know who we are? Mind your own business!” Onlookers called the police, who arrived at the scene within minutes and arrested Zhang along with five others, including his son and daughter. Then things get stranger.

Cuffed and behind bars, Zhang told state media, “She was a demon, she was an evil spirit, so I beat her relentlessly, and stomped on her head with my heel. She wouldn’t let me have her phone number, and my daughter said she was no good. She told me to kill her.” His prison confession was broadcast on CCTV last week. “We give no thought to the law. We only believe in God,” he said with an icy calm. “I felt good doing it.”

Authorities say Zhang and four others charged in the murder belong to a group called Quannengshen, which means Almighty God, though the Christian sect is most commonly known as Eastern Lightning. Zhang told authorities he had been a follower of Eastern Lightning for seven years, living off of savings he accumulated before joining the sect.

Despite the shroud of mystery surrounding the sect, a few details about its origins and central tenants have been brought to light by former adherents: A man named Zhao Weishan established the millenarian group in central China in the early 1990s. Eager to develop a following amongst underground Chinese Christians, he proclaimed that a woman known as Lightening Deng was the living host of Jesus Christ. Chinese press have reported that Lightening Deng’s real name is Yang Xiangbin, Zhao’s alleged mistress, who reportedly suffered a mental breakdown after failing the National College Entrance Examination. (In 2001, the Asian edition of Time headlined a feature on Eastern Lightning: “Jesus is Back, and She’s Chinese.”)

The sect has long been linked to violence as a method of recruitment, according to Chinese authorities, and Eastern Lightning (EL) has even been accused of kidnapping leaders of rival churches. David Aikman, former Beijing bureau chief at Time, described encounters with EL kidnapping victims in his 2006 book, Jesus in Beijing, including one man affiliated with the Tanghe network who said he was kidnapped with 33 other leaders in 2002. He claimed his kidnappers drugged him and assigned a woman to seduce him in his weakened state, threatening to disclose his adultery to other parishioners in his church if he didn’t relent.

The group has also been known to offer gifts like smartphones to potential followers, most of whom are unemployed. When their advances are rejected, they have allegedly abducted their targets and forced them to convert by employing beatings and coercive tactics, according to a former member who requested anonymity. The former member said the group entices men to join by providing young women as companions, allegedly stages fake exorcisms to heal the sick, and plays Taiwanese pop music in loops to brainwash their followers. The former member also said that Eastern Lightning preaches that their ultimate goal is to defeat the Great Red Dragon, which is an unsubtle allusion to the Chinese Communist Party. (Attempts to contact the leaders of Eastern Lightening to comment on these allegations were unsuccessful.)

When their advances are rejected, they have allegedly abducted their targets and forced them to convert by employing beatings and coercive tactics.

In one case, a woman who hosted mass in her house for 20 Christians in Shanxi province said that Eastern Lightning kidnapped her and locked her in a room for nine days. She told The Daily Beast that EL members beat and whipped her, and tried to convince her that the local leader of Eastern Lightning was possessed by “the angel Lucifer.” When her screams attracted the attention of neighbors, her captors allegedly said that she was a relative who suffered from mental illness and apologized for her outbursts, only to increase the intensity of the torture afterward. She says she was released when she feigned acceptance of their dogma.

In December 2012, with the Mayan apocalypse looming, Eastern Lightning went on a recruitment binge, demanding donations from neophytes to repel the dark forces that aimed to bring the world to an end. Chinese media were quick to brand them as heretics. Across the country, over 1,300 members of Eastern Lightning were arrested. A year and a half later, when the McDonald’s killing surfaced online, the public hurled verbal attacks at the sect on social media. For several days, Eastern Lightning was public enemy No. 1.

Media and information are sensitive fields in China, which contributes to the tight regulation of religion within the state. Christianity is a particularly nervous subject, in part because of its role in weakening the last dynasty of imperial China. In the mid-1800s, a man from southeast China claimed to be the brother of Jesus Christ and founded an oppositional state within the Chinese empire. He amassed 30 million followers and attempted to topple imperial rule. The ensuing civil war resulted in 20 million deaths and a severely weakened ruling class. Even though this was a factor that led to the eventual rise of the Communist Party, the lesson was clear: Cults were efficient conduits for social engineering. The central government has since been wary of groups that could manipulate the beliefs of the general populace. In fact, members of the Party are required to be atheists.

It’s no wonder, then, that state-run media coverage of the McDonald’s murder has focused so much on the religious motivations behind it. In doing so, they’ve successfully redirected outrage away from the bystanders who watched a woman be beat to death and onto Eastern Lightning. “The implication is that religion needs to be strictly and strongly regulated, and this kind of incident only confirms that in the eyes of party bureaucrats, government bureaucrats, and frankly, a lot of Chinese people,” Angela Zito, director of religion and media at New York University, told The Daily Beast. The state isn’t declaring religion pernicious, but in creating distinctions among specific religions—and in singling out Eastern Lightning as pernicious—it is declaring itself authority on the role of religion in China. “You need to have a bad guy in order to have a good guy, and [the authorities] are the arbiters of good and bad religion,” said Zito. “That leaves them in a position of power, and incidents like the McDonald’s murder shore up that position.”

For years, Chinese media has reported that Zhao and his Christ-mistress fled to the U.S. in 2000 (the sect was banned in the mid-’90s), where they were granted political asylum. A public affairs officer at the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong was unable to confirm or deny these reports due to privacy concerns. However, adherents of Eastern Lightning have been spotted proselytizing in New York and California, particularly in cities with large Chinese-American and Korean-American populations. A representative of Eastern Lightning in Taiwan provided The Daily Beast with two phone numbers in New York believed to be connected to Zhao; those who answered claimed to be members of the church, but deflected questions about its alleged leader. An email sent to Yang, whose public record lists her as “president” of the church, was not returned.

Eastern Lightning adherents are forbidden from knowing the physical location of Zhao and his companion, the sect’s representative in Taiwan told The Daily Beast, and are discouraged to speak about him as an individual. But his followers aggressively spread his teachings by infiltrating house churches in China.

Mr. Tian, a man from southeast China who joined Eastern Lightning but fled its grasp in 2013, offered insight on the inner workings of the sect. “When everyone around you is accumulating food and water, packing their houses full of survival supplies, it does things to your brain,” he said, referring to their preparations for the Mayan apocalypse. “It changed my perception of what was real. I had to follow what everyone else was doing.”

Prior to joining Eastern Lightning, Tian practiced his Christian faith in a house church by joining a small group of Christians in worship in a family home. He said the private, exclusive nature of their assembly made it easy for a member of Eastern Lightning to become close with them. “She joined us in mid-2012, and became increasingly vocal as we spent more time together.” Tian said that the newcomer distributed literature printed by Eastern Lightning, and shared her visions of the Messiah returning to Earth as a Chinese woman. Tian didn’t want to be left out “in case her visions were real,” and was inducted into the sect.

Once he was part of Eastern Lightning, Tian says, he was warned that he would be struck by lightning and killed if he tried to leave the group. But he was fully devoted to EL, and made preparations for the looming doomsday. “December [2012] came, and nothing happened. Our leader said it was because they saved the world, but then some of us started to doubt her.” Those seeds of dissent led to Tian’s decision to relocate and start anew. “Besides, I found out some of the followers only joined so they could follow Zhao Weishan’s example—they wanted to go to the West by seeking religious asylum,” he says. Since leaving the group, he continues to practice his faith in a house church, but has severed all old connections.

Following the McDonald’s murder, authorities swiftly began making arrests on people whom they said were associated with Eastern Lightning—the first one being a woman who had allegedly been distributing materials produced by the sect. She was quickly found guilty on the vague charge of “organizing and using a religious cult to break laws” and sentenced to five years in prison. Members have been arrested in other parts of China. While some have been given prison sentences of three to four years, police say that most will likely be released after several days in detention. There are a rare few like Tian who can identify local leaders of Eastern Lightning and assist law enforcement in the crackdown, but they live in fear of retaliation. “That woman was a stranger, but they still beat her to death on a whim.” Tian said, “Think of what they would do to a ‘traitor.’ They are scary people, and I don’t want to die.”

For more on this story go to: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/20/is-eastern-lightning-the-scariest-doomsday-sect-in-china.html

 

China’s Clampdown on ‘Evil Cults’

By Murong Xuecun From New York Times

On June 1, my friend Pastor Wang Yi of the Early Rain Reformed Church in Chengdu was arrested while distributing anti-forced-abortion leaflets. The stated grounds for detaining him were “illegal advertising.” He was let go after half an hour. Three days later, Mr. Wang was detained again. This time the arresting officers produced no identification and gave no reason for taking him in. After 12 hours of interrogation, he was finally released at midnight.

When I posted an account of the harassment on Weibo, a microblogging platform, several people protested against the injustice — and many wrote in support of the government’s actions. One netizen commented, “The cops have done a beautiful job!”

I wondered how many of the hostile comments were sincere and how many were made for money: The government employs a cyberpolice force of propagandists known as the 50-Cent Party. But given other recent events, and China’s agonizing history with organized religion, I believe that a good number of the pro-government comments reflected genuine opinion.

On May 28, a woman named Wu Shuoyan was beaten to death in a McDonalds restaurant in Zhaoyuan in Shandong Province while people stood by idly. The state broadcaster CCTV announced that her murderers were all members of the Church of Almighty God, a Christian sect. The CCTV report implied that the killers’ faith had some relation to the atrocity.

A few days later the government published its list of 20 active “cults.” From then on, events unfolded with a ruthless and familiar logic: Every TV channel and newspaper issued warnings about the dangers of “evil cults.” Community organizations, village authorities and schools got in on the act.

The anti-cult campaign extended to more mainstream religious practices. The People’s Daily website and the Global Times, a government newspaper, opened a barrage of attacks on China’s underground Christian churches. An article in the Global Times said “underground churches and evil cults are spreading like mushrooms … the problem is very urgent.”

The government’s anti-religion campaign is not borne of concern for public security stemming from a horrific murder. This is a concerted effort to bring independent churches and their followers into line. The clampdown is simply the government’s way of strengthening its control of society.

As a perceived “foreign” religion, Christianity makes the Chinese leadership particularly nervous. The history of Eastern Europe in the 1980s is seen as a cautionary tale by officials such as the former head of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs, Ye Xiaowen, who often cited Christianity’s contribution to the end of Communist rule in Poland. A policy document published in September 2012 on the Religious Affairs Bureau’s website stated that unlawful religious groups are “threatening China’s national security.”

It’s hard to pin down the number of Christians in China, but it’s clearly growing. In 2010, government figures put the number of Christians at 23 million. The Pew Research Center estimated in April that Christians account for around 5.1 percent of the Chinese population, or 67 million believers, of whom around 58 million are Protestants and 9 million are Catholics. Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University, projected that by 2030, China would have the world’s largest Christian population.

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China has two classes of Christian churches: One group is legal and consists of state-approved congregations; the other is illegal and includes what are called “home churches” or “underground churches.”

The legal churches belong to the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement,” a government-backed umbrella organization that operates on the principle of freedom from foreign interference. The prerequisite for becoming a legal church is to accept being managed by the government: Most clergy are trained at state-sanctioned seminaries.

The illegal churches are independent congregations that operate without state-approval and are buffeted by frequent crackdowns. State media routinely presents underground churches as an American Trojan horse.

But in the latest crackdown, even legal churches are fair game for the government’s bulldozers. In Zhejiang Province in the southeast, churches once treated as legal now face persecution. At least 10 of them have had their crosses destroyed or have been completely demolished. Until recently, Sanjiang Church was considered the crown jewel of the city of Wenzhou, which has been called “China’s Jerusalem” because of its many churches. On April 28, Sanjiang was razed as part of the crackdown.

Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, communism has been promoted as the “religion” of the Chinese people, while traditional religions have been suppressed. During the Cultural Revolution, countless temples and churches were demolished. Many Buddhist monks and Christian clergy were forced into leading secular lives. As a result, traditional belief systems like Confucianism and Buddhism were weakened. But as the country has opened up, Chinese people have gained more personal freedoms and with that a renewed desire for faith. To many believers, Christianity is filling a spiritual vacuum and offering a sense of belonging.

Still, given the decades of anti-religion propaganda, and despite Christianity’s growing appeal, many Chinese people are ignorant about religion, and many even express disgust with it. Like the fighters of the anti-Christian Boxer Rebellion in the late-19th century, they are easily manipulated into viewing foreign faiths as evil sects.

On June 1, a CCTV report outlined the “six characteristics of evil cults,” which a legal “expert” said included the cult of personality, immorality and restrictions of individual and spiritual freedom. As many Chinese people took to the Internet with renewed anti-religious fervor to thank the government for exposing the true nature of “evil cults,” I realized that the name of the biggest cult is hidden in plain view: the Communist Party.

Murong Xuecun, a novelist and blogger, is the author of “Leave Me Alone: A Novel of Chengdu” and “Dancing Through Red Dust.” This article was translated by Harvey Thomlinson from the Chinese.

For more on this story go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/opinion/murong-chinas-clampdown-on-evil-cults.html?_r=1