by Edmund Downie:
The Chinese government’s recent crackdown on dissent has found a new target: the Christian church. On Easter Sunday, police arrested more than thirty members of Shouwang Church, a congregation in northwest Beijing, for holding unsanctioned outdoor services . The arrests mark the third Sunday in a row which police have broken up Shouwang’s outdoor services. Church leaders are also claiming that authorities have pressured landlords to evict church members and that some members have already been fired for their participation in the church.
First, a few words about Chinese laws on religion. Mao’s Communist China banned all religious organizations, but the Chinese Constitution today takes a more nuanced approach. Citizens may pursue their own faiths. If they wish to associate, however, the associations must attach themselves to one of five state-sanctioned “patriotic religious associations,” each of which represents a different faith: Buddhism, Taoism, Muslim, Catholic, and Protestant. Mao’s China attempted to stamp religion out of both the public and private spheres; today’s legal code allows private expression of most faiths while neutering religion’s public force. But these laws reflect little about the practice of religion in China. Only a quarter of Chinese’s Protestants belong to the state Protestant church. The other sixty million belong to “house churches” like Shouwang, which do not have official sanction.
Shouwang’s legal status has caused it problems before, as in 2009, when Beijing city authorities called the employers of church members and pressured them to fire members who wouldn’t join an official church. But last year seemed to promise improvement. In March, Shouwang was the subject of a flattering write-up in state media outlet China Daily that ran under the headline, “House Churches Thrive in Beijing.” The article danced around the subject of Shouwang’s legal status while blithely quoting members on the “sense of belonging” and “intimate feel” fostered by house churches. Meanwhile, the church had negotiated successfully to buy a permanent location in northwest Beijing with twenty-two million yuan ($4 million) in donations from its congregants. Membership was also growing, nearing one thousand in number.
The church’s troubles began again in October, when two hundred Chinese house church members, including many from Shouwang, booked tickets to South Africa to represent China at a conference for evangelical Christians. Authorities stopped all but two from boarding the plane and then blocked Shouwang from using its space in Beijing.
This year’s nationwide crackdown on dissent has put the church in even worse straits. The crackdown dates to January with the Jasmine Revolution, which attempted to bring protests of the Arab world to thirteen major Chinese cities. The government responded by swamping the protests and launching a wave of arrests across China. Chinese Human Rights Defenders counts fifty-four political activists and dissenters missing or under sustained and unlawful detention. The arrest of internationally renowned artist and provocateur Ai Weiwei is the most dramatic sign of rising anxiety in the government.
In my last post on the sacking of liberal journalist Chang Ping, I described his dismissal as a pre-emptive strike based on his reputation, to prevent him from fanning the flames of revolution. The detentions of Shouwang Church members indicate a similar intent. As with Chang Ping, though Shouwang has a history of run-ins with the government, news reports on the detentions list nothing out of the ordinary in its activities over the last few months. But house churches tend to draw a more liberal crowd than state churches, the sort of crowd that’s willing to take a legal risk for the sake of its faith. Cracking down on such institutions sends a message to the liberal elements of Chinese society about the place of their views in public discourse. The church’s outdoor services also set an example of leeway within the law that doesn’t sit well with a government anxious to shore up its authority. In this climate, Shouwang’s members are lucky to have stayed free this long.