China Digital Times

China news tagged with: religious freedom (74)

• One Billion Souls to Save

  

  Times Online has a lengthy article about the spread of Christianity in China:

  In fact, across China religion is undergoing a defiant and extraordinary revival. Millions of Chinese are turning to familiar traditional faiths such as Buddhism and Taoism – a mystical belief with about 400 million adherents that is China’s only indigenous creed. Taoist believers, like Buddhists, visit temples across the country to burn incense, present offerings and request readings from fortune tellers. Others are finding comfort in Confucius, but it is Christianity that is leading the battle for China’s 1.3 billion souls.

  Many regard religion as a new force, unaware that missionaries – Protestant for the most part but also Roman Catholics – tried to spread Christianity across China in the 19th century and met with fierce opposition during the anti-Western Boxer Rebellion in the early 1900s. But it was former leader Deng Xiaoping, who effectively endorsed freedom of worship, and gave Christianity the chance to take hold, with his sweeping market reforms in 1978.

  » Read more
  • March 27, 2009 10:19 PM

• Kashgar Uighurs Pressured to Shave

  

  In the latest of a series of moves to suppress Uighur expression of ethnic and religious identity, Chinese government officials in Xinjiang are pushing male state employees to shave their facial hair. From Radio Free Asia:

  Authorities in China’s westernmost city of Kashgar are stepping up pressure on government employees to go clean-shaven, and the city’s large ethnic Uyghur population, whose adult males overwhelmingly sport moustaches, aren’t happy about it, residents say.

  Kashgar Prefecture propaganda chief Omerjan Tohti said the tough new line against facial hair aims to make government employees look more presentable, but he acknowledged that the issue has become politicized.

  [...]“Kashgar’s situation is very complicated,” Tohti said. “There are some radical elements politicizing beards and mustaches to incite separatism.”

  » Read more
  • February 21, 2009 11:39 PM

• Video: Naked China

  

  It has been five months since the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China considered the Games as a symbol of the rising of a great nation. Over five nights leading to the opening ceremony, News and multimedia website Current.com came up with a series of documentaries with five parts: Busting Out; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Out of Control; Fighting for Freedom; Let the Party Begin. These video series, anchored by Laura Ling, a Current journalist, summarize Current’s former news videos to explore China’s economic growth, how China prepared for the Games, social ills in China’s society - sex workers, freedom of religion and the press, and the transition of China’s culture, via Current.com:

  Naked China: Busting Out
  

  Naked China: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
  

  Naked China: Out of Control
  

  Naked China: Fighting for Freedom
  

  Naked China: Let the Party Begin
  

  » Read more
  • January 28, 2009 3:09 PM

• Pastors Say China Easing Up on Churches

  

  Protestant pastors operating out of illegal “house churches” in China may soon be able to practice their religion in the open. From UPI:

  Recent meetings between government officials and leaders of banned underground Protestant house churches marked the first step toward reconciliation in decades, the Rev. Ezra Jin said.

  Jin, who founded his Zion house church two years ago, said the government, including the police, have realized the time for confrontation is past.

  “The government is anxious to work out the way to go forward,” said Jin, noting he prays and sings with several hundred worshippers each Sunday in Beijing.

  For more information on underground Christianity in China see this Frontline World production with Chicago Tribune reporter Evan Osnos.

  » Read more
  • January 26, 2009 4:14 PM

• Hong Kong Cardinal, Critical of China, to Step Down

  

  The Vatican has agreed to Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun’s request to step down from his post in 2009:

  [The Cardinal] said he would spend more time monitoring Catholic churches in mainland China, according to The Associated Press, which quoted him as saying: “I do not retire to rest. The mainland Chinese church is huge and complicated. Sometimes the pope wants me to give him some advice, so I need more time to research it.”

  The Cardinal has been an outspoken human rights critic of the CCP. The state-sanctioned religious group, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, has around seven million members in China, and it is estimated that several million belong to underground churches throughout the country.

  For more information on China-Vatican relations, see past CDT posts.

  Image courtesy of Wikipedia.

  » Read more
  • December 24, 2008 12:10 PM

• Raids on Chinese House Churches

  

  From RFA:

  At least 10 members of an unofficial “house” church in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu have been injured after a local property developer launched an unannounced eviction raid Wednesday on the building where their meetings were being held.

  “They are developing this plot of land, and they wanted the land on which our church is built,” a pastor surnamed Ding at the Chengnan Church in the Pinghu district of Yancheng city said.

  “No agreement had been reached, and they hadn’t even carried out a valuation of the property. A deputy secretary from the municipal government led the gang—there were more than 200 people,” Ding said.

  » Read more
  • December 19, 2008 11:47 PM

• China 2008: Human Rights

  

  This next installment in the CDT series on important issues facing China in 2008 concerns the state of human rights in China.  See also these previous China 2008 articles: China and the Developing World, Nationalism, Internet Culture, and Identity, Environmental Crisis, and The Global Financial Crisis and the Revaluation of the Yuan.
  

  The issue of human rights may be the oldest sore point between the People’s Republic of China and the developed democracies of the world - particularly the United States - as the former aspires to a place of prestige in the international system.  The Chinese government first garnered international outrage for its human rights record with the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.  Since then, scrutiny has been focused on, among other issues, China’s treatment of its ethnic and religious minorities.  However, human rights as a category casts a broad net which also includes freedom of expression, due process, reproductive freedom, and labor rights.

  The hosting of the Olympic Games in Beijing made 2008 a very special year for human rights in China.  One of the hottest questions buzzing around the run-up to the Games was whether Chinese leaders would improve human rights, as per their promise when bidding to host the Olympics in 2001.  Since the closing ceremony, however, several events have surfaced in the media to indicate that old human rights violations are still plaguing the People’s Republic of China.  Below are several cases which have appeared on CDT, from the crackdown in Tibet to lesser-known episodes of religious and political oppression.

  Activism

  In 2008, the Chinese government set for China ambitious goals of social progress, such as democracy by 2020 and battling discrimination against sufferers of AIDS.  Activists continue to be excluded from efforts to meet those goals, as evidenced by the spate of confinements, arrests, and disappearances of democracy, AIDS, and other activists.  An activist campaigning for people with HIV and AIDS was detained and sent out of Beijing as the capital observed World AIDS Day.  The trial and sentencing of democracy activist Hu Jia and the house arrest of his activist wife Zeng Jinyan were perhaps the biggest stories in this vein in 2008.

  The Olympics

  To showcase China’s commitment to free speech, the Chinese government created special ‘protest zones‘ in parks around Beijing where people could apply to protest.  However, of the 77 protest applications filed - most involving property, health care, and labor disputes  74 were voluntarily withdrawn after being “properly addressed by the relevant authorities”, and none were approved.  Petitioners were often followed to Beijing by police from their hometown and forced to go back, or arrested and sentenced to hard labor.

  Black Jails

  Some Chinese citizens who traveled to Beijing for redress of grievances were not so lucky to be escorted back home.  Many petitioners were imprisoned in ‘black jails’ instead, illegal but state-run detention centers for petitioners scattered throughout the capital city.  Human rights groups have suspected the existence of these underground prisoners for some time, but hard evidence came to light in September when Beijing activists mounted rescue operations for petitioners being held in a black jail.  Charged with no crime and held indefinitely in poor conditions, those held in black jails have also been badly beaten.

  Labor

  The global credit crisis has exacerbated the plight of China’s laborers.  The recent wave of labor unrest stems from the chronic injustices of unpaid wages and unemployment benefits, and stolen pensions.  Many Chinese laborers are migrant workers whose legal inability to obtain a hukou, or local registration, consigns them to substandard living conditions and denies them social services such as education for their children.

  Legal Rights

  The right to sue continues to be denied to parents who lost children to melamine-tainted infant formula and to unsafe schools which collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake.  Chinese courts have thus far declined to hear all such cases, lawyers offering legal advice to bereaved families have been intimidated by the state, and parents are both threatened and bribed into silence.

  Police Brutality

  In November, police suppressed a violent riot in the city of Longnan, Gansu province over plans to demolish and move the city center.  Soon after, Chinese netizens reported that the violence had been triggered when police began to beat protesters.  They estimated that over a hundred had been arrested in connection with the riots, many injured and some fatally so.   One netizen also claimed that tens of protesters had been beaten to death.  These posts were soon censored.

  Tibet

  Thousands in Tibet were arrested in a security crackdown after violent riots against government policies broke out in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on March 14.  Among them was Jigme, a Tibetan monk who while in hiding spoke to foreign media about his two months of abuse in government custody.  Jigme was re-arrested in November at his monastery in Labrang, where he had returned after police assured his family that he would be safe.

  Torture

  Accusations of torture in Chinese prisons have been leveled for years against the PRC.  In early November, Chinese officials appeared before U.N. Committee Against Torture to answer questions about the country’s alleged record of prisoner abuse.  However, while flatly denying allegations of torture, members of the China delegation side-stepped the Committee’s questions about whether or not the government disappeared and abused political dissidents.  After the review, the U.N. Torture Committee released a report which recommended that China “take immediate steps to prevent acts of torture”.  The Chinese government called the committee’s findings ’slanderous’ and ‘prejudiced’.

  Xinjiang

  Religious oppression continues against the largely Muslim Uighur ethnic minority in China’s far northwest province of Xinjiang. After attackers killed over 20 police officers and security guards in Xinjiang during the Olympic Games, Chinese authorities implemented a security crackdown which included religious restrictions on the region’s Muslims, such as preventing mass prayers and the ciriculation of religious material.  During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in September, women were forced to unveil their faces in public, Uighur restaurants were forced to stay open during the day, and Muslims were discouraged from fasting.  Ethnic Uighur government officials were tested with offers of free lunches at work.

  Later in November, in a more draconian instance of China’s population control policy (also known as the one-child policy), a Uighur woman was held at a hospital in Xinjiang to undergo an abortion against her will, six months into her third pregnancy.  After an unsuccessful escape attempt, she was later released without the abortion due to international pressure on Chinese authorities.

  » Read more
  • December 10, 2008 12:42 AM

• U.S. Condemns Beating Of Sons Of Chinese Pastor

  

  From Reuters:

  The United States strongly condemned on Thursday the “brutal beating” of two sons of a detained Beijing pastor and voiced concern over what it said was a pattern of intimidation of religious leaders in China.

  State Department spokesman Robert Wood said Beijing-based pastor Zhang Mingxuan, president of the China House Church Alliance, had been detained along with his wife, and their two sons were beaten up this month by public security officials.

  “We are gravely concerned by the brutal beating of Pastor Zhang ‘Bike’ Mingxuan’s two sons by public security officials,” said Wood, who did not provide details of the beatings.

  Read also Congressional Leaders Issue Letter to Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice Urging Advocacy for Zhang Family, and Interview with Zhang Jian from China Aid Association.

  » Read more
  • October 23, 2008 8:30 PM

• Wary of Islam, China Tightens a Vise of Rules

  

  According to a report in the New York Times, Muslims living in Xinjiang must abide by a stringent set of rules in their religious practice:

  To be a practicing Muslim in the vast autonomous region of northwestern China called Xinjiang is to live under an intricate series of laws and regulations intended to control the spread and practice of Islam, the predominant religion among the Uighurs, a Turkic people uneasy with Chinese rule.

  The edicts touch on every facet of a Muslim’s way of life. Official versions of the Koran are the only legal ones. Imams may not teach the Koran in private, and studying Arabic is allowed only at special government schools.

  Two of Islam’s five pillars — the sacred fasting month of Ramadan and the pilgrimage to Mecca called the hajj — are also carefully controlled. Students and government workers are compelled to eat during Ramadan, and the passports of Uighurs have been confiscated across Xinjiang to force them to join government-run hajj tours rather than travel illegally to Mecca on their own.

  » Read more
  • October 18, 2008 2:06 PM

• Ramadan Lunches for China’s Muslims

  

  In addition to earlier accounts of fasting restrictions on Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang during Ramadan, Radio Free Asia reports that ethnic Uyghur government officials are being tested with offers of food at the workplace:

  Chinese authorities in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, home to the Muslim Uyghur ethnic group, are implementing a campaign to offer free lunches during the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, when eating is proscribed until sundown.

  The lunches are being offered in government departments to ethnic Uyghur and Han Chinese officials alike, employees said.

  Uyghur exiles say that Chinese authorities have previously offered free lunches during Ramadan as a means of determining who is fasting.

  » Read more
  • September 25, 2008 8:55 AM

• Different Media Pictures of Ramadan in Xinjiang

  

  CDT reported in an earlier post that Xinjiang Muslims are facing a security crackdown and fasting restrictions during the holy month of Ramadan. 

  Earlier this month, Radio Free Asia also reported on several Ramadan restrictions imposed upon Muslims in Xinjiang:

  Women are being forced to uncover their faces in public by police, while restrictions on teaching Islam to Uyghur children are being intensified, police said.

  “We are…checking the identities of those who have beards or mustaches, and women who cover their faces,” an officer who answered the phone at the Charbagh village police station, in Lop county, Hotan prefecture.

  “We uncover the faces of veiled women by force if necessary,” he said. “We also arrest anyone teaching religion to children illegally,” he said, adding that police were also helping to enforce a ban on Muslim restaurant closures in Ramadan.

  But the China Daily paints a different picture: ‘Ramadan brings normalcy back to Kashgar’:

  A month after a brutal terrorist attack near its front entrance, the three-storey Yijin Motel in this largely Uygur city re-opened for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

  [...] When asked about Ramadan dietary restrictions, a veiled female Uygur shopkeeper, who was eating sunflower seeds on a lazy afternoon, pounded on her husband’s chest and said: “It’s in there!”

  “Why need it here?” she said in broken Mandarin while pointing at her own mouth.

  Guli, a 19-year-old from Kashgar’s Bachu county, is aware that there have been heightened security measures, but they hardly affect her. “I don’t feel them. Young people like us don’t normally observe the fast anyway; only the older generation does, and I don’t see how they can be prevented from doing so,” she said.

  Read more about the Kashgar attacks via CDT.

  The New Dominion blog offers its own critical commentary of the China Daily article:

  Keeping in mind that this is an English language article and is more likely written with foreign audiences in mind, one cannot help but sense that much of it is designed to obliquely address numerous ongoing claims that there is a Ramadan crackdown being implemented in response to the attacks. Hu emphasizes that part and parcel with the “return to normalcy” are Uyghurs taking part, unhindered and voluntarily, in the discipline demanded of them during Ramadan. The basis for claims of a Ramadan crackdown have been various township and village level government websites that made the political faux-pas of making regulations publically viewable online, and after the news hit the Western press, indeed some of these townships took the regulations off their site, but so far it seems that the Kashgar government has not at least publicly discussed Ramadan regulations, and so the actual extent of Ramadan restrictions throughout Xinjiang remains unknown.  Interestingly, Hu decided to throw in the example of an unobservant Muslim into his article

  [...] Perhaps implying that if any Uyghurs are not observing Ramadan or if any Uyghur restaurants are remaining open, it’s on their own decision.

  » Read more
  • September 23, 2008 9:55 AM

• ‘China Repression Grows’, Says US

  

  From the BBC:

  Repression of religious freedom in some parts of China has intensified over the past year, the US government says.

  The state department’s annual report on religious freedom around the world criticised Beijing’s actions in remote Xinjiang province and Tibetan areas… In China, the report highlighted the treatment of the Uighur people - a Muslim group living mainly in Xinjiang.

  “The government reportedly continued to detain Uighur Muslim citizens for possession of unauthorised religious texts, imprison them for religious activities determined to be ‘extremist’, and prevent them from observing certain sacred religious traditions,” the report said.

  It was also critical of the Beijing government’s handling of protests by Tibetans in March - particularly of the use of “patriotic education campaigns” in a bid to stifle dissent.

  The International Religious Freedom Report 2008 for China can be viewed here.

  Meanwhile, in related news, the Associated Press reports:

  China has rejected a Senate resolution urging Beijing to hold serious talks with supporters of the Dalai Lama, saying the move shows Washington supports Tibetan independence.

  The bipartisan Senate resolution, passed Wednesday, also called for China to allow more religious freedom in Tibet, which was rocked by violent riots and anti-government protests earlier this year.

  “The Tibet issue is China’s internal affair, so is the Chinese government’s contact and dialogue with the Dalai Lama,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site late Saturday night.

  » Read more
  • September 22, 2008 12:06 PM

• Chinese “House” Church Seeks To Sue Government

  

  From Reuters:

  A “house” church in China is seeking to sue a local religious affairs authority for shutting down a service in what activists called a breakthrough challenge.

  The Qiyu Blessings Church in the southwest province of Sichuan is one of thousands of once-banned self-organised Christian groups the ruling Communist Party warily tolerates as it encourages believers to join larger state-sanctioned churches.

  The church leader now wants to take the Shuangliu County Bureau of Religious Affairs to court for stopping a service in early May, the New York-based group Human Rights in China reported in an email on Friday.

  Read also Chengdu House Church Files First Suit in China Against Government Religious Authority from Human Rights in China.

  » Read more
  • September 22, 2008 6:10 AM

• China’s Uighurs Face Fasting Restrictions

  

  Al-Jazeera has a report on the Ramadan crackdown ongoing in Xinjiang, including a ban on fasting for many segments of the population:

  Read more from Shanghaiist.

  » Read more
  • September 11, 2008 9:05 PM

• China Confiscates Bibles From American Christians

  

  From AP:

  Chinese customs officials confiscated more than 300 Bibles on Sunday from four American Christians who arrived in a southwestern city with plans to distribute them, the group’s leader said.

  The Bibles were taken from the group’s checked luggage after they landed at the airport in the city of Kunming, said Pat Klein, head of Vision Beyond Borders. The group, based in Sheridan, Wyoming, distributes Bibles and Christian teaching materials around the world to “strengthen the persecuted church,” according to its Web site.

  The group arrived in China on Sunday and had intended to distribute the Bibles to people in the city, Klein told the AP in a telephone interview while still at the airport.

  » Read more
  • August 17, 2008 6:52 PM

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