Great. Thank you so much.
In October of last year, Pastor Wang Yi, the head of the Early Rain Covenant Church in southwestern China, asked his audience a question: Have we made a difference? If tomorrow morning the Early Rain Covenant Church suddenly disappeared from the city of Chengdu, if each of us vanished into thin air, would the city be any different? Would anybody miss us?
As of December last year, Pastor Wang and his church have been able to explore that question. Starting on December 9, police arrested more than 100 church members, including Wang and his wife, who was also a key leader in the church. The church was shuttered and many members went into hiding. About half of those arrested were released. More than 50 continue to be held. Wang's wife was released earlier this month, but her husband continues to be detained. He faces potential charges of inciting subversion, which is a crime that carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison. Over the next month, more members of the church were detained. Students who had attended a seminary school affiliated with the church were sent back to their home provinces and were prevented from returning.
I visited Chengdu in January to see what had become of the church, which is one of the largest underground or “house” churches in that part of the country. I'd been told that access to the church, which occupied three floors of a commercial building in Chengdu, would be difficult, but I was able to walk into the building. I took the elevator to the floor of the main church hall and managed to get a few minutes in the former hall before plainclothes police came in and told me I had to leave. The church was bare aside from a dusty Ping-Pong table. The cross that hung in the back, that would be behind Pastor Wang as he gave sermons, was gone. The police watched until I got in a taxi and left.
What happened to the Early Rain Covenant Church is a reflection of a broader campaign by Chinese authorities to sinicize religion in China. One part of that has been cracking down on these unregistered churches, many of which had been able to operate and were tolerated by authorities for years. In recent years, other even larger house churches, such as the Zion Church in Beijing, which had more than 1,500 members, have been shut down. Early Rain had more than 500 members. In January another church in Chengdu was placed under investigation less than a week after the mass arrest of the Early Rain Covenant Church members. A Sunday school in Guangzhou, in southern China, was raided. The previous November, another church in Guangzhou, called the Guangzhou Bible Reformed Church, was shut for the second time in three months.
Chinese Christians and activists say that what's happening now is the worst crackdown on Christianity since the Cultural Revolution, when the leadership under Mao Zedong vowed to eradicate religion. This effort to sinicize religion comes from concerns about western influence in China and systems of belief that connect Chinese citizens with international networks. The government says this oversight is necessary to prevent foreign forces from using religion to destabilize China.
Today there are an estimated 60 million, at least, Christians in China, in both rural and urban areas. This means that congregation-based churches can organize large groups of people across the country. Some do have links with Christian groups abroad. A church like Early Rain was likely especially alarming. Wang was a little different from other pastors. He was a civil rights lawyer before. He was a well-known public intellectual and essayist before he became a pastor.
While other churches tend to be apolitical, Wang's church was outspoken. They had advocated for the parents of children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake—thousands of deaths that critics said could have been avoided had authorities not approved the shoddy construction of schools and other buildings. They also advocated for families affected by faulty vaccines that were approved by authorities. They also commemorated every year the victims of the highly sensitive June 4, 1989, crackdown.
As you know, this is not just Christianity that has come under pressure. All five government-sanctioned religions in China—Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Taoism and Protestantism, to which Early Rain belonged—are supposed to have these sinicization plans. We already know about the efforts to sinicize Islam, so I won't go into those, but one thing I was looking for when I was reporting in Chengdu on this church was any parallels or any techniques possibly being used on Christians that had been similar to those used on Uighur Muslims and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.
When they were arrested, a lot of the detainees—some 20 of them, I think—were sent to a legal education centre, so I wanted to know whether or not there were any parallels between these centres and the re-education centres used in Xinjiang.
As far as I could tell from the people I spoke to who were sent to the centre in Chengdu, there were not. These people were able to read the Bible and weren't subjected to any kind of political indoctrination. It seems to me that the most obvious parallels between the cases of Uighur Muslims and of Christians would be the use of technology to surveil and control the activities of religious believers.
Earlier, I mentioned the Zion Church in Beijing. One of the reasons why they were forced to close down was that they were ordered to install 24-hour closed-circuit television cameras. In a lot of mosques in Xinjiang, they've had to install cameras. When the church refused, the pastor and members of the church said that they were consistently and constantly harassed by state security. They eventually were shut down and the church was demolished. Other churches have been asked by police to hand over detailed lists of attendees and their ID numbers and phone numbers, which is another technique also used in Xinjiang, where people are tracked.
We also see similar efforts in regard to the outward signs of Christianity, as we have seen with mosques and other Islamic structures being torn down in Xinjiang and Ningxia. There was a statement signed by 500 house church leaders, who said that crosses have been removed from buildings and the authorities have forced churches to hang the Chinese flag or sing patriotic songs. They also have barred minors from attending church. This is also a rule in Xinjiang for minors.
Going back to the example of Chengdu, the Early Rain Covenant Church, since being closed and the mass arrests, has continued to hold meetings virtually, where people dial in to a live webcast. Others hold very small group meetings in their homes if they're able to. Others gather in groups in restaurants or parks. As I said, many have gone into hiding, so people communicate over encrypted chat platforms [Technical difficulty—Editor].