Pruning of christian crosses in China
Forbidden to buy the Bible for the internet in China
Chinese security forces launched on Sunday a wide operation to arrest nearly a hundred members of a christian confession protestant of Chengdu, in Sichuan province, including its spiritual leader, pastor Wang Yi, as reported by the parishioners and local media.
Wang Yi is a cleric especially known in China by its open activism, his defense of human rights and the media attention he received after the interview that he had in 2006 with former president George Bush in the White House, which has earned to be arrested before.
The preacher had resisted the new guidelines imposed by Beijing at the beginning of the year, which requires the registration of all religious communities active in the country and has not hesitated to criticize the mandate of Xi Jinping. “The Government can’t prevent citizens to meet and participate in religious activities”, he went on to say in that time.
The protestant pastor, was one of the first religious who supported a petition protesting the action of the authorities against these communities is not subject to official regulation, which here are called “underground churches”.
With nearly half a thousand of the faithful, the Reformed Church of the Early Rain has refused to keep a low profile and continued proselytizing in the streets of Chengdu.
As reported on his page on Facebook, the police started to detain parishioners Sunday at 18:00.
Before being arrested, the faithful spread a religious message in which they referred to the imminent police action. “Lord, help us to have the consciousness and the courage the christians to resist this nonsense Orwellian with an action of the Gospel a more positive and greater praise,” read the text.
The newspaper ‘South China Morning Post’ stated that the agents blocked the accounts of the members of this congregation, and they cut the phone line to their headquarters, at the time they entered the residences of its main leaders, including Wang Yi.
One of the members of the Church that was released this Monday, Zhang Guoqing, told the same newspaper that had an appearance in the home of Wang Yi at 19:00 but this time it didn’t find. “His house had been looted. It was a disaster. The police say that our church is an illegal organization and that we cannot attend most meetings from now on,” he said.
The operation included dozens of dwellings. Another follower of the Church cited by the agency Afp clarified that there had also been arrests in the street or people “that were discovered by the location of his mobile phone and arrested”.
the headquarters of The religious community appeared on Monday surrounded by vehicles of the police, whose agents seized various materials from the grounds.
“Continue to push members of the community to sign a document in which they say that they will not go to church. There are children who have been separated from their parents and who are now in charge of other members of the congregation”, noted the Church of the Early Rain in Facebook.
In the same social network described the police action and said that in some cases the agents “broke the doors” of the houses, “they came in using flashlights, waking up to some of our brothers and sisters, and drove to the police station to the children”.
Bob Fu, founder of the organization ChinaAid, specialized in documenting the harassment of the christian community in the asian nation – held the view that this “massive night attack represents an escalation of important religious persecution” in China.
last September, one of the main protestant churches are not officers of China, the Church of Zion, was closed down in Beijing in the absence of legal authorization.
Two months later, a catholic bishop of this country’s “disappeared” -presumably arrested by the police – in spite of an agreement signed between the Vatican and Beijing to the nomination of these offices ecclesiastical.
The head of ChinaAid estimated that so far this year, chinese security forces have detained 10,000 christians, a significant increase from the figures of last year, when they arrested 3,000, according to the accounting of this organization.
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