Jesus in China: Life on the edge

Page 2

He said he was detained for 36 hours, then released without explanation. Police declined requests for information about the case.

Zhang and his family move frequently from apartment to apartment on the fringes of Beijing because, they believe, landlords are pressured by police to evict them. Lawyers familiar with his case say police have warned them to rein him in, but he continues to organize churches and preach the need for uniting to demand greater rights.

"I am an honest citizen. Everything I do is legal," Zhang said. "But in the eyes of the Communist Party, everybody in my family—me, my wife, my two sons and daughter-in-law—we are dangerous people. Our phone is bugged. We are followed everywhere. Wherever we stay, we are thrown out."

Zhang was born in a poor village. He grew up through years of famine in the countryside and, while still a teenager, he concluded that living off the land would forever put him at the mercy of the harvest.

"But I found that barbers were the freest people," he said. "In summer, they could work in the shade under a tree. And in winter, in a warm room. No barber ever died of hunger."

He married a preacher's daughter, who introduced him to Christianity. But it wasn't until Zhang's business foundered that he decided that religion would be his future. He began evangelizing wherever he could: to customers in his barber's chair, to passengers on the bus. In 1998 he spent four months bicycling from province to province, meeting church leaders and hearing tales of fights over religious expression. Local preachers, he concluded, were being treated "like drug dealers."

"During that time, I saw ordinary people complaining of injustice everywhere. No one spoke up for them," Zhang said. "I realized that nobody but Jesus can save this country and save the people."

He moved to Beijing and, in 2005, he and others established the House Church Alliance. The alliance is the first of its kind, said Bob Fu, president of China Aid Association, a Texas-based advocacy group for Christians.

"They are the first group willing to stand up and operate aboveground," Fu said. "Traditionally, they would have been underground. But they took a public role, educating churches and pastors on how to protect themselves with existing laws, and to use lawyers to protect their rights."

The alliance claims followers in provinces across the country, representing 300,000 Christians, but those figures are impossible to verify. Still, it was enough to draw the concern of the government. When Zhang tried to get official approval, his application for registration was denied.

He kept working anyway, and he has emerged as a pivotal link between urban intellectuals and rural believers.

A VILLAGE GOES TO COURT

After eight hours on the road from Beijing, Zhang's mini-bus turned off the paved two-lane road in eastern Shandong province and down a strip of dirt. He was on his way to see another local church in a standoff with authorities. He pulled up before a metal gate, which opened to reveal the modest brick home of Cheng Zhangan, a construction worker with the tanned face of a life in the sun and the worried expression of a man unsure of what he had gotten himself into.

Cheng, 43, once helped construct the local village church, part of China's officially sanctioned Christian system known as the Three-Self Patriotic Movement. Over time, however, he grew disenchanted with the state church, so Cheng and roughly 50 of his neighbors decided to use an empty building beside his home to build their own unofficial church, joining an estimated 50 million Chinese Christians who have chosen to worship outside the state system.

Last August, Cheng and his neighbors organized a summer camp for local students in rural Yutai county to teach them, as he put it, "to take the right road, fear God, listen to their parents, obey various rules and regulations of the country, and respect teachers."

Camp was still in session when police arrived. They searched his home, confiscated books and photos and detained him, he said, for running an illegal religious gathering. They also cited him for violating a national regulation that bans anyone younger than 18 from receiving formal religious education, though that regulation is not uniformly enforced. Cheng challenged their authority to arrest him, not only on the letter of the law but on the basis of the law.

"[The officer in charge] said, 'You have to follow what we say.' I said, 'I should worship you? I won't get everlasting life if I worship you! I won't get into heaven. I won't get anything if I worship you!' "

Cheng was fined 1,000 yuan, he said, the equivalent of $145. But he didn't stop complaining. He praised top leaders in Beijing for adopting a greater tolerance of religion, but he blamed local bureaucrats for failing to heed that change.

He did what his parents' generation rarely would have done: He struck back. He contended that authorities lacked a search warrant and failed to provide a receipt certifying that he had paid his fine. He formally requested that the local government review the decision, but it was upheld. He appealed to the county court, and, again, the verdict was upheld. He appealed again to a higher court, and his case is pending.

"Whether they will solve it, it's up to the court," said Cheng, a father of two. "But I wanted to let them know we are all good citizens. We love the country, we love the people.

CONTINUED

Jesus in China: Life on the edge

Page 3

"We do no harm to the country," he added. And as night settled over his courtyard, villagers filtered in through the front gate, once again, for an evening church service.

FAITH IN LAW

Li Baiguang pulled from his briefcase a recent issue of a magazine with a cover article titled "Chinese Human Rights Lawyers." He slid his finger across 14 small photos of China's most progressive legal scholars.

Many of them are under intense pressure from authorities, but Li, whose photo was among them, was illuminating an overlooked part of the story: "One, two, three, four ..." he said, ticking off the lawyers who have converted to Christianity. "Many of those who are seeking democracy and freedom in China have found God."

The Christian current rippling through China's human-rights circles is an important part of the rise of Christian activism in China. Li, a 44-year-old lawyer in Beijing, is typical of the trend: highly educated, disillusioned with China's political system and determined to reform it.

Li was arrested in the past after trying to register a new political party. In 2006 he was one of three Chinese Christian activists invited to the White House to meet with President George W. Bush. That high-profile visit afforded Li a measure of protection, he believes, so he pushed his activism a step further. He embarked on a nomadic six-month trip through eight provinces, gathering evidence of religious persecution and dispensing legal aid.

He began teaching rural Christians basic legal tactics, such as recording the badge numbers and names of any police officers who confront them, demanding receipts for materials confiscated in raids and checking search and arrest warrants for the legally required stamps.

"Wherever I go, I teach them laws," Li said. "The churches all faced the same problem: The police and the religious bureau would arrest them when they gathered. The police considered them illegal and would either detain them or send them to re-education-through-labor [camps] or sentence them" to jail time.

Li helped the churches file for administrative review and appeal in court. But he faced failure after failure—until he took on the city of Wendeng in Shandong province.

Church leaders had challenged local police for detaining them improperly after a raid that netted more than 30 worshipers and left three of them under arrest for 12 days. But instead of the usual victory for the city, police settled the case last year by abandoning the charges and issuing a rare apology, accompanied by compensation of 460 yuan, about $67.

The case made history as one of the first in which an underground church succeeded in challenging local police in court. Li has never pinpointed what was different about this case—he suspects sympathetic local officials intervened—but it sent a shock wave through China's religious-rights movement.

Li suddenly found that more churches were willing to sue than before. And local authorities, even if they won cases, seemed to give churches more room to worship without harassment.

"Although we failed on paper in another seven or eight provinces ... I found that, wherever we sued the government, the local police were no longer arresting Christians," said Li, a portrait of the overworked lawyer with his thinning black hair and wardrobe of dark, baggy suits. "It seemed our administrative reviews and litigation were educating local government officials to learn to respect citizens' liberty and freedom."

But Li's activism could bring him problems of his own. After another Christian lawyer, Li Jianqiang, helped a house church pursue a protracted legal appeal against police, the 43-year-old found that authorities abruptly refused to reregister his law license.

"They gave no official reason at all," he said at his office in a residential compound in the eastern city of Qingdao.

Though he no longer files them in his own name, Li Jianqiang continues to take on churches' cases. He once was a city official, so he sympathizes with the government's concern about the Christian legal movement. He is determined to demonstrate that Christians have no interest in challenging the government politically, only in hastening the rule of law.

"Christians just want freedom to believe. They don't want to rebel," he said. "They don't care who is in power: Caesar, Mao Zedong, the Communist Party. Whoever is in power is in power. But don't hinder my belief in Jesus."

[email protected]

2008 Chicago Tribune

Egypt's Coptic Christians Are Choosing Isolation

Egypt's Coptic Christians Are Choosing Isolation