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CHINA
Articles on the Chinese government's treatment of religious organizations and its members, its reactions to the actions of religious organizations that impact China (e.g. the canonization of martyrs of Chinese religious persecution), and the issue of religious freedom in China.
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CHINESE BISHOP, PRIESTS, LAITY ARRESTED
("EWTN News," April 24, 2001)
STAMFORD, Connecticut, Apr. 23, 01 (CWNews.com) - A Chinese bishop, five priests, and at least a dozen laypersons were arrested by the Communist authorities during Holy Week this year, according to the US-based Cardinal Kung Foundation on Monday.
The foundation said Bishop Shi Enxiang, 79, of Yixian, Hebei province, was arrested in Beijing on Good Friday, and is being kept in an unknown location. Bishop Shi has spent about 30 years in total in jail for refusing to acknowledge government controls on the practice of religion, with his last three-year jail term ending in 1993. Authorities tried to arrest him in 1996, but failed when the bishop escaped into hiding. He remained free and in hiding until his arrest on April 13.
The others, arrested in separate incidents, include Father Li Jianbo, 34, of Hebei province, arrested in inner Mongolia on April 19; Father Lu Genjun, 29, arrested shortly before Easter in Hebei and immediately sentenced to three years in a labor camp--three other unidentified priests were reportedly arrested with him; a priest only known as Father Yin arrested in Hebei in January and sentenced to three years in a labor camp in April; Father Feng Yungxiang arrested on Good Friday in Fujian province; and Father Liao Haiqing, in his early seventies, arrested on Good Friday in Jiangxi province.
Father Liao was released, but 13 Catholic laypersons were also arrested on Good Friday in Jiangxi and are still detained.
Joseph Kung, president of the Cardinal Kung Foundation, said: "A Holy Mass, a prayer service, and even praying over the dying by Roman Catholics are all considered illegal and subversive activities by the Chinese government. While Christians around the world were observing the holiest week of the year, the underground Roman Catholic Church in China suffered another assault from the Chinese government."
He added, "These incidents, along with Beijing's recent behavior toward the American crew and its plane that made an emergency landing in China, should awaken the United States and its allies of China's flagrantly abusive policies toward other nations as well as its own people."
The Communist Chinese government requires Christians to worship only in state-controlled associations including the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which eschews any connections to the Vatican or the Pope. Many Catholics worship in churches that, while openly loyal to the government association, secretly pledge allegiance to the Pope.
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China arrests Catholic bishop, priests - group says
(Reuters, April 23, 2001)
BEIJING, April 23 (Reuters) - Chinese police arrested a 79-year-old underground Roman Catholic bishop along with several priests and lay Catholics in the week before Easter, the U.S.-based Cardinal Kung Foundation said.
Police arrested Shi Enxiang, the underground bishop of Yixian in the northern province of Hebei, on April 13 -- Good Friday -- while he was visiting Beijing, the foundation said in a statement seen by Reuters on Monday.
"While the Christians around the world were observing the holiest week of the year, the underground Roman Catholic Church in China suffered another assault from the Chinese government," foundation president Joseph Kung said in the statement.
Shi, ordained a bishop in 1982, had been in hiding since he escaped arrest in 1996, the statement said. He had spent a total of about 30 years in jail, most recently serving a three-year sentence from 1990-1993, it added.
China's constitution enshrines freedom of religion but worship is confined to state-controlled churches.
About 12 million Roman Catholics worship in underground churches and unofficial prayer meetings, the statement said.
The foundation said that police also arrested Li Jianbo, 34, a priest in Hebei's Mancheng county while he was in Xilinhot in the northern region of Inner Mongolia.
Another priest, Lu Genjun, 39, was sent to a labour camp for three years after his arrest shortly before Easter in Hebei's Baoding county, it added.
Authorities sentenced another priest in Hebei, surnamed Yin, to three years in a labour camp in April, the statement said without giving further details.
Police arrested two other priests on April 13, one in Fu'an in Fujian province and one in Fuzhou in Jiangxi province, along with 13 underground Catholic worshippers in Jiangxi, it said.
The U.S. State Department's annual human rights report this year condemned Beijing's crackdown on underground Christians.
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Chinese underground bishop reported in custody
("BBC News," April 23, 2001)
An American-based Roman Catholic organisation says a bishop of the underground church in China has been arrested, together with several priests and lay Catholics.
The Cardinal Kung Foundation said that the Bishop of Yixian, Shi Enxiang, was detained when he visited Beijing from his northern diocese in Hebei province during Easter.
The foundation said that the underground Roman Catholic church in China had suffered another assault by the Chinese government at a time when Christians around the world were celebrating the holiest week of their year.
The authorities in Beijing have not confirmed the arrest.
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China detentions may be tied to book, scholar says
By Jon Herskovitz
NEW YORK, April 23 (Reuters) - Beijing leaders, upset by a recent book on the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, may be lashing out by detaining U.S. residents and citizens of Chinese ancestry, a U.S. academic said on Monday.
A number of Chinese-born academics have been detained in China on spy charges, and Beijing may have ordered its secret police to take some of them into custody because of suspected links to "The Tiananmen Papers," a collection of documents purporting to reveal the internal debates that led to Beijing's 1989 crackdown on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, the scholar said.
Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unarmed civilians were killed when top Chinese leaders sent in troops and tanks to end weeks of pro-democracy protests on June 4, 1989.
"I could imagine a situation in which the leaders in Beijing think there is a connection" between some of the detained researchers' activities and the book's appearance, Boston University Sinologist Merle Goldman told Reuters.
Goldman said China's security apparatus had been shaken over the past few years by such issues as continuing protests by the Falun Gong spiritual sect and the publication in January of the English-language edition of "The Tiananmen Papers."
ALSO AVAILABLE IN CHINESE
A much longer Chinese version of the book came out in New York this month under the title "June Fourth: The True Story." Beijing has called the collection of supposed official reports and minutes of top leaders' meetings "a fabrication."
"There is certainly a greater sense of vulnerability on the State Security Ministry, and I think they are flaying out to make sure that nothing embarrassing will happen that will get them into trouble," Goldman said.
Last week China confirmed that it was investigating a U.S. citizen of Chinese origin suspected of espionage, and a human rights group in Hong Kong said his detention was linked to "The Tiananmen Papers."
Wu Jianmin was detained on April 8 in the southern city of Shenzhen and has been held in nearby Guangzhou on suspicion of spying for Taiwan, the State Department said. The Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said Wu had been arrested on suspicion of passing Tiananmen-related papers.
Another U.S. citizen being detained in China is Li Shaomin, who was teaching business at the City University of Hong Kong and was picked up on Feb. 25 in Shenzhen.
Also being held are two Chinese with U.S. residence permits: Gao Zhan, a sociology researcher who has written on women's issues and who was teaching at American University in Washington, and Qin Guangguang, who works for a U.S. medical group. Qin was detained in Beijing in December 2000 on suspicion of leaking state secrets.
ACTIVIST SEES NO DIRECT LINK
The executive director of the international group Human Rights in China, Xiao Qiang, said he did not see any direct link between the detention of the four and "The Tiananmen Papers." But he said the book's publication had caused Beijing to tighten the screws on academics of Chinese ancestry studying the workings of government or Taiwan-related issues.
"The direct link is speculation. The timing is not a coincidence," Xiao told Reuters. He said the book had aroused and enraged Beijing leaders.
"The amount of publicity from the book deeply embarrassed the Chinese leadership and increased the pressure on the security planners to step up their vigilance," he said.
One of the editors of the English-language edition, Princeton University professor Perry Link, declined to comment on any possible connection between individuals and the smuggling of Tiananmen documents out of China.
Link said top Beijing officials had stepped up punishments for Chinese accused of passing secrets to foreigners after the book came out and a recently revealed document by former top Communist Party official Bao Tong helped establish its validity.
The other editor, Andrew Nathan of Columbia University, said, "The publication of 'The Tiananmen Papers,' along with a bunch of other events, has contributed to a siege mentality in the state security bureau, and the security authorities have been ordered to clamp down and find perpetrators of all sorts."
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Homosexuality removed from official list of mental illnesses
by David Rennie ("Electronic Telegraph," April 21, 2001)
CHINA removed homosexuality from its official register of psychiatric disorders yesterday in what the media hailed as a move towards tolerance and rationality. But leading psychiatrists continued to describe homosexual acts as "abnormal", a view that if anything understates the Chinese public's near-universal hostility towards homosexuals.
The third edition of the Chinese Standards for Classification and Diagnosis of Mental Disorders, published yesterday, formally struck homosexuality from its list of diseases, although same-sex desires remained listed as a source of mental distress for those unhappy with their orientation.
The Chinese Psychiatric Association - which is under close international scrutiny because of the growing use of mental hospitals to detain dissidents and members of the Falun Gong sect - voted the change through earlier this year.
The decision followed consultations with the American Psychiatric Association, which struck homosexuality from its own register of diseases in 1973. However, the Beijing Youth Daily newspaper gave considerable space to the views of a senior psychiatrist who called homosexuals "abnormal" and liable to spread disease through incessant promiscuity.
Prejudice against homosexuals is very strong in China and the number of open homosexuals is tiny. Communist puritanism means that almost all young couples marry before living together, and powerful Confucian traditions state that the worst "unfilial act" is failing to have a son to carry on the family line.
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China trumpets human rights victory at U.N.
by Jeremy Page (Reuters, April 19, 2001)
BEIJING, April 19 (Reuters) - A triumphant China expressed "admiration and thanks" on Thursday to nations that helped block a resolution censuring it at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and took a swipe at the United States for proposing the move.
China used a controversial "no action" motion to block the resolution at the rights meet in Geneva on Wednesday -- as it has almost every year since its troops killed hundreds of pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
"The Chinese government wishes to express admiration and thanks to all the countries which upheld justice and supported China," the official Xinhua news agency quoted Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue as saying.
"Although the United States canvassed for support here and there by cajoling or coercing, it had found no country to co-sponsor the anti-China motion," Zhang said.
"Once again the United States fell into a predicament of self-isolation and its failure has long been expected."
The 53-nation annual gathering in Geneva approved Beijing's "no action" motion by a vote of 23 in favour, 17 against and 12 abstentions. One delegation was absent. Asian countries including Pakistan rallied to China's side.
The outcome, though no surprise, was a crucial boost to China as it confronts the United States over a number of sensitive issues, including a collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese jet fighter, and U.S. arms sales to Taiwan.
Criticism of China's human rights record, especially a crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement, also threatens to derail Beijing's bid to host the 2008 Olympics ahead of the International Olympic Committee's July vote on the host city.
U.S. SAYS UNFORTUNATE
The United States said it was unfortunate the resolution was shelved, but believed Washington had made its point.
"We think it's unfortunate that more members of the Human Rights Commission didn't choose to take up the China resolution at the commission this year," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a news conference.
Zhang accused Washington of being driven by domestic politics to interfere in China's internal affairs and "tarnish China's image in the world."
"Once more facts have shown that the attempt to exert political pressure on other countries under the pretext of the human right issue to pursue hegemonism and power politics is against people's will and will go nowhere," Zhang said.
A commentary in the People's Daily, the main Communist Party newspaper, urged the United States to deal with its own human rights problems before criticising others.
The English-language China Daily drew attention in an editorial to recent race riots in Cincinnati, Ohio.
"Ridiculous and hypocritical as it is, the United States, unable to cope with its own human rights abuses, blatantly applies a double standard in its accusations of human rights violations by others," it said.
A cartoon in the paper showed Uncle Sam sitting on a black man while scrutinising Asia through a magnifying glass.
CHINA SAYS READY TO COOPERATE
Boucher said the U.S. goal was to encourage China to adhere to international standards of human rights and focus international attention to what he called the worsening human rights situation in China in the past year.
Zhang said China was ready to work with others to continue to promote human rights through dialogue.
"We would advise the U.S. side to change its practice, realise its errors and mend its way, and return to the right track of dialogue as soon as possible," she said.
The Chinese government was dedicated to "promoting and protecting the human rights and basic freedom of the Chinese people in accordance with the actual national conditions," she said.
Critics accuse China of widespread human rights abuses, especially against its Tibetan minority, worshippers at underground Christian churches and followers of Falun Gong.
China calls the banned spiritual group an "evil cult" which brainwashes and cheats, but rights groups accuse Beijing of conducting a campaign of repression, including detentions and beatings, against its members.
Falun Gong practitioners, who say some 190 adherents have died in police custody, held protests on Wednesday around the U.N. building in Geneva, where the forum is holding its annual six-week session until April 27.
The Chinese government says that a handful of Falun Gong adherents have died in custody, but that they either committed suicide or died of natural causes.
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Martyrdom of Liu Haitao Confirmed in China Young Christian Dies from Police Beating
by Paul Davenport (Compass Direct News Service, April 17, 2001)
LONDON (Compass) -- On October 16, 2000, twenty-one-year-old Liu Haitao from Henan province in central China died as the result of severe police beatings. Although the immediate cause of his death was a kidney ailment that flared up after police mistreatment and a harsh imprisonment, there is no question his death was the result of his witness for Christ, which makes him a martyr for the faith. Local Christians in the area plan to observe October 16 as a memorial day to the life of the young Christian.
Christian martyrs were once commonplace in China, especially in the years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Now they are exceptional, but the story of Liu's death does illustrate how common police brutality is for many hundreds of Christians detained each year. As a house church leader in Loyang shared, "At any one moment, there are probably well over a hundred Christians detained for their faith and receiving severe beatings from sadistic policemen. Many of them have permanent injuries as a result." The callous disregard among officials for Liu's worsening condition, even to the point of refusing to arrange transport from prison to hospital when he was about to die, almost defies belief.
Privately, a government source in Beijing described the death of Liu as "a bad mistake." He said, "The government does not wish to create martyrs, because they make religion uncontrollable. Better to squeeze the church than smash it -- history has taught us that much at least." ...
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Human Rights Watch slams China's 'whitewash' of poor rights record
(AFP, April 10, 2001)
BEIJING, April 10 (AFP) - Human Rights Watch Tuesday slammed China's white paper on human rights as a whitewash clearly aimed at the ongoing session of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
Sidney Jones, Asia director of the New York-based group, said the white paper was part of a two-pronged lobbying strategy to prompt the UN to take a soft line on China's human rights record.
"We've seen this combination before: high-level visits to Latin American to get allies for the Commission, together with the release of a report which boasts that China's human rights record has never been better," he said.
The current session of the UN Human Rights Commission opened on March 19 and China's rights record is expected to be discussed later this month.
Beijing's white paper highlights improvements in the general standard of living and in "people's rights to subsistence and development" at a time when the collapse of rural education and healthcare programs have been of growing concern, the pressure group said.
Controls on freedom of association, assembly, and expression, already tight, are tightening further but the report highlights Chinese people's political rights while failing to touch on the recent arrests of Chinese scholars resident abroad and members of the Falungong spiritual sect.
The report talks about China's efforts to ensure an impartial judiciary, when the politicization and Communist Party control of the courts is a constant of the Chinese legal system, Human Rights Watch said.
Beijing also trumpets its protection of women and children's rights, after a much publicized explosion at a school in Jiangxi province where children were illegally making firecrackers caused the deaths of some 42 people.
Efforts to establish schools for Uighur children led to the arrest of a prominent Uighur businesswoman, and Tibetan cultural institutions are under constant surveillance from state authorities but the Chinese report stresses government protection of minorities, it said.
The first Chinese White Paper on Human Rights was published in November 1991, while the memories of the military's cruising of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement were still fresh.
There is also a precedent for high-level visits to Latin America just before the UN Human Rights Commission's meeting. Of the six countries on President Jiang Zemin's current itinerary, only Chile is not a member of the current Commission.
Some of these countries might be inclined to join with the United States, if not in sponsoring a resolution, then in trying to defeat China's efforts to ensure it will not come to a vote, Human Rights Watch said.
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Murder of missionary doesn't dissuade family Widow, 6 daughters returning to China
by Natalie Pompilio ("Times-Picayune," April 1, 2001)
Fourteen years ago, an eastern New Orleans man answered a call to spread his Christian faith in China, a country he had never visited and knew little about.
Bruce Emerson Morrison made a home there with his wife, Valori, a woman from Iowa who also had moved to the Far East to spread her religion. They raised their six daughters in the central China town of Wuhan. Through his Protestant church and as an English teacher, Morrison spread his love for Christ among the Chinese people.
His mission came to an end Feb. 3 when one of the Chinese men he had reached out to stabbed him to death.
Morrison's family still believes he did the right thing in traveling to China and spreading the word.
"He was called," said his father, Paul Morrison of eastern New Orleans. "This is just one of those aberrations."
The killing of the 37-year-old American was remarkable in a country that has only a fraction of the murders that occur in the United States. In 1996, China had 1.4 murders per 100,000 residents. That same year the United States had seven murders for every 100,000 people.
No one knows why Gong Zhili stabbed Morrison, a gentle man who had befriended him, or what will happen to Zhili. He was an out-of-work music teacher with a history of mental problems. Some newspapers quoted police as saying Zhili was "a known schizophrenic."
Morrison's widow and daughters have come home to grieve with relatives, but plan to return to China soon. It's the only home the girls have ever known, and it's where their father is memorialized with a simple headstone with the epitaph in English and Chinese, "Your gentleness has made me great."
Family stands out
Bruce was teaching English as a second language to some of his Chinese classmates at Louisiana State University in the mid-1980s when one told him, "China needs you."
Bruce took that statement very seriously, Paul Morrison said. Although Bruce had known he wanted to do missionary work, he had been unsure about where to go.
"He said, 'Well, maybe that's the Lord telling me that's where they want me to go' and so he went," Paul Morrison said.
Armed with a forestry degree from LSU, Bruce moved overseas in 1987. He met Valori in Hong Kong two years later. She immediately liked the soft-spoken American.
"The first thing I learned was to say what needed to be said in the nicest way possible. That's what he always did," Valori said. "I want (my daughters) to know that and be like him."
The couple married in 1990 and soon settled in Wuhan, a river port city of 7 million people. Bruce taught English at Hubei Institute of Technology. Valori home-schooled the girls: Hannah, 7, Victoria, 6, Esther, 5, Loice, 3, Mary, 2, and Charity, 8 months.
In a country where blond hair is rare and few people have more than one child, the Morrisons and their Chinese-speaking brood stood out. Strangers often would stop the family to take pictures, ask questions or just stare, Valori said. Bruce called his daughters his "golden flowers."
"He had quite a bouquet," Paul Morrison said.
On Feb. 3, Bruce went alone to a youth group meeting at their church, Wuchang Protestant Church in Wuhan. According to newspaper reports, Zhili, whom Bruce had known since April 2000, walked into the foyer of the church about 1:45 p.m., shouted, "Teacher Mo!," a term of respect, and stabbed Bruce below the heart.
As Bruce was being rushed to the hospital, a friend called Valori at home and told her that Bruce had been hurt. Valori woke the napping children.
"I told them, 'Daddy needs us,' " she recalled. During the half-hour cab ride to the hospital, they prayed. But Bruce died before they arrived.
Valori went alone to say her final goodbye. She repeated to herself one of the verses she'd read that day: "All your children will be taught by the Lord and great will be the peace in your children."
The verse still comforts her, she said.
"You always know it's 'til death do us part.' You always know it's going to come to an end someday," Valori said. "Regretting it or wishing it away won't do any good."
Killer's fate
Bruce's murder made headlines around the world. The mayor of Wuhan and officials from the Hubei Institute came to pay their respects to Valori and the children. A representative from the U.S. Embassy spent two nights with the family. The police, Valori said, "were very kind and gracious." And as a tribute to their teacher, 600 of Bruce's current and former students came to his memorial service, although institute officials, always fearful of large student gatherings, had asked only three representatives to attend.
Chinese officials aren't stingy with the death penalty. The government won't reveal how many executions are carried out each year, but Amnesty International estimates that more than 1,000 people were sentenced to death in 1999 and more than 18,000 people were executed during the 1990s.
Valori said she does not want her husband's killer put to death.
"Bruce cared about that guy who hurt him, and so should I," she said.
She believes Zhili's mental problems warrant other measures, perhaps institutionalization in a mental hospital or medication. She is confident that his illness will save him from death.
"We don't want him out on the streets, killing other people," she said.
After a few more months visiting family in the United States, Valori will take her daughters back to China.
In addition to raising six children without her husband -- "Bruce helped a lot, changing diapers and cleaning," she said -- Valori will have to find ways to make ends meet while devoting herself to her evangelical work. The family also needs to find a new place to live because their apartment is owned by Hubei Institute.
"I have my work cut out for me," Valori said. "I know God will provide."
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Rights Group Reports Third Academic Held by China
by Tan Ee Lyn (Reuters, April 1, 2001)
HONG KONG, March 31 -- An academic with permanent Hong Kong residence has been held for almost eight months in mainland China, the third detention of a Chinese intellectual to be uncovered in a month, a human rights group said today.
China-born Xu Zerong, 45, a researcher specializing in China's relations with Southeast Asia, has been detained in southern Guangzhou city since mid-August, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said in a statement.
It was the third known detention of China-born academics by mainland police to be revealed in a month. The United States and China are already at odds over the six-week detention of U.S. resident Gao Zhan on espionage allegations.
Xu's family has not been allowed to see him and does not know where he is, why he is detained or if he has been charged.
The holder of a doctoral degree in politics from Britain's Oxford University, Xu moved to Hong Kong, where he gained permanent residency before becoming a researcher at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou.
Xu's case came to light as the wife of Hong Kong-based professor Li Shaomin, a naturalized U.S. citizen who has been locked up in mainland China for more than a month, said today she could not imagine why her husband would be detained.
An associate professor at Hong Kong's City University, Li was detained by Chinese authorities on Feb. 25 in the southern city of Shenzhen, his wife, Liu Yingli, said in Hong Kong.
Gao, an unpaid fellow at American University in Washington, was detained with her husband Xue Donghua and 5-year-old son, Andrew, as they were leaving Beijing on Feb. 11 after Chinese New Year celebrations. Father and son were sent home after 26 days.
Frank Lu of the rights center warned of the detentions of an apparently growing number of Chinese intellectuals on the mainland.
"There are definitely more than these three; other cases are still being investigated" by rights groups, he said.
Lu did not rule out the possibility that recent detentions could be Beijing's way to hit back after the defection of a senior Chinese military officer to the United States.
"There could be an element of revenge because this is such an important and sensitive matter," Lu said.
China said last week it was investigating the case of the officer after a report in Taiwan's United Daily News that a colonel in a military delegation to the United States and Canada last year had defected.
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A Truly Modern China Wouldn't Fear the News
("Seattle Times," (reprinted from the Washington Post) March 29, 2001)
The paradox of modern China begins with the fact that its leaders want it both ways: They are hungry for the benefits of joining the global economy. But they hope to avoid paying the price, which is maintaining an open society. International newspapers and magazines that distribute in China have experienced that abstract dilemma in very practical terms lately, as they have tried to cope with decisions by China's official censors. The International Herald Tribune, of which I am executive editor, has seen its distribution limited in China recently, in part because we carried stories about the Falun Gong religious sect. The Herald Tribune also gets banned occasionally in countries such as Saudi Arabia, for seemingly innocuous articles like the one we ran Dec. 11 with the headline "Saudi Elite Moves Cautiously to Bring Country into Modern World." What makes the Chinese censorship surprising is that it coincides with Beijing's preparations to join the World Trade Organization and its bid to host the 2008 Olympic Games. This is a time, you would think, when the Chinese would want to show the world that they are embracing the 21st century, rather than trying to hold it at arm's length through censorship. Chinese membership of the WTO would ratify the opening to the West begun more than 20 years ago by the late Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping. And hosting the Olympics would provide a showcase for this new China. But do Beijing's leaders really imagine that the free market is divisible - that you can buy and sell computers, but not transmit ideas? Do they imagine that the world will come to an Olympics where visitors can't read the sports page of a global newspaper because that issue happens to carry an article about a dissident group? The very notion of censorship seems at odds with the pervasive communications networks that are the backbone of today's global economy. Financial traders in Shanghai have the same need for reliable, instantaneous information as traders in New York, London and Frankfurt. There is no middle ground when it comes to the information economy - you're either connected, or you aren't. One Asian leader who tried for a generation to control the flow of information into his country, Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, has concluded that such attempts to wall off society are self-defeating. In a conversation in January, Mr. Lee said of the Internet's instant flow of information: "I don't think we can stop it now," adding, "I don't see any alternative. You either use the Internet or you are backward. You are dispensing with a very valuable and cheap tool. The Chinese government will find that out over time." President Jiang Zemin of China has some of that same realism. He told interviewers from The Washington Post last Friday: "We are now in a new century. Even in the run-up to the new century, we have already seen that under economic globalization, under international markets, countries surely come into competition with each other." Openness and competition are, indeed, the essential features of the global economy. Yet in the censor's office in Beijing, some people still imagine that restricting the flow of news is desirable - or even possible. It isn't, and in the end it makes the people trying to maintain censorship look as out-of-date as the radio jammers of the Cold War. For international publications, being banned occasionally is part of doing business - it is regrettable, but a fact of life. And I wouldn't mention the news media's recent problems if there wasn't a risk that these incidents may be a prelude to a broader ban on Western publications. That would be bad for the news business, bad for our Chinese readers - and, we journalists would humbly submit, bad for China itself. So here is a simple test for the WTO and the International Olympic Committee as they weigh China's bid for recognition as a global economic power. The mark of a nation's maturity is when it stops trying to suppress the ideas contained in that ancient but obviously still potent form of communication, a newspaper.
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'Psychiatry' in China
("The New York Times," March 28, 2001)
THE NEW YORK TIMES Wednesday, March 28, 2001 The abuse of psychiatry to intimidate and torture dissidents in the Soviet Union was well documented and loudly deplored by the West. The practice in China has received less comment, but Beijing, too, imprisons nonconformists as mentally ill - a policy that deserves worldwide attention and forceful condemnation from foreign governments, including the United States. During the Cultural Revolution, the genuinely mentally ill were routinely "treated" with political re-education, and healthy people who did not hew to the prevailing political line were often imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals. Such abuses diminished as China became more open and psychiatry became more professional and scientific. Today, however, the abuse of psychiatry once again appears to be increasing in China. The government has forcibly imprisoned members of Falun Gong in psychiatric hospitals. Falun Gong, a popular movement that advocates channeling energy through deep breathing and exercises, has been the target of a heavy-handed government crackdown marked with abuses reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, among them the misuse of psychiatry. Movement leaders claim that some 600 members have been forcibly detained in mental hospitals. This number is impossible to verify, but journalists and human rights researchers have documented numerous cases of Falun Gong members being taken to psychiatric institutions and drugged, physically restrained, isolated or given electric shocks. Robin Munro, a senior researcher at the University of London, explores some of these cases in an article published last month in The Columbia Journal of Asian Law. Mr. Munro, who has also worked for Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch investigating abuses in China, estimates that at least 3,000 people have been sent to mental hospitals for expressing political views in the past two decades, not including Falun Gong members. Another alarming development is the network of new police psychiatric hospitals - called ankangs, which means "peace and happiness" - built since 1987. Chinese law includes "political harm to society" as legally dangerous mentally ill behavior. The police are instructed to take into psychiatric custody "political maniacs," defined as people who make anti-government speeches, write reactionary letters, or "express opinions on important domestic and international affairs." Erik Eckholm of The New York Times has reported that at least one labor leader was detained and given shock therapy in a psychiatric hospital. There are currently 20 ankangs, and the government plans to build many more. An international gathering of psychiatrists, which investigated similar abuses in the Soviet Union, is trying to publicize China's practices and organize an investigation by members of the World Psychiatric Association. Psychiatric imprisonment is not a widespread phenomenon compared with the Chinese government's use of prisons and labor camps for dissidents. But it is a particularly noxious practice that deserves more attention and criticism than it has so far received.
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Scholar Held by China Accused of Espionage
by Philip P. Pan ("Washington Post," March 28, 2001)
BEIJING, March 27 -- The Foreign Ministry today accused an American University-based scholar detained in China since mid-February of acting as a paid spy for overseas intelligence agencies and dismissed U.S. protests over the treatment of her son as unfounded.
The spying charge lodged against the detained Chinese woman, Gao Zhan, seemed to complicate a case that has irritated U.S.-China relations at the start of the Bush administration. U.S. officials have been especially upset about China's treatment of Gao's 5-year-old son, Andrew, who is a U.S. citizen.
The boy was taken from his parents and held for 26 days, in what authorities have described as a kindergarten, before he was released. Gao's husband, Xue Donghua, was released at the same time. China did not notify the U.S. Embassy about any of the detentions.
The new allegation comes less than a week after President Bush urged Gao's release in a White House meeting with China's top foreign policy official, Qian Qichen. At the time, Qian said Gao may not have been aware she was violating Chinese law, according to U.S. officials.
But the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Sun Yuxi, told a news conference today that Gao "accepted missions from overseas intelligence agencies and took funds for spying activities in mainland China."
Sun did not name any agency or country, or offer any evidence to support the charges. His use of the word overseas, however, suggested he was not referring to Taiwan's intelligence service, because Beijing considers Taiwan to be part of China.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington that there is no substance to the accusations, and Xue, Gao's husband, said in a Radio Free Asia interview that her work was "purely academic."
"We still continue to urge the Chinese government to release Ms. Gao immediately so that she can be reunited with her family in the United States," Boucher said. "We are looking for a more forthcoming response from the Chinese."
Previously, Chinese authorities had said Gao, 40, a Chinese political scientist who immigrated to the United States in 1989 and has applied for U.S. citizenship, was suspected of damaging state security and had "openly confessed her crimes."
Jerome Cohen, a New York lawyer with long experience in China who is representing Gao, said the Foreign Ministry's statement was worrying. "This is serious business," he said. "This suggests we may be in for a longer fight."
Cohen dismissed the spying allegation, saying Gao has visited China about once a year since 1989 for brief research trips or visits with her family. He said China's mention of payments might be references to Gao's role as treasurer of the Association of Chinese Political Studies, a U.S.-based group that receives funding from a variety of sources. Xue said earlier that during his detention he was questioned about his wife's research trips to Taiwan.
"They're grasping at straws to try to build a case and justify what they've done," Cohen said. "They have to justify detaining her now because they're under enormous heat from their own government."
Chen Weixing, president of the Association of Chinese Political Studies, a 15-year-old organization of professors and students, said China has no reason to be suspicious of the group. He described it as a nonprofit, independent academic organization operating on a shoestring budget, with funding primarily from various foundations.
He said the group receives no funding from the U.S. government, but has received from funds in the past from other governmental sources, including the Chinese Embassy in Washington. He said the association does not sponsor research, but uses its funds only to organize an annual conference and occasional symposiums.
Chen said the group has organized trips to Taiwan -- Gao went on two of them -- and other academic exchanges, but participants arrange for funding from their home institutions. Local institutions arrange housing, he said.
He said he and other scholars are worried about traveling to China now.
"I know Gao Zhan very well, and my personal view is she wasn't engaged in any espionage at all," Chen said. "The line between spying and academic research can be blurred. If you get funding to do research on a subject, they can try to say it's espionage."
Cohen said state security officials might be under pressure in part because President Jiang Zemin has suggested Gao is guilty in a public statement. In an interview with Washington Post reporters and editors last week, Jiang said he was unaware of the case but that if Gao and her family "had been subjected to a certain legal procedure, it means they must have violated the law to a certain extent."
The Foreign Ministry spokesman rejected U.S. protests over Andrew's treatment, saying he was never detained but held in a kindergarten with parental consent.
"The U.S. protest is without foundation and China has refused to accept it," Sun said. "Authorities, proceeding from a humanitarian standpoint after getting the consent of the couple, put the son, Andrew Xue, under the care of a kindergarten in Beijing. The kindergarten took good care of him, and Andrew lived just as any other child in that kindergarten."
But Xue said he never consented for Andrew to be held in the kindergarten. In fact, he said he told police his son was a U.S. citizen and repeatedly asked them to let him see Andrew or at least to allow the boy to stay with relatives. He said police responded by suggesting he offer evidence to incriminate his wife.
Gao often writes about Chinese women's issues and China-Taiwan relations and in one recent article argued that women in Taiwan have more opportunities for political participation than those in China. She and her family had just celebrated Chinese New Year with relatives in Nanjing and Xian and were preparing to return to Washington when they were detained on Feb. 11 at the Beijing airport, her husband said.
_________________________________
Jailed in China: Confront the Abuse
("New York Times," March 27, 2001)
Letter to the Editor:
Re "Contortions of Psychiatry in China" (editorial, March 25):
During the last year, the American Psychiatric Association has made multiple inquiries to the leadership of the World Psychiatric Association about psychiatric abuse of political prisoners in China.
The World Psychiatric Association Committee on the Use and Abuse of Psychiatry has moved too slowly in the face of serious accusations about psychiatric imprisonment of Falun Gong members, union and student leaders, and others who are diagnosed as "political maniacs" and subjected to shock therapy and psychotropic medications.
The World Psychiatric Association must move with alacrity as it did at American, British and Australian insistence when psychiatry was used in the intimidation and torture of Soviet dissidents.
DANIEL B. BORENSTEIN, M.D.
President, American Psychiatric Association
Los Angeles, March 25, 2001
_________________________________
Contortions of Psychiatry in China
("New York Times," (Editorial) March 25, 2001)
The abuse of psychiatry to intimidate and torture dissidents in the Soviet Union was well documented and loudly deplored by the West. The practice in China has received less comment, but Beijing, too, imprisons nonconformists as mentally ill — a policy that deserves worldwide attention and forceful condemnation from foreign governments, including the United States.
During the Cultural Revolution, the genuinely mentally ill were routinely "treated" with political re-education, and healthy people who did not hew to the prevailing political line were often imprisoned in psychiatric hospitals. Such abuses diminished as China became more open and psychiatry became more professional and scientific.
Today, however, the abuse of psychiatry once again appears to be increasing in China. The government has forcibly imprisoned members of Falun Gong in psychiatric hospitals. Falun Gong, a popular movement that advocates channeling energy through deep breathing and exercises, has been the target of a heavy-handed government crackdown marked with abuses reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution, among them the misuse of psychiatry.
Movement leaders claim that some 600 members have been forcibly detained in mental hospitals. This number is impossible to verify, but journalists and human rights researchers have documented numerous cases of Falun Gong members being taken to psychiatric institutions and drugged, physically restrained, isolated or given electric shocks.
Robin Munro, a senior researcher at the University of London, explores some of these cases in an article published last month in The Columbia Journal of Asian Law. Mr. Munro, who has also worked for Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch investigating abuses in China, estimates that at least 3,000 people have been sent to mental hospitals for expressing political views in the past two decades, not including Falun Gong members.
Another alarming development is the network of new police psychiatric hospitals — called Ankangs, which means "peace and happiness" — built since 1987. Chinese law includes "political harm to society" as legally dangerous mentally ill behavior. Police are instructed to take into psychiatric custody "political maniacs," defined as people who make anti-government speeches, write reactionary letters or "express opinions on important domestic and international affairs." Erik Eckholm of The Times has reported that at least one labor leader was detained and given shock therapy in a psychiatric hospital. There are currently 20 Ankangs, and the government plans to build many more.
An international gathering of psychiatrists, which investigated similar abuses in the Soviet Union, is trying to publicize China's practices and organize an investigation by members of the World Psychiatric Association. Psychiatric imprisonment is not a widespread phenomenon compared with the Chinese government's use of prisons and labor camps for dissidents. But it is a particularly noxious practice, and one that deserves more attention and criticism than it has so far received.
_________________________________
News Corp. Heir Woos China With Show of Support
James Murdoch gives speech backing the Asian nation's handling of Falun Gong and criticizing the West's coverage.
by
Evelyn Iritani ("Los Angeles Times," March 23, 2001)
In what appeared to some to be a blatant effort to curry favor with
China,
James Murdoch, heir to the News Corp. media empire, called the Falun
Gong
spiritual movement a "dangerous" and "apocalyptic cult" and
lambasted
the
Western press for its negative portrayal of that giant Asian nation.
Eight years after his powerful father, Rupert, offended officials in
Beijing
by proclaiming satellite television a weapon to attack "totalitarian"
governments,
his 28-year-old son demonstrated in a speech this week in Los
Angeles
just how far News Corp. is willing to go to make amends.
The elder Murdoch has long viewed China as a critical piece of his
global
agenda. That nation's pending entry to the World Trade Organization
promises
to crack open a telecommunications sector that is already one of the
world's
largest and erode tight constraints on an exploding cable and
satellite
television market.
Speaking at the Milken Institute's annual business conference in Beverly
Hills,
the younger Murdoch startled even China's supporters with his zealous
defense
of that government's harsh crackdown on Falun Gong and criticism of
Hong
Kong democracy supporters.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual movement that
combines
meditation and exercise and was banned by the Chinese government
after
10,000 followers staged a protest in Tiananmen Square in 1999.
With his prominent father in the audience, the chairman of News Corp.'s
Hong
Kong-based Star Group said the spiritual group "clearly does not have
the
success of China at heart."
After describing himself as "apolitical," Murdoch--whose
family's
$30-billion
corporate empire includes Fox Television, the Dodgers, the New
York
Post and Star TV, Asia's largest satellite network--also said Hong Kong
democracy
advocates should accept the reality of life under a strong-willed
"absolutist"
government.
And the outspoken chief executive didn't spare his own employees,
accusing
the Hong Kong press and Western newsmagazines of painting a falsely
negative
portrayal of China through their focus on controversial issues such
as
human rights and Taiwan.
"I think these destabilizing forces today are very, very dangerous
for
the
Chinese government," he said.
Even those who share Murdoch's sentiments that China's complex political
and
economic landscape are not well understood abroad were taken aback by his
ardent
boosterism of the darker side of China's governance.
At one particularly uncomfortable moment in the discussion, Robert Kapp,
president
of the U.S. China Business Council, felt it necessary to distance
himself
from Murdoch's blanket endorsement of the Chinese government's
record.
"I personally get nailed as being China's best lobbyist," said
Kapp, who
represents
this country's most prominent China business group. "We go to
great
lengths to explain we are not working for China. We are working for the
interests
of the American business community."
In Thursday's meeting between Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen and
President
Bush, human rights concerns and Taiwan were high on the agenda. The
State
Department reports that China has jailed thousands of Falun Gong
practitioners
and at least 100 have died in prison as a result of neglect or
torture.
When told of Murdoch's comments, Patrick Horgan, a Beijing-based
technology
analyst, said: "I think being a lap dog is something people in
certain
companies think they have to do but if one can avoid it, one should."
Mike Jendrzejczyk, Washington director for Human Rights Watch Asia, was
far
less diplomatic: "It's quite appalling he would echo both [the Chinese
government's]
rhetoric and use the same excuses."
Murdoch's provocative performance offered a revealing glimpse of the
next
generation of News Corp. leadership when the firm is struggling with
massive
industry consolidation, the collapse of the dot-com bubble and
reports
that its negotiations to buy the U.S.-based DirecTV Inc. satellite
television
company have stalled.
Though the founder shows no signs of slowing, his advanced age has kept
the
succession rumor mill alive for several years. Eldest son Lachlan is the
reputed
heir apparent. But James, a Harvard dropout, was given the job of
heading
up the firm's prominent China initiative just a few years after
joining
the family company. Their sister, Elisabeth, left News Corp. last
year
to set up her own media company.
To those familiar with News Corp.'s torturous path into the China
market,
the younger Murdoch's comments presented a striking contrast to the
fateful
remarks uttered by his father. In a speech made shortly after he
acquired
Star TV in 1993, the elder Murdoch declared satellite television an
"unambiguous
threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere."
Within weeks, unhappy Chinese leaders had declared war on Murdoch and
pronounced
satellite dishes illegal. It wasn't long before the contrite
Australian
was paying conciliatory visits to Beijing and bending over
backward
to satisfy the Chinese government in exchange for access to that
nation's
exploding media market. Today, China's cable and satellite
advertising
market is worth more than $800 million a year and is growing at
30%
annually.
Under pressure from China, he pulled BBC off Star TV and canceled his
book
division's plans to publish the memoirs of Chris Patten, the outspoken
British
governor who oversaw Hong Kong's return to Chinese rule in 1997.
By pouring more than $1 billion into its Asia holdings, News Corp. has
solidified
its standing as China's most prominent foreign media company. Star
TV,
which offers 30 channels in seven languages, is still losing money but
reported
strong growth last year thanks to its fast-growing India channel.
News Corp. also owns a 37.6% stake in China's popular Phoenix
Television,
a Chinese joint venture, whose broadcasts, along with Star, are
viewed
in southern China and luxury hotels and foreign compounds in other
parts
of the country.
But the big payoff for News Corp.'s ardent courtship came this year,
when
the firm landed a coveted deal that provided early entry to the Chinese
telecom
market, according to Horgan, of APCO China.
Foreigners are banned from investing in basic telecom services, though
China
has agreed to allow up to 49% foreign ownership in that sector
post-WTO.
But in February, News Corp., Goldman Sachs & Co. and two Chinese
companies
spent $325 million to buy a 12% stake in China Netcom, an
aggressive
Beijing-based telecommunications provider backed by the son of
President
Jiang Zemin.
Horgan said picking up a piece of one of China's major broadband
networks
was a smart move for News Corp., particularly since China Netcom's
founders
also included the powerful State Administration of Radio, Film and
Television.
"News Corp. succeeded by virtue of persistence," Horgan
explained. "This
is
liberalization through the back door."
In a telling acknowledgment of the
"regulation-by-man-rather-than-law"
climate
that still exists in China's evolving economy, the government-backed
China
Daily newspaper praised the deal as "revolutionary" and then
acknowledged
that the investment was not "entirely legal" under current
regulations.
Murdoch said this week he was "excited" to be involved with
China Netcom
and
he insisted the deal had been "drawn up by lawyers and is legal." But
he
would
not elaborate on how his firm was able to bypass the foreign investment
ban.
Reflecting his father's no-holds-barred business philosophy, the younger
Murdoch
did warn his Los Angeles audience that investing in China required a
"strong
stomach." But he said Chinese officials were very "practical" and
"resolutely
capitalist" and foreign firms interested in succeeding in China
should
"push the envelope" of the regulatory apparatus.
"People are going to start piling in quickly," he said.
"The time is
very
ripe right now."
_________________________________
Human Rights Group Says Christian Leaders Arrested in China Rationale for Recent Chinese Military Build-Up Questioned
by Fred Jackson and Chad Groening ("Agape Press,"March 23, 2001)
(AgapePress) - Two more preachers have reportedly been arrested by authorities in China.
The New York-based group Human Rights in China says authorities have detained two Christian leaders who were preaching at a home in Hubei Province in the central part of the country. CNN quotes the group as saying the two men, who are pastors with the underground Chinese Evangelical Fellowship, were picked up last week at a home where they were attending a family prayer service. The fellowship is branded by Beijing officials as one of a dozen "evil cults" in the country.
A spokesman for Amnesty International says several members of the evangelical group have been detained or sent to labor camps since 1998. It says at least one was severely beaten and died in custody.
This latest report did not give any further details on the fate of the two arrested last week.
Chinese Military Build-Up While Christian persecution and other human-rights violations in China have been part of the mix on the American political scene for some time now, the political turmoil between communist China and the island nation of Taiwan has been around even longer. A senior policy analyst with the Heritage Foundation says the United States needs to stop making Taiwan "jump through hoops" to get critically needed military hardware.
Stephen Yates is the Senior China Policy Analyst at the Washington-based think tank. He says a recent report in The Washington Times revealed that China has increased its defense spending by nearly 20%. Yates says there is only one reason for that.
"[China] faces no threats on its borders [and] no likely rival in the region will seek to invade or topple the government there," Yates says, "so really the only place one can expect that China's aiming this military capability is at the United States, with an eye towards keeping it out of Taiwan."
Yates says unlike the United States, which has pledged to defend democracies on a global basis, China has no other national security reason to greatly increase and modernize its military.
"One would really have to ask the question of Beijing of exactly what kinds of threats they really see themselves facing in the world," he says. "When one looks at the U.S. defense budget, we have interests globally and we defend them globally. In most cases, we are on the side of people seeking to protect their own freedom."
"What is it that China intends to do with a modernized and better equipped and funded military?"
Yates says the U.S. needs to make it easier for Taiwan to receive the military hardware it needs to deter the communists from making a military move against the island nation.
_________________________________
China Tries To Jam Foreign Radio
By MARTIN FACKLER c The Associated Press
BEIJING (AP) - In the airwaves above Tibet and China's western deserts, a battle is under way for the hearts and minds of restive ethnic minorities.
The communist government is pitted against an array of foreign broadcasters ranging from exiled Muslim separatists and Saudi religious radio to Western news services such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia.
In a region fought over by outside powers for centuries, the broadcasters are trying to cement ethnic unity - or kindle rebellion. It's a high-tech update of the ``Great Game,'' the 19th-century rivalry between Britain and Russia to control Central Asia.
The official Xinhua news agency has warned of the dangers of foreign broadcasting, noting, ``Infiltration by hostile radio stations from abroad into our region has lately become more serious.''
Beijing is fighting back by expanding programming in local languages - new transmitters are extending Chinese radio into remote corners of Tibet and the Muslim region of Xinjiang - and stepping up efforts to jam foreign shortwave broadcasts.
Western broadcasters say jamming, usually the airing of noise at the same frequency, has increased since last fall, and Chinese officials have confirmed they are building jamming facilities.
VOA has heard Chinese opera and banging sounds drowning out its programs in Tibetan since September, said John Buescher, head of the U.S. government agency's Tibetan service.
``The jamming is being called China's new 'Great Wall,''' said Dru Gladney, a Xinjiang expert at the University of Hawaii. ``It's all part of a general package to rein in Xinjiang'' and Tibet.
The stepped-up interference coincides with China's ``develop the West'' program. The effort begun last year is aimed at binding the economy of China's western regions, Tibet and Xinjiang farther north, more closely to Beijing and raising living standards.
The two regions have been the scene of a separatist struggle since communist troops arrived in 1950. Over the past decade, Tibetan and Xinjiang cities have seen a wave of protests and bombings. China claims foreigners incite the unrest and train militants.
Two of the biggest foreign broadcasters are financed by the U.S. government.
VOA transmits four hours of news a day in two Tibetan dialects. Radio Free Asia, set up after the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists, has eight hours daily of Tibetan programming.
Xinjiang's biggest Muslim ethnic group is the Uighurs. Though Radio Free Asia has broadcast one hour a day in the Uighur language since 1998, most programming in the language comes from Muslim countries.
A state-run Saudi station beams out two hours a day of Islamic religious programs in Uighur, but experts say it attracts few listeners. An Uzbek government station broadcasts secular news in Uighur.
More worrisome to China is programming by Uighur exiles broadcast from Almaty, capital of the neighboring Central Asian republic of Kazakstan. Uighurs are ethnically related to Kazaks and other Central Asians.
Radio Almaty broadcasts one to two hours a day into Xinjiang's Yili valley, the site of anti-Chinese rioting in 1997.
It carries news of Uighurs living abroad and a ``mildly anti-Chinese message,'' said Nicolas Becquelin, a Xinjiang specialist at the School for Advanced Social Sciences in Paris. Becquelin said the broadcasters are forced to temper that anti-Chinese message to avoid upsetting Kazak authorities.
China has pressured Kazakstan and other neighbors to clamp down on anti-Chinese agitation, holding out access to import markets as an incentive.
Chinese anxieties about foreign broadcasting got a rare public airing at the annual session of the national legislature in Beijing in early March.
The head of the Xinjiang delegation called for more money for radio and television and to combat ``subversive broadcasts,'' especially in the Yili valley.
``These broadcasts are fanning separatism ... and carrying out propaganda by religious extremists,'' said Abulahat Abdurixit. ``Their ultimate objective is to destroy and break up China.''
Xinhua said the delegation wanted much more than the $400,000 spent last year on those activities.
In Tibet, China has quadrupled its Tibetan-language radio staff to 80 in the last year, according to Western observers.
Voice of Tibet, a private broadcaster based in Oslo, Norway, says it tries to evade jamming by switching frequencies twice a day. Chinese jammers then rush to find and block the new signal.
``They move when we move,'' said Oystein Alme, manager of the service. ``We can see they are getting faster.''
_________________________________
Britain denounces rights abuses in China, Zimbabwe, at UN forum
(AFP, March 22, 2001)
GENEVA, March 22 (AFP) - Britain denounced human rights abuses in China and Zimbabwe, and expressed concern at the plight of Chechen civilians in Russia, at the UN's annual human rights hearings in Geneva on Thursday.
Junior foreign minister John Battle said Britain was "concerned about the use of the death penalty and administrative detention, and incidents of torture and degrading treatment of detainees."
He mentioned in particular the plight of democracy activists and followers of the Falun Gong sect during his address to the session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
Battle also talked about Tibet, saying he hoped China would "enter into a meaningful dialogue with the Dalai Lama on a long-term solution in Tibet."
And he expressed alarm over a deteriorating human rights situation in Zimbabwe, citing attacks against judges, anti-democratic actions and "orchestrated violence against members of the legitimate opposition."
On Russia's conflict in Chechnya, he said: "There is an urgent need for a thorough and transparent investigation into the multiple allegations of human rights violations."
But he welcomed Russia's willingness to work with the Council of Europe on the conflict.
Looking ahead to the World Conference against Racism in South Africa from August 31 to September 7, Battle also raised the issue of reparations for slavery.
While some countries, especially in Africa, want to see the issue raised, reports in the South African press suggest that countries such as the US and France might boycott the conference if the issue was put on the agenda.
"We need to understand the past and recognize the history of the problems we see today in order to address them," Battle said.
"But the international community cannot afford to be diverted from the fundamental responsibility of dealing with the problems of contemporary racial discrimination," he added.
"I hope the conference will not overlook the daily problems of a wide range of diverse ethnic communities," he said.
On Monday, European Union ministers said the EU would express its concern about "serious human rights violations" in China during the Commission's annual six-week session, which began here on Monday.
While the EU said it would not co-sign a United States-sponsored resolution against China, it said it would vote for it. The US resolution is due to be presented in the second week of April.
_________________________________
Religion, cult different terms
("China Daily," March 21, 2001)
Religion and cult seem to be two words that some US politicians do not separate when using them in relation to other countries.
On March 14, a human rights organization called the US Freedom House recognized Falun Gong as "China's defender of religious rights" at a ceremony attended by some US Congress members.
"There is no religious freedom there, only religious persecution," the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jesse Helms was quoted as saying by Reuters.
Helms' unfounded words exposed his ignorance of China's religious freedom policy and spoke volumes for the deep-rooted discrimination against China.
Since the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, the Chinese Government has been pursuing a religious freedom policy. Under this, the Chinese people have freedom to believe or not to believe in any religion.
China has now established relations with religious organizations in 70 nations. The government has made huge efforts to rebuild and revamp churches.
For example, to ensure people in the Three Gorges Dam area can engage in normal religious activities after resettlement, China has freed up tens of millions of yuan to build churches and religious sites in the new resettled areas. This move has been greeted with a warm response by the 150,000 relocated people.
The Chinese Government's ban of Falun Gong is only a step to safeguard real religious activities from being smeared by the evil cult, which has claimed thousands of lives.
Given the evil nature of Falun Gong, the Chinese Government has every reason to impose a ban on the cult which led to 1,600 deaths including several members setting themselves on fire.
For those followers who have been deceived by Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi's heresy, the Chinese Government has been taking a lenient attitude in an effort to pull them out of the mire.
The Freedom House's recognition of Falun Gong and four other groups for defending religious rights only attest to some China-bashers' desires to interfere in China's internal affairs and to portray the Chinese Government in the worst possible light.
This could have a ripple effect and encourage evil cults to flourish throughout the world.
_________________________________
China Aims PR Attack at Falun Gong
(AP, March 21, 2001)
BEIJING (AP) - China launched a new propaganda attack on the Falun Gong spiritual group Tuesday as Beijing prepared to fight U.S. efforts to have the U.N. Human Rights Commission censure its crackdown on the movement.
The state television evening news broadcast a report claiming Falun Gong had encouraged 136 followers to kill themselves. The official Xinhua News Agency carried a similar report calling Falun Gong heretical and a threat to public safety.
On Jan. 23, five people who the government said were Falun Gong followers set themselves on fire in Beijing. Falun Gong spokesmen abroad have denied that the five were group members.
Falun Gong was banned in 1999 as a threat to the Communist Party's grip on power. Thousands of people have been detained, and human rights groups say 112 people have died in custody.
The new government accusations come as the United States is preparing to propose a resolution for the U.N. Human Rights Commission to condemn the crackdown. China has defeated similar measures in the past.
The European Union said it would support the resolution at the commission's six-week session that began this week in Geneva.
Falun Gong draws on Buddhism, Taoism and traditional Chinese beliefs. It was founded by a former government clerk who now lives in the United States. Before the crackdown, official estimates of its membership ranged as high as 70 million.
China has often accused Falun Gong of causing the deaths of followers by encouraging them to refuse medical treatment or kill themselves.
The new campaign Tuesday included a half-hour program broadcast after the news detailing what state television said were suicides by Falun Gong members. The broadcast included footage of people who it said burned themselves to death, threw themselves in front of trains or killed themselves in other ways.
_________________________________
U.N. receives petition condemning Falun Gong
("CNN News," March 20, 2001")
by Rose Tang
HONG KONG, China -- A Chinese organization is to present over one million signatures to the United Nations Human Rights Commission condemning the Falun Gong group.
The official Xinhua news agency reported that the China Anti-cult Association has been displaying banners splashed with signatures outside the Commission's Geneva headquarters since Monday.
The U.N. convention is likely to address China's repression of Falun Gong.
Xinhua said the more than 1.5 million signatures were collected for "protecting human rights against evil cults", and would be submitted to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.
Chinese religious leaders Bishop Fu Tieshan and Buddhist Abbot Shengsang are leading the anti-cult delegation, which Xinhua calls a "non-government organization."
The association launched the petition in January after several alleged Falun Gong members set themselves alight in the Tiananmen Square in Beijing protesting a government crackdown.
The petition was highly praised by the government and was widely reported on the state media.
Mass crackdown Beijing has been running a nationwide crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement after banning it as an "evil cult" in 1999.
"The Chinese government has banned Falun Gong and the evil cult according to law, winning heartfelt popular support," Xinhua quoted the anti-cult association as saying.
Beijing has arrested hundreds of Falun Gong members and sentenced dozens to jail for protesting against the crackdown.
Falun Gong claims numerous members have been tortured in jail or labor camps.
The spiritual movement attracted millions in the 1990s with its mix of traditional Chinese religions, health exercises and the teachings of founder Li Hongzhi, a former government clerk now living in the United States.
"Change of tactic" Hong Kong Falun Gong spokeswoman Sophie Xiao said the petition was "disgusting".
"This could be a change of the government's tactic. It demonstrates that they have gained no popular support," she told CNN.com from Geneva.
Xiao believes people must have been forced to sign the petition.
"I heard from people coming out of China that even primary school kids were forced to sign otherwise they could face expulsion," she added.
"This is a rape of public opinion... These religious leaders (of the delegation) are all registered with the Chinese Communist Party," she said.
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US seeks to condemn China on rights abuses Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights U.S. Commission on Human Rights
by Naomi Koppel (AP, March 18, 2001)
GENEVA (March 18, 2001 2:22 p.m. EST) - Suppression of the Falun Gong spiritual movement and continued crackdowns on Tibet make China a top target for U.S. officials when the United Nations Human Rights Commission opens Monday.
Washington plans to take the lead on China by sponsoring a resolution condemning the world's most populous country for what it says is a deteriorating rights situation.
However, the resolution faces a formidable obstacle: a counter-resolution by China. On nine other occasions, China has succeeded in blocking full debate on its human rights record.
Rights groups said they suspect Washington hasn't got the stomach for the slow process of bringing other members of the 53-nation commission on board. Success, they said, hinges on how avidly U.S. leaders lobby foreign governments for support.
"We fear that this announcement was made for domestic consumption in the United States, to calm U.S. public opinion," said Reed Brody, advocacy director of Washington-based Human Rights Watch. "Up to now, no great efforts have been made to have this resolution adopted."
The six-week commission meeting opens in Geneva with a statement from U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson.
Member nations are expected to spend up to a week discussing the situation in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Last fall, an extraordinary meeting of the commission mandated Robinson's office to appoint a commission of inquiry to examine allegations of Israeli human rights abuses. That report is expected to be made public March 26 or 27.
Another crisis to be taken up at the meeting is Chechnya.
Last year, Russia became the first permanent member of the U.N. Security Council formally rebuked by the commission. Moscow was criticized for "disproportionate and indiscriminate use of Russian military force, including attacks against civilians" in the breakaway region.
Robinson, in a report prepared for this year's meeting, said Russia failed to heed international calls to allow an independent inquiry into human rights violations. Meanwhile, "disappearances and killings, corruption, abuses and harassment at checkpoints" continue, she said.
The new president of Congo, Joseph Kabila, also is expected to address the commission.
For the United States, China remains a top human rights priority. The State Department's annual report said thousands of religious institutions had either been closed or destroyed and hundreds of Falun Gong members imprisoned in the past year.
Second on the Americans' priority list is Cuba. Last year's censure resolution criticizing "continued repression of members of the political opposition and the detention of dissidents" passed - but this time Washington must first resolve disagreements with its allies.
The Czech Republic again is planning to take the lead against Cuba by proposing the resolution. But U.S. officials are furious that the proposed text also attacks the U.S. embargo of Cuba.
Last weekend, Secretary of State Colin Powell urged Czech President Vaclav Havel to delete the embargo reference, saying it was a mistake to mix economic and human rights issues.
Other countries on the commission's agenda have been the subject of censure resolutions year after year, including Iraq, Iran, Rwanda, Congo and Myanmar, also known as Burma.
Human Rights Watch said it feared the commission was becoming less effective because the countries criticized for rights violations increasingly are also members of the commission.
Among this year's new members: Algeria, Congo, Kenya, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Vietnam - nations that themselves have been accused of serious human rights violations. Three countries - Cuba, Libya and Syria - are on the U.S. terrorism list. One-party states include China, Cuba and Vietnam.
"Having governments like this is like having foxes guarding the chicken coop," said Brody. His group believes countries join the commission in order to avoid criticism of their own records.
"It is hard to believe that Libya and Syria and Vietnam are actively going to take part in finding solutions for another country's human rights problems," he said.
Many of those countries have regularly refused U.N. human rights' experts requests to visit the country. A standing invitation for such visits should be a minimum standard for commission membership, Brody said.
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China Arrests Two Underground Church Leaders
(AP, March 17, 2001)
BEIJING (AP)--Two leaders of China's underground "house church" movement were detained in central China and could face criminal charges, a police official said Saturday. Luo Gang and He Ping were detained March 12 in Honghu county in Hubei province, said the county police official. He would give only his surname, Zhang.
China allows only government-controlled religious groups. It has imprisoned and harassed leaders of the flourishing nondenominational Protestant "house church" movement, so called because worship often takes place in private homes.
Despite a 3-year crackdown, the movement led by evangelical preachers has attracted millions of followers.
Luo and He are leaders of a "house church" in Hubei with about 1 million members, according to New York-based Human Rights in China.
Their church was banned in 1998 as an "evil cult," according to Zhang, the police official. He said the pair probably would be prosecuted on charges of running a banned movement.
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China says human rights meddling may harm EU ties
(Reuters, March 2, 2001)
BRUSSELS, March 2 (Reuters) - China has warned the European Union their ties could suffer if the directly elected European Parliament continues to meddle in its human rights issues.
The EU assembly adopted a resolution on February 15 calling on the Chinese authorities to guarantee full religious freedoms and to respect the followers of the Falun Gong sect.
"There exist disagreements between China and the EU over the question of human rights," China's ambassador to the EU, Song Mingjiang, wrote in a strongly worded letter to all European Parliament members.
"The question, if improperly handled, can also give rise to negative impact on the development of our bilateral relations," warned the letter, a copy of which Reuters obtained on Friday.
Song said there was no link between religious freedom and the issue of the Falun Gong, whose followers practise a religion based on elements of Taoism, Buddhism and traditional Chinese meditation and exercises.
China regards the sect as a dangerous cult. Thirty seven Falun Gong followers were jailed on Friday for up to 10 years for distributing leaflets about the group.
"To support the Falun Gong cult in China both hurts the Chinese people's feelings and goes against European values. It undermines the (parliament's) credibility," Song wrote.
He also said European accusations of human rights violations in Tibet were "groundless."
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Divine Encounters on Chinese Campus Touch 48 Students
("Religion Today," March 01, 2001)
Encounters with Christian teachers and students on a campus in northern China has led to 48 people becoming Christians in only nine weeks. Christian teachers are praying for an additional 100 conversions before the school year ends.
"The greatest thing about this is that it truly has been a supernatural work," said a teacher. "Both Chinese and American Christians are working together, as a team with the Holy Spirit in orchestrating this 'harvest of souls.'"
A number of the new Christians had a string of "spontaneous" encounters with Christian teachers and students in the few days immediately prior to accepting Christ. "The Holy Spirit continues to direct people to our door day after day," the teacher said. "We are experiencing a great movement of God's spirit in answer to prayer."
The Chinese students, who are relatively new believers themselves, are reportedly taking responsibility for the evangelism of other students, and meet in small groups for worship.
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US blasts China rights record, sets tone for Bush
("ABC News," February 26, 2001)
WASHINGTON, Feb 26 (Reuters) - The United States on Monday said China's human rights record deteriorated further in 2000, adding to a tough stance from Washington as President George W. Bush works out his approach to the Communist giant. The State Department's annual human rights report, which regularly draws expressions of outrage from Beijing, said: "China's poor human rights record worsened during the year."
It added: "The government's respect for religious freedom deteriorated markedly during the year, as the government conducted crackdowns against underground Christian groups and Tibetan Buddhists and destroyed many houses of worship."
It mentioned widespread use of torture and particularly condemned the crackdown on the Falun Gong, a widespread spiritual movement. Many Falun Gong practitioners have been arrested, including many rounded up in mass arrests in public places such as Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
"By year's end, thousands of unregistered religious institutions had been either closed or destroyed, hundreds of Falun Gong leaders had been imprisoned, and thousands of Falun Gong practitioners remained in detention or were sentenced to "re-education through labor" camps or incarcerated in mental institutions, it said.
"Various sources report that approximately 100 or more Falun Gong practitioners died as a result of torture and mistreatment in custody," it added.
At the same time, the report noted that decentralization by the Communist authorities and other economic reforms had "markedly reduced state control over citizens daily lives."
HARD CRACKDOWN, BUT MORE CHOICE
Many Chinese had more individual choice, greater access to information, and expanded economic opportunity in 2000, the report said.
Release of the report coincided with a visit to Beijing by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, who urged the Chinese authorities to scrap the "re-education through labor" system it has used to lock up dissidents and many Falun Gong members.
Human Rights in China issued a report last week which cited Chinese sources as saying 260,000 people were in labor camps, 60 percent of them for the catch-all offense of "disturbing public order."
Although compiled from data gathered under former President Bill Clinton, who took what many Republicans consider too soft a line toward Beijing, the report added to the impression of a tougher line emerging under Bush.
In his election campaign last year, Bush promised to transform what was billed as a policy of making China a "strategic partner" into one in which the emerging economic powerhouse would be seen as a "strategic competitor."
Bush made clear he wanted to focus his Asian policy mainly on existing U.S. allies, primarily Japan, which he believed Clinton had ignored.
In its first major decision on China, the administration has said it will strongly back a motion at the U.N. Human Rights Commission meeting in Geneva next month faulting Beijing's human rights record.
Washington has traditionally backed such a resolution even though China, through diplomatic maneuvering, has almost always escaped a direct vote on the issue over the past decade.
BUSH'S ROCKY START
Bush's relations with Beijing are already off to a rocky start.
Last week he was forced to comment on reports that Chinese workers were helping Iraq install fiber-optic technology in Iraq after allegations that they were helping upgrade Baghdad's air defense systems, which were bombed by U.S. aircraft.
"It's troubling that they be involved in helping Iraq develop a system that will endanger our pilots," Bush told reporters. U.S. officials said the presence of the technicians could contravene U.N. sanctions.
In another key decision that could set the tone for Bush's relations with China, his administration is due to decide in April on Taiwan's annual requests for arms sales. China claims the self-governing island is a rebel province.
Beijing has also been critical of Bush's determination to deploy a U.S. anti-missile defense system, a key element in his proposals for transforming U.S. national security but one China says will trigger a new arms race.
Zhou Mingwei, a senior Chinese official dealing with Taiwan, is having talks in Washington this week, the first official ministerial level contact between Beijing and the new administration.
Qian Qichen, China's most senior foreign affairs official is due in the United States in March.
The State Department said its report would be available at its Internet website www.state.gov later on Monday.
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China expected to release political prisoners ahead of Olympic vote
(AFP, February 23, 2001)
BEIJING, Feb 23 (AFP) - China will release several prominent political dissidents as it tries to polish its human rights record ahead of a July vote that will decide which city hosts the 2008 Olympic Games, western diplomats and rights groups said Friday.
"I think it is almost a sure thing that Xu Wenli, Wang Youcai and Qin Yongmin will be released ahead of the vote," Frank Lu, director of the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, told AFP.
"The Chinese authorities released some 20 prominent dissidents ahead of the 1993 vote on the 2000 Olympic Games so it is very, very likely that they will do it again," he said.
The three are veteran Chinese dissidents and co-founders of the outlawed China Democracy Party and were sentenced up to 13 years imprisonment in 1998 for subversion.
Lu's remarks come as an evaluation team from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) spent a third day in Beijing being briefed on the city's 2008 bid.
Lu said Beijing would not make the same mistake it made in 1993 when dissidents like Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan were released ahead of the 2000 Games vote, only to join a campaign from inside of China that led to Beijing's defeat.
This time China would only release the dissidents on condition they take up residence outside China, Lu said.
Beijing's human rights record was widely seen as a crucial factor in its failure to secure the 2000 Games.
Wei and Wang were re-arrested following the failed bid and finally released into exile after China fought off international pressure at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.
The IOC is due to decide in July which city should host the 2008 Games among the five candidates, which in addition to Beijing, are Paris, Toronto, Osaka and Istanbul.
Western diplomats in Beijing also said that it was quite likely China would release some dissidents in the run up to the July vote, and could likely release a few before the annual meeting of the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva in March.
"We regularly call on China to release prominent dissidents in high level talks with the Chinese leadership and this will continue regardless of the Olympic vote," one diplomat said.
"China has often released political dissidents in an effort to appease international public opinion and score points for other events like the Olympic bid or high level meetings with Western leaders," he said.
Next week the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Mary Robinson will make her second visit to Beijing in two months and is expected to push the Chinese government to reform legal provisions which allow citizens to be jailed for up to three years without trial.
Shan Chengfeng, the wife of jailed China Democracy Party (CDP) member Wu Yilong, was Wednesday sentenced to two years "reform through labor" after signing an open letter urging the IOC to press China on rights.
The timing of the sentencing surprised observors who had expected Beijing to avoid inflaming the rights issue during the IOC visit.
The official Xinhua news agency reported earlier in the week that the brutal crackdown on the Falungong spritual sect, over which China has been severely criticised, was abating.
In another conciliatory move, Ye Xiaowen, head of the government's Religious Affairs Bureau, told a meeting in Hong Kong earlier this week that religious freedoms in China would improve, although the government would continue to crackdown on anyone attempting to use religion to harm national security.
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Bush backs U.N. rebuke of China on rights
DIPLOMACY: How the new president and Beijing
handle the annual discomfort may set the tone for Sino-U.S. relations for years.
by Carol Giacomo ("The Orange County Registry," February 17, 2001)
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration, in its first major decision on China, will sponsor a U.N. resolution faulting Beijing's human- rights record, administration officials said Friday.
"There is a consensus in the administration to go ahead with the resolution because that's what the facts require," a senior official told Reuters. The resolution will be offered when the U.N. Commission on Human Rights holds its annual meeting in Geneva in March.
Formal paperwork authorizing the action was still being processed, and it was unclear when an official announcement of the U.S. position would come. But the decision has been made, the officials said.
The annual question of such a resolution traditionally has been a source of extreme irritation between the United States and China.
How President George W. Bush and the Chinese government handle it this year could help set the tone for Sino-American relations during his administration.
The United States, reflecting strong American concern over Beijing's record, usually sponsors or supports a resolution at the U.N. meeting in Gen eva criticizing Chinese human-rights abuses.
Republican and Democratic members of the Senate and House in recent days have put bipartisan pressure on Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to make a strong effort to persuade the U.N. commission to adopt a resolution criticizing China's human-rights record.
China has been faulted for its increasingly harsh treatment of protesters from the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, widespread use of torture and for placing curbs on the Internet.
Except for last year, the U.S. campaign on behalf of a U.N. censure largely has been lackluster and symbolic, drawing little backing from other countries.
China over the past decade almost always has escaped even a direct vote on the issue.
As a result, some China experts and U.S. policy-makers have questioned why the United States should again participate in an exercise of questionable value that does little or nothing to change the behavior of a major world power with whom Washington has many other serious issues.
A senior U.S. official acknowledged that trying to win support for the China resolution "will be a hard fight."
"There might not be much support out there, but we think (sponsoring a resolution is) the right thing to do," he said.
But whether that would mean Bush or Powell would get directly involved in trying to sway opinion has not been determined.
Bush is facing another decision that could be even more sensitive than human rights - whether to sell new weapons to Taiwan and, if so, how many. That decision is not expected until April.
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Powell urged Bush to back resolution on China human rights
(Kyodo News Service, Feb. 17, 2001)
WASHINGTON, Feb. 17 (Kyodo) - Secretary of State Colin Powell has urged President George W. Bush to submit to a U.N. meeting slated for next month a resolution condemning China's human rights record, a U.S. official said Friday.
The official said Bush has yet to make a final decision on the matter, but indicated Washington is set to sponsor the resolution, which is to be presented to the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva in mid-March.
Following the military crackdown on the pro-democracy movement at Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989, the United States has sponsored nearly every year resolutions condemning China's human rights record, except in some years, such as 1998, when China released jailed dissidents.
The resolutions called for improvement in the country's human rights situation. In response, China countered through various motions and succeeded in blocking their adoption.
As a result, officials in the Bush administration have called for the U.S. to compromise with China on human rights instead of doggedly sticking to the submission of resolutions.
However, a crackdown by Chinese authorities on the Falun Gong sect has raised strong protests from Congress and human rights groups.
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US legislators pile pressure on Bush over China rights
(AFP, February 14, 2001)
WASHINGTON, Feb 14 (AFP) - Exiled dissidents and legislators Wednesday called on the US government to censure China at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, setting up an early political test for President George W. Bush.
High-profile exiles including Harry Wu and Wei Jingsheng and rights campaigners turned up the heat on the administration as it mulls whether support a motion condemning China at a commission meeting in Geneva.
Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, a champion of human rights causes in Congress, has introduced a bipartisan Senate resolution calling on Bush's new foreign policy team to take a stand against rights abuses in China.
"The United States cannot be silent, but must lead international condemnation of China's terrible abuse of its citizen's fundamental human rights," Wellstone told reporters.
China has signed but not yet ratified the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Convenant on Political and Civil Rights, but Wellstone poured scorn on Beijing's motives.
"In all due respect, your words do not matter, your record has been atrocious," he said.
A concurrent non-binding resolution is also to be lodged with the House of Representatives. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi of California, who supports the move, called on Bush to send a "clear message" that he supports human rights in China.
"The world looks to our new president to declare his commitment to promoting democratic values .... Now it is more important than ever for the United States to organize and win the vote in Geneva," she said.
The United States co-sponsored a resolution against China in Geneva in 2000, but Beijing, with its habitual massive lobbying effort, stopped the move in its tracks.
Secretary of State Colin Powell told a congressional committee during confirmation hearings last month that the new administration was considering whether to sponsor a resolution in Geneva.
Next week Powell's State Department is due to release its annual human rights report, which in the past has been harshly critical of China's treatment of political activists, non state sanctioned religions and prisoners.
This year's campaign by activists is the first since they lost a battle last year to defeat a historic China trade bill which they say rewards Beijing for an appalling human rights record.
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Canadian Prime Minister Visits China
by Christopher Bodeen (Associated Press, Feb. 12, 2001)
BEIJING (AP) - Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien raised human rights concerns with Chinese leaders Sunday and oversaw the signing of an agreement on legal reforms at the start of visit focusing on Chinese-Canadian business ties.
Chretien met with Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji and watched as officials signed a series of pacts at the Great Hall of the People, the government headquarters in Beijing.
Leading a 500-member trade delegation, Chretien told Zhu he hoped the visit would replicate the success of a similar trip in 1994 and ``lead to a lot of good business cooperation between Canada and China.''
Zhu called the business-oriented approach an ``innovative form of diplomacy which has made a contribution to the bilateral relations between our two countries.''
Reporters were barred from the rest of their discussion.
Senior Canadian officials said that during the 90-minute meeting, Chretien raised concerns about Chinese rule in Tibet and Beijing's crackdown on the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual movement.
Chretien was ``very specific in saying these are his concerns and those of Canadians, that we consider them problems,'' one official said. The Canadian officials spoke on condition of anonymity. Canadian lawmakers have pressed Chretien to urge China to hold negotiations with the Tibetan government in exile headed by the Dalai Lama.
Zhu responded by repeating China's assertion that it will talk with the Dalai Lama if he meets certain conditions, said the officials. Zhu also defended the crackdown on Falun Gong. China banned Falun Gong as an evil cult and accuses it of swindling followers and driving them to insanity or even death through its dangerous teachings.
Falun Gong and human rights groups say at least 112 people have died from police mistreatment during the often violent 18-month-long campaign against the sect.
China, which occupied Tibet with troops in 1950, has harshly repressed all challenges to Chinese rule and seeks to stamp out allegiance to the Dalai Lama, who fled to India in 1959 after a failed uprising against communist rule.
Zhu also pledged that China's legislature would ratify one of two key U.N. human rights and civil liberties covenants next months. Both have been signed by China's government but need legislative approval to take effect.
State television quoted Zhu saying that China adheres to broad international standards of human rights. But he added it was up to individual countries to apply rights to fit their specific conditions - a standard Chinese response to criticism. China is willing to open ``exchanges and dialogue'' with Canada on rights issues, the report quoted Zhu saying.
The agreements signed Sunday included one that would further cooperation in setting up legal aid centers throughout China and promoting reforms of the criminal justice system, part of Canadian efforts to engage China on human rights and the rule of law. Other agreements covered cooperation in the energy sector, poverty reduction and the environment.
Before meeting with Zhu, Chretien lunched with China's minister for development and planning, Zeng Peiyan, and leaders from western provinces where China has launched ambitious development projects.
China is among Canada's top trading partners, and Chretien's entourage included representatives of the aerospace and energy industries. Canadian officials say they expect 173 business agreements will be signed during the visit, which will also take Chretien to China's commercial center, Shanghai, and the western city of Xi'an.
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Amnesty warns over China torture
(BBC, February 12, 2001)
Human rights group Amnesty International says torture and ill-treatment of prisoners and detainees in China has become widespread and systematic. In a report, Amnesty says a growing range of Chinese officials are resorting to extreme violence against inmates in a range of institutions from police stations to drug rehabilitation centres.
What is particularly horrifying about torture in China is that much of it is committed in broad daylight
Amnesty International
Among the victims are members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement and Muslim separatists in the far western region of Xinjiang.
Amnesty says the government's commitment to curbing torture has often been undermined by its own directives to use every means in anti-corruption campaigns and political crackdowns.
The report also says that although Chinese journalists are playing a growing role in exposing abuses, they would never report torture of political dissidents.
Abuses growing
"What is particularly horrifying about torture in China is that much of it is committed by officials in broad daylight to instil fear and discipline," said an Amnesty spokesman.
Officials have come down hard on Falun Gong members.
He told BBC News Online: "The fact that torture is often not even hidden in China shows that these officials commit these crimes with total impunity."
According to the report, the range of officials resorting to torture is expanding, as is the circle of victims.
"In China, the trend is toward a widening of the scope of torture to include state-sponsored blackmail, collection of tax and the enforcement of fines," said the spokesman.
And although the Chinese Government has said it is committed to fighting torture, the report says investigations rarely bring perpetrators to justice and official denials are readily accepted.
Persecution
In China the trend is toward a widening of the scope of torture
Amnesty spokesman
Amnesty also says bogus psychiatric hospitalisation is often used to suppress dissent.
The report makes recommendations to the Chinese authorities to improve human rights, including banning torture, and excluding from courts all evidence extracted under torture.
Amnesty also urges an end to incommunicado and arbitrary detention, ensuring detainees access to lawyers, families and medical treatment, and instituting an effective complaints mechanism.
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Dutch MP urges tough EU stance on human rights in China
("The Hague," February 7, 2001)
(AFP)-The European Union should take a tough stance to protest China's refusal to allow western officials to meet with members of the Falungong sect, a member of the ruling coalition in the Netherlands said Wednesday.
Dutch Foreign Minister Jozias van Aartsen cancelled a scheduled visit to Beijing and Hong Kong where the Dutch human rights envoy had planned to meet with 11 Chinese human rights activists including a representative of the Falungong sect.
The decision to scrap the visit came after Beijing pressured the Dutch government to cancel the February 12 meeting with the Chinese representatives, which was to be held in Hong Kong.
"I call on Mr. van Aartsen to get the European Union to adopt the same kind of stance," Social Democrat MP Bert Koenders told the ANP news agency.
The minister informed both the Swedish EU presidency and the European foreign affairs commissioner, Chris Patten, of his decision, the foreign ministry said.
Both the press and parliament commented favorably on the decision to cancel the visit, but the Dutch employers' organization expressed concern about possible repercussions on trade relations between China and the Netherlands.
China's official Xinhua news agency cited the Dutch government as saying the visit had been postponed "owing to a time factor."
But the foreign ministry in The Hague made clear late Tuesday that the visit was being cancelled due to pressure from Beijing.
"It is unthinkable that a part of the program would be suppressed under pressure from China," a foreign ministry spokesman said.
Dutch Human Rights Ambassador Renee Jones-Bos was to have met representatives of 11 organisations including the Falungong spiritual movement, which has been banned in mainland China but not in Hong Kong.
A government spokeswoman in Hong Kong said the cancellation was a matter concerning foreign affairs which fell within the jurisdiction of the central government in Beijing.
Falungong was banned by Beijing in July 1999 as an "evil cult" and the Communist leadership stepped up an already-intensive propaganda campaign against it after five alleged members tried to commit suicide by setting themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square last month.
A Falungong spokeswoman told AFP in Hong Kong: "We regret very much that a normal meeting for discussing human rights has been cancelled because of pressure from Beijing, because I think human rights should transcend national boundaries and races."
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U.S. Weighing Options on China's Human Rights Stance Bush may go for more practical approach than condemnation
by Jane Perlez ("New York Times," February 4, 2001)
Washington -- The Bush administration is debating how hard to press China on human rights, and may be tempted to drop condemnation of the country at an annual human rights meeting next month in preference for what some see as a more pragmatic approach to bringing reforms.
During most of the Clinton administration, the United States was at the forefront of nations reprimanding China before the U.N. Human Rights Commission, a strategy that the Chinese always tried to block to stave off embarrassment.
This year, as China faces a vote by the International Olympic Committee in July on whether Beijing will be host for the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese government has offered a number of inducements -- including ratification of a U.N. rights covenant -- to persuade the United States to drop the traditional resolution.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said at his confirmation hearing that a recommendation to President Bush on whether the United States would support a resolution would be "the No. 1 item on our plate," but he did not say what he would do about it.
In a meeting with the departing Chinese ambassador, Li Zhaoxing, Powell warned that he would raise human rights issues and do so "frankly," a State Department spokesman said. China needs to follow "the rule of law and to be exposed to the powerful forces of free enterprise systems and democracy," Powell was quoted as telling Li.
The words differed little from those of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, but they came the day after five followers of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement set themselves on fire in Tiananmen Square.
Powell faces an array of liberal and conservative human rights advocates who want the administration to support a resolution, even though, as in the past, it is almost certain to be defeated. These advocates argue that little will change in China if the United States accepts the alternatives, and that China will gain a moral victory by not being reprimanded.
The State Department's annual human rights report, due at the end of this month, is expected to say, as it did last year, that the human rights situation in China has continued to deteriorate, with religious persecution particularly intense, and thus to increase pressure on Powell for introducing a resolution.
The annual Geneva meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission begins on March 19, but lobbying is already at a high pitch.
Last week, seven human rights groups, including Human Rights Watch and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, wrote to Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, urging them to press ahead with the resolution.
One factor Powell must consider, officials and human rights advocates said, is whether the United States can do more to improve human rights in China by accepting some of the Chinese proposals.
The Chinese have offered, for instance, to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which would oblige them to accept visits from officials assigned to hold China to international standards.
The Chinese, however, would agree to ratify the covenant only without the section that calls for the right to form trade unions.
The Chinese have also signaled they might be ready to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross to visit prisons in China and to allow the U.S. Customs Service access to suspected prison labor sites.
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Christian Youth Work Under Attack in China Analysis of Communist News Reveals Deceitful Government Tactics
by Paul Davenport ("Compass Direct News Service," January 27, 2001)
LONDON (Compass) -- Last July, authorities in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui moved to discourage Christian work with young people through an article that appeared in the local Anhui "Xinan Evening News."
The August 7 article, headlined, "Illegal Private 'Summer Camp' Banned," read:
"Recently, a peasant in Dongzhi county, under the pretext of holding a 'summer camp' in his home, privately spread religion among young people. On discovery by local police, this was prohibited.
"From 5-11 July, a certain villager Li of Zhaotan township took advantage of the summer vacation to organize more than 60 young people from Nixi, Huayuan and other rural districts and towns to hold the so-called 'Year 2000 XX Religion Summer Camp' at his home. During this period, Li 'enrolled students' to a set timetable and conducted examinations for those who attended. On the afternoon of 11 July, after the sub-branch of the Public Security Bureau at Zhaotan got to know about this, they immediately organized the people's police to go there and stop it.
"Afterwards, the Dongzhi county Public Security Bureau and Religious Affairs Bureau fined this Li according to the relevant laws and regulations. -- Our Own Reporter, Bao Xiaochun."
The article deliberately did not mention which religion committed this "crime" of holding a summer camp for young people. And many Chinese readers will have assumed it was one of the extreme cults banned by the government in recent years.
In fact, a reliable and detailed report from a Christian house church source in Dongzhi county confirmed that the camp was run by evangelical house church Christians.
The source stated that there are many Christians there, including many children. Sunday school work has been carried out for some time, although by law it is banned by the Chinese government for all children under the age of 18. Many of the children have become Christians and have made a good impression on the local people by their good behavior to the extent that many non-Christian families have sent their children to Sunday school, which does not charge.
Last summer, Sunday school teachers in the area held a five-day camp for several dozen children. However, on their return home they were so excited on the bus that the noise drew the attention of the local police. Through the children, the police soon found out about the camp and began to interrogate some of the teachers, including Mr. Li. The police accused them of being a cult such as Falun Gong or the "Established King" sect.
The teachers stated clearly that they were Christians with no connection to any cult. The police then told them -- in a clear violation of the Chinese Constitution -- that they were not allowed to believe in Christianity.
Eventually, the teachers were allowed to return home but warned they could be fined or arrested. Although the camp had been completed successfully, the article was placed in the local newspaper to show that police had acted in accordance with government regulations and to warn Christians in Anhui province who could read between the lines.
One young couple involved in the camp were warned that they might be sentenced to prison for 3-5 years. They were too poor to pay a fine, so they fled to another province. The police then arrested an older teacher, aged in her fifties. However, she had a very good local reputation, and villagers and even the local Communist Party officials rebuked the police, saying: "There are so many criminals in society, why don't you arrest them instead of good people? What crime has she committed?" Seeing popular opinion was against them, the police released the teacher.
It is instructive to compare the Communist Party newspaper report with the facts as reported by the local Christians. This is not always possible in China because of censorship, which makes this report particularly valuable.
We may conclude:
>> Not everything in the Mainland Chinese press should be taken at face value; it is often distorted.
>> The authorities continue their campaign against the growth of the church but seek to cover their tracks.
>> In many cases, public opinion (which would have been solidly anti-Christian in the early days of Mao) is now often in favor of persecuted Christians because of their consistent lives and service to the community.
It is a major scandal that Christian Sunday school and youth work to more than 400 million Chinese children under the age of 18 is still prohibited by the Communist Party. And even where, as in this case, the law is partially ignored, Christians may still suffer the consequences.
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China, With an Eye on Critics, Says It Will Ratify Rights Pact
by Erik Eckholm ("New York Times," January 23,2001)
BEIJING, Jan. 22 China will probably ratify a major international rights convention by the end of March, officials said today. The nation is apparently seeking to head off an early confrontation with the Bush administration over human rights and to enhance its chances to be host to the 2008 Olympics.
The formal adoption of the pact, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which China signed in 1997, has been a goal of the United Nations, the United States and other Western governments and rights groups. But China has shown little progress toward ratifying a second, much stronger treaty on civil and political rights than it signed in 1998.
Senior officials expressed their intention to ratify the economic and social covenant to Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations on a three-day visit that ended today. A spokeswoman for Mr. Annan, Marie Okabe, told The Associated Press this afternoon that officials had said that the covenant "might be or would be ratified during the first quarter by the Parliament, and possibly in March."
She did not identify the officials but added that Mr. Annan "was reassured of that and welcomed that."
Diplomats have speculated that China might adopt the covenant, perhaps with legal reservations on some provisions, before the annual meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, which begins on March 19 in Geneva.
President Bush will have to decide before then whether to propose, as the United States has in many past years, a resolution to condemn China's record on rights. Though China has always mustered enough support to kill the resolutions, it has resented American sponsorship and has warned that a repetition this year may harm relations.
China is also desperate to hold the 2008 Olympics here and may hope that the adoption of a significant rights treaty will help muffle international critics who oppose the bid because of rights violations, most recently the persecution and imprisonment of believers in the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
The treaty on economic, social and cultural rights is filled with vague calls for self-determination, the equal treatment of races and sexes and the rights to good housing, food, education and health care. One of its most pointed provisions declares "the right of everyone to form trade unions and to join the trade union of his choice." Those conditions are clearly not met in China, where the the Communist Party controls the only legal unions.
But countries can ratify with legal reservations, and the treaty language has many loopholes. The section that calls for free unions allows exceptions based on national laws and "the interests of national security or public order."
Still, rights advocates say they hope that China will join the treaty because it obligates periodic reports on compliance and opens the door to formal international questioning of policies.
"Ratification would be welcome and could indicate a greater willingness on the part of China to adhere to international human rights standards," said Mike Jendrzejczyk, an Asia expert in the Washington office of Human Rights Watch. "But we'll have to see if China makes any significant reservations to the treaty and how strongly they will enforce its provisions."
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EU presses China on human rights, Tibet
(1-23-01)
BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) - The European Union expressed concern Tuesday about China's failure to tackle alleged human rights abuses, including its frequent use of the death penalty and its policies in Tibet.
"The European Union remains much concerned at the lack of progress in a number of (human rights) areas," the EU said in a statement published on the Web site of its current president, Sweden.
The concerns included "continuing widespread restrictions on freedom of assembly, expression and association, the violations of freedom of religion and belief, the situation of minorities, including in Tibet, and the frequent and extensive recourse to the death penalty."
The EU urged China to cooperate with international human rights bodies, reform its administrative detention system, respect prisoner rights, allow religious freedom and ease its tight control over Tibet.
The statement, approved by EU foreign ministers at a meeting in Brussels Monday, said China should stop its "patriotic education" campaign in Tibet which critics say endangers the unique Buddhist culture of the vast Himalayan region.
It also called for independent access to a young boy chosen by Tibet's exiled ruler, the Dalai Lama, as the new Panchen Lama, the second highest rank in Tibetan Buddhism.
Beijing has promoted its own choice for the post and the whereabouts of the Dalai Lama's 11-year-old candidate remain unknown. Many Tibetans regard Beijing's candidate as an impostor.
Pro-Tibetan activists said the EU statement did not go far enough in its criticism of China.
In a press release, the International Tibet Support Network -- comprising about 100 pro-Tibet groups -- urged EU governments to back a resolution condemning China's record at a meeting of the U.N. Commission for Human Rights in Geneva this spring.
"The worsening situation in Tibet over the last three years has shown us that dialogue is not enough," said Alison Reynolds, co-chair of the Network's steering committee.
China resents what it sees as outside meddling in its domestic affairs. It denies human rights abuses in Tibet, where it says Beijing rule has brought a big rise in living standards.
It accuses the Dalai Lama, who fled his homeland for India after Chinese troops invaded in 1959, of "splittist" activities. Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, says he wants autonomy for Tibet within China, rather than outright independence.
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China Moves To Ratify Rights Pact
by John Leicester (Associated Press, Jan. 22, 2001)
BEIJING (AP) - Chinese leaders told U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that China aims to ratify a key international human rights pact in the next 2 1/2 months, Annan's spokeswoman said Monday.
News of China's plans comes as the government seeks to keep human rights abuses from sinking Beijing's bid to host the 2008 Olympics. It also precedes the annual meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, where China wages a yearly battle to avoid scrutiny of its civil liberties' record.
During three days of meetings that ended Monday, Chinese officials clarified a timetable for ratifying the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, said Annan's spokeswoman, Marie Okabe.
The officials told Annan that the covenant ``might be or would be ratified during the first quarter by the parliament, and possibly in March,'' Okabe said. ``He was reassured of that and welcomed that.''
U.N. officials, foreign governments and human rights groups have long urged China to ratify the treaty, which it signed in 1997. China also has yet to ratify another key pact, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which it signed in 1998.
Together, the covenants lay down guarantees for civil liberties whose frequent neglect in China have drawn criticism from rights groups worldwide.
One alleged target of recent human rights abuses has been the banned Falun Gong meditation sect. On Monday, China's government braced for Lunar New Year protests by Falun Gong followers, warning in state media that demonstrators would be punished harshly as ``enemies of the people.''
``Like a rat crossing the street that everyone shouts out to squash, they will suffer serious legal sanctions and ultimately receive the shameful fate of failure,'' the Beijing Daily newspaper said.
Front-page editorials in state newspapers accused Falun Gong founder Li Hongzhi of political ambitions and said his calls to protest the ban were an evil plot to destabilize China.
``Obsessed'' Falun Gong followers must realize that an ``extremely brutal, extremely evil criminal intent'' lies behind the protests, said the Communist Party's flagship newspaper, People's Daily.
Okabe said there was less reported progress on the political rights treaty, though Chinese officials told Annan that work on the pact was continuing.
China is keenly aware that its image as a human rights transgressor helped doom Beijing's bid in 1993 to host the 2000 Olympics.
With International Olympic Committee inspectors due in Beijing next month, China's persecuted dissident community has urged the government to free political prisoners. The Olympic committee will choose the host city in July.
Ratification of the pact in March could also boost China's position at the annual meeting of the 53-nation U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, which opens March 19. For most of the past decade, China has expended successful but embarrassing efforts to fend off censure of its rights record.
Annan capped his trip with a meeting Monday with Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
In particular, Annan said he sought help from Beijing for U.N. peacekeeping operations. China's participation in peacekeeping has been limited despite its 2.5-million-member army, and Annan said he mentioned several areas where Beijing could help.
The official Xinhua News Agency reported Jiang as saying that China ``is satisfied'' with Annan's work - a possible boost for Annan should he seek a second five-year term as secretary general at year's end.
``The Chinese government will continue to support him,'' Jiang was quoted as saying.
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Chinese official stresses religious freedom
(UPI, January 19, 2001)
BEIJING, Jan. 19 (UPI) -- China's constitutionally mandated religious freedoms allow for the safeguarding of national sovereignty as well as protection of the human rights of believers, a Chinese official said.
According to a report Friday from the state-run Xinhua news agency, Li Ruihuan, chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said China would stick to the principles of respecting the freedom of religious belief and religious groups running religious affairs independently.
Li, a member of the Political Bureau Standing Committee of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, was speaking to a seminar of leaders of religious groups in China, arranged to mark the coming Chinese lunar New Year.
He said that religions can be adapted to the socialists system if the tenets concerning religion in the Constitution are followed. Li also praised those from religious circles as patriotic religious believers seeking unity and progress and added that they had contributed to the maintenance of social stability.
According to Xinhua, Li credited those leaders with helping China reaching some of the advancements it has made in recent years.
But China's relationship with religions groups has not been entirely positive. Chinese officials have raised international concern with their crackdown on the quasi-religious Falun Gong group, whose members are forbidden to practice their combination of meditation and exercise. Falun members often do their exercises in public in protest of the official censorship. Other religions, notably Roman Catholicism, have chafed as China installed its own local leaders to oversee the religion in China rather than accepting leaders sent in by the church hierarchy.
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Last Chinese Bishop Installed Before Church Forced Underground Dies
("Religion News Service," January 12, 2001)
VATICAN CITY (RNS) -- Bishop Matthias Tuan In-min, the last Chinese prelate installed as a bishop before China's Communist regime forced the Roman Catholic Church underground, has died in Beijing. He was 92.
The Asian Catholic news agency OCAN said Tuan, bishop of Wanhsien in central China, died Wednesday (Jan. 10). He had been hospitalized since August, the agency said.
Pope Pius XII named Tuan a bishop on June 9, 1949, shortly before communist forces established the Republic of China. The regime outlawed religious observances, imprisoned many priests, nuns and laity and closed Catholic institutions.
Tuan was the last bishop regularly consecrated before the persecutions began. In 1957, the government established the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which is independent of the Vatican and ordains its own bishops.
OCAN said Tuan's assistant, Bishop Coadjutor Joseph Hsu Zhihsuan has taken over the direction of the diocese, which includes tens of thousands of Catholics, who practice their faith in private.
Pope John Paul II invited both Tuan and Hsu to attend the Synod of Asian Bishops held at the Vatican in 1988, but the Chinese government refused them exit visas. The bishops left two seats empty at their meetings to mark the absences of the Chinese prelates.
Tuan, who spoke English, French, Italian and Latin, communicated directly with John Paul by telephone and facsimile, and they exchanged greetings on each other's birthday each year.
Following a funeral service Monday (Jan. 15), the prelate will be cremated and his ashes kept at the Church of Longbo near Wanhsien, OCAN said.
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Hong Kong Catholic Schools Charged with Fraud
(CNW News, January 11, 2001)
HONG KONG, Jan. 11, 01 (CWNews.com/Fides) - Catholic officials in Hong Kong have rejected claims by the government that the Church owes hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent for school buildings.
"The Catholic Church is exempt from paying rent for school buildings," said Hong Kong diocesan delegate for education Alice Woo about a commentary published recently in the Tung Fong (Oriental Daily News) which said that the Catholic Church owes the government of the Special Administrative Region US$128,000 rent for school buildings used for "religious activities."
Leading members of the Church in Hong Kong fear the claim is a first step prompted by Beijing towards taking control of schools and pushing Catholics out of education in the former British colony.
On the basis of education regulations set during the time of British rule, Catholic schools in Hong Kong use public buildings. The Tung Fong commentary accuses the Hong Kong Diocese of fraud against the local government by using the school structures for religious services without paying rent, while other organizations need to pay rent when using public property for their own purposes. The article says that because the Church uses the campus for activity not strictly educational, it must pay rent.
According to education regulations, school supervisors or principals may decide if they should ask for the full fee or partial fee from the tenant when the school campus is rented out. The Catholic Church is the sponsoring body of the school, not a tenant.
Father Stephen Chan, a Catholic school supervisor and ecclesiastical adviser of the local Justice and Peace Commission, said that religious activities are a part of education and bring a contribution of charity and morality to society. The Franciscan father said that "suppressing this contribution would render society only more materialistic, lacking formation in spirituality and humanity."
"Every time the Church opens a new school," said Father Thomas Law, another supervisor, "she pays the government a set sum."
However the Oriental Daily News accuses the Church of failing to live up to its fame as a moral leader. "Three and a half years after the handover of Hong Kong, the Catholic Church contributes much to society. It has become a moral force for Hong Kong people. For this reason they have high expectations that it will continue to be a model of morality."
About half the schools in Hong Kong are run by Catholics or Protestants. The Hong Kong Catholic Church Directory 2000 reports that there are 323 Catholics schools in the territory, ranging from pre-school to high school, serving 289,391 pupils, of whom 18,984 (6.56%) are Catholics.
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China Planning Own Internet
BEIJING (AP, Jan. 6) - China is moving ahead with plans to build its ``very own information superhighway,'' a second-generation Internet-like network designed for China's government and industry, the government's Xinhua News Agency said Saturday.
At a signing ceremony Saturday in Beijing, several unidentified companies agreed to form the China C-Net Strategic Alliance, which will develop the new network, the report said.
China is one of the fastest growing Internet markets in the world. The government estimates that the number of Web users has more than doubled in the last year, to about 20 million from 9 million, the Beijing Evening News said Saturday.
``In the new century, the Chinese people will build our very own information superhighway,'' the Xinhua report declared. ``The current one by itself has too many faults and is incapable of satisfying the needs of the Chinese government and companies as they enter the digital age.''
New software and hardware are already being developed for the system, the report said. It didn't give a time for start of construction or completion of the project.
The new system will be safer, faster and handle a greater volume of information than the existing one, the report said. It will rely upon technology now being developed abroad for a planned international upgrade of the Internet, plus technology developed exclusively for China.
The report didn't say if foreigners would be allowed to use the new system. It also didn't say how compatible C-Net will be with the existing Internet or future international systems.
Analysts have warned that China may try to build a ``Great Fire Wall'' in cyberspace, cutting itself off from the rest of the world to shield its citizens from information deemed subversive.
The communist government routinely blocks Web sites of foreign news organizations and groups it opposes, such as democracy activists and the outlawed Falun Gong sect
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NW China province publishes annals of religion
(China News, Jan. 4, 2001)
An annals of religion of northwest China's Qinghai province has been published recently.
According to a local cultural official, the compilation of the annals started in 1987 and is part of the Qinghai provincial annals.
The 310,000 word annals cover the history, activities and development of Buddhism, Islam, Christian and Taoism in the province.
At the same time, the book offers readers rich knowledge on the country's policies on religious issues as well as the province's experience in handling diversified religious activities.
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Crackdown at Christmas Dims Holiday for Chinese
by Philip P. Pan ("Washington Post," December 18, 2000)
WENZHOU, China Hu Saiwang headed home earlier than usual this year, hoping to celebrate Christmas with family and friends in a little white church his congregation built six years ago in their village outside this bustling city on China's southeastern coast.
During the long journey from Hunan province, the 22-year-old migrant worker conjured up images from celebrations of Christmas past--his Protestant neighbors singing hymns, sharing fruit and candy, and reading the Bible in a building so austere that not a single cross or painting adorned its walls.
But when Hu arrived in the village of Zhong, the church was gone. Only a pile of broken concrete, loose bricks and splintered lumber remained.
It didn't take long to find out what had happened. A few weeks ago, a group of Communist Party and government officials showed up and declared the church illegal because it operated outside the control of China's state-run religious organizations. They seized the congregation's organ and audio system and then, as police stood guard, started swinging sledgehammers, stopping only after the building was flattened.
"It's such a shame, because we worked so hard for this," Hu said, standing in the rubble of the altar. "In our hearts we're all hurting. . . . But there's nothing we can do."
China's security services routinely crack down on unauthorized religious activity before Christmas. But officials here in Wenzhou--a city known for its large Christian population--are engaged in a campaign that residents say is the most destructive since controls on religion were loosened in the late 1970s at the end of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.
The countryside here is dotted with the ruins of churches the government has torn down or blown up in recent weeks. Other churches, both Protestant and Roman Catholic, have been seized and converted into schools and recreation centers; one church has been transformed into a training center for Communist Party officials.
Buddhist and Taoist temples and shrines for ancestral worship have been targeted as well, and residents say authorities are also intensifying efforts to restrict proselytizing and religious gatherings in private homes.
China says it guarantees freedom of religion, as long as people worship in one of its "patriotic" or state-controlled religious institutions. But many believers refuse to submit to the government's authority, choosing to worship secretly in homes or underground churches. Others practice their faiths more openly in unauthorized churches or temples, hoping local officials will turn a blind eye.
China has demolished churches in Wenzhou and elsewhere before, but not on such a large scale. The state-run media have reported that more than 1,500 churches, temples and shrines in the region have been shut down or destroyed since the crackdown began in early November.
"We don't have anywhere to go now," said Hu Shimei, 62, who helped build the church that was destroyed in Zhong. "But we'll celebrate Christmas at home, because we are still faithful."
Wenzhou officials refused requests for interviews, but they have made no secret of their campaign against "illegal religious activity locations and feudal superstitions."
The crackdown comes as China struggles to contain a nationwide religious revival that some officials believe threatens their authority. Underground churches and unorthodox sects, such as the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, offer a source of moral values independent of the Communist Party, and they are gaining in popularity in part because Communist ideology is losing its appeal.
Nowhere is this truer than in Wenzhou, a freewheeling, prospering trading port with a history of missionary activity and immigration to the West. The city is sometimes called China's Jerusalem, because officials say that as many as one in 10 of the region's 7 million residents are Christians. Christian groups say the figure is much higher.
Wenzhou pioneered experiments with capitalism in the early 1980s, well before the rest of China, and private enterprise now dominates its economy. Beijing has applauded such growth, but it is also wary because the city's newly rich entrepreneurs are financing a boom in church construction.
The government has tried to crack down on illegal religious activity in Wenzhou before. Last year, police destroyed five underground Roman Catholic churches and arrested several leaders, including an 81-year-old archbishop. But the current campaign has claimed churches that local officials had tolerated for decades in some cases.
For example, officials in nearby Qiaotou township had been threatening for years to tear down four illegal Protestant churches. Residents say authorities would usually shut them down and allow them to reopen when the political environment eased, but this year, all four were destroyed or converted into recreation centers.
The largest, the two-story Wangtian church built in 1982, was destroyed two weeks ago. Residents said a crowd of 70 worshipers, many of them crying, watched from behind a line of police officers as workers dismantled the church, tore down its cross and defaced an inscription from the Book of Psalms on its facade because officials considered it superstitious.
"They say we have freedom of religion, but why do they do this to a church? Where's the freedom?" asked a congregational leader who asked not to be identified because police have tried to arrest him. "I don't know what we're going to do for Christmas now. It's a dangerous time. They say we can't even gather in someone's house, but we'll still do it. We have faith in Jesus."
He and other members of the congregation said they refused to register their church with the government because the Communist Party would require the names of all members and would monitor all church functions. Their faith, they said, is incompatible with party control.
"The party can supervise our bodies and our minds," said one member. "But we can't let it supervise our souls."
Members of other illegal churches objected to fees they would have to pay the government. In still other villages, there are longstanding rivalries between the "patriotic" and underground churches that go beyond issues of party control.
In Zhong, for example, some residents refuse to worship in the "patriotic" church because they feel it doesn't interpret the Bible strictly enough. They believe the official church, located just down the street, pressured the local government to demolish their church because it was drawing away worshipers.
Other Christians caught in the crackdown said they were willing to submit to government control to save their churches. In nearby Douxi village, for example, residents said they have been trying to register their church ever since it was built in the mid-1980s. But two weeks ago, local officials showed up with workers who removed the wooden cross on the church and painted a red star, a symbol of China's Communist Party, above the front entrance. The church became an elementary school.
"We built this church with our own money, and they just stole it. It's so hard to bear, we all cried," said Hu Songliu, 62, one of the congregation's leaders.
She said the village doesn't have a "patriotic" church and that the nearest one is nearly two miles away on roads that are difficult to travel by car, much less by foot. "Most of us are old. My mother-in-law is 91 and walks with a cane. How are we supposed to get there?"
Still, Hu said, the congregation would not let the loss ruin Christmas. "This is God's will. We already have the cookies, the sweets, the fruit. We'll just celebrate in someone's house," she said. "It will be crowded, but we're going to make this a great Christmas."
Residents in Longwai village also were at peace about losing their church, a small, one-room structure they built in 1986 because they refused to worship in the state church. The government smashed it to pieces at the end of November after residents turned down a chance to register it.
"We're not sad, because it's just a church. God isn't in the church. God is in our hearts. Christmas is in our hearts," said Zhen Chuanlian, 27, one of the worshipers. "They can take away the church, but they can't take away our faith."
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Fears Grow That China Will Class House Churches as Cults Authorities Urged to Determine Whether Cults are 'Harmful to Society'
by Alex Buchan ("Compass News," December 18, 2000)
LONDON (Compass) -- The Chinese government sponsored an International Symposium on Evil Cults in Beijing November 8-10 that urged local authorities not to inquire too closely into the beliefs of accused cults. Instead, authorities were encouraged to assess whether they are "harmful to society" -- a catch-all criterion that some house church leaders fear could lead to their own movements being classed as cults.
Nearly 60 academics from all over the world attended the Beijing Symposium, and it was full of predictable denunciation of the Chinese folk religious movement, Falun Gong. But it was a recommendation buried beneath academic verbiage that caught the eyes of some house church leaders: "We should not excessively debate whether it is a genuine religion or not. We should mainly view it from the angle of whether it is harmful to the society."
According to a Shanghai-based house church leader, "Every house church movement could be accused of being 'harmful to society' simply because we refuse to belong to accredited religious bodies, which leads them to say, 'You must be a cult because you are being so secretive.'"
Interestingly, many house church leaders interviewed express surprise that the government did not crack down harder this year. Said one in Xian, "It's like the government has been distracted with Falun Gong." Another in Beijing added, "In practice, many authorities are able to distinguish between a genuine Christian house church and a very unorthodox Christian sect or cult, but local police are often not so discerning."
At the same time, a prominent China ministry profiled the secretive "Two Grains of Rice" (Er-Liang-Liang) Christian cult. The ministry released its findings to Compass on the understanding they would not be named.
The sect, also known as the Blessed Group (Meng-Fu Pai), or the Disciples, is growing rapidly in the provinces of Hebei, Sichuan, Shaanxi, Shangdong and Yunnan. Estimates start at 100,000 members and up. Members are put on starvation rations and told to pray not to Christ but to the founder of the movement, San-Shu, who claims to forgive sins.
Members also undertake dangerous fire baptisms and refuse medical treatment. Various provincial governments outlawed the movement in 1995. The sect teaches that military rebellion against the government is legitimate, referring to police as the "great locusts" of Joel 1:6.
The research of the China ministry makes it clear how hard it would be to classify the "Two Grains of Rice" sect as an orthodox house church movement, however much Scripture may be quoted back and forth.
Started in 1982 by a man called Ji San Bao, he changed his name to San-Shu after becoming a Christian. Then he quickly began to propound heretical viewpoints. Citing the New Testament Scripture 1 John 4:2-3, he claimed to be "the second manifestation of Christ in the flesh." He married again, to a woman called Hsu-Shu, who claims to be the living manifestation of the Holy Spirit.
Members of the group must pray in the name of these two leaders. San-Shu claims that only he has the right to forgive sins. Followers must write down all their sins and pass them to him for forgiveness. If he decides to put them into an "ark of the covenant," then they are forgiven.
San-Shu also claims to determine when the coming of the "kingdom of Zion" will take place, and proclaims that the new Zion is in fact the Chinese city of Xian. Stories of miracles abound surrounding his ministry, though his power comes also from the fact that his disciples sell all they have and deed their property to his movement. However, he is believed to be under arrest at the moment.
The nickname "Two Grains of Rice" comes from a doctrine unique to the group. They link the miracle of Jesus feeding the 5,000 from two loaves and five fish in the Gospel of John, chapter six, with the widow's "handful of flour and a little oil" in the Old Testament verse in I Kings 17. They claim these items are the "bread of life," and thus each meal should be a kind of miraculous feeding.
So a person should eat no more than two grains of rice at each mealtime to experience a miracle of multiplication. If a person eats more than two grains, it is a sign they lack faith and have not repented. Not surprisingly, there have been cases of starvation and severe malnutrition among many of the followers.
Another peculiar doctrine concerns baptism. San-Shu takes the words of John the Baptist in Matthew 3:11 that "the one who comes after me ... will baptize with fire" quite literally. The rite of baptism in the cult involves passing through live flames and sometimes of throwing infants through flames.
"The cult really only flourishes among the very poor peasants that live in isolated communities, though it is also making inroads among the unemployed," a house church leader in Xian commented. "The challenge is to give these cult members some real biblical teaching, and the whole cult is organized to deny us access to bring this teaching."
Yet it is remarkable that the Chinese house church movements have remained largely orthodox in their Christian teaching, despite a repressive government policy which makes the teaching of the Scriptures a hazardous activity. Bibles are still in short supply in many rural locations, and Bible teachers have to conduct their seminars in secret.
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Places of worship razed in Chinese crackdown Campaign focuses on heavily Christian city of Wenzhou
by Frank Langfitt ("Baltimore Sun," Dec 15 2000)
BEIJING - Members of at least 40 Protestant congregations on China's southeastern coast are looking to celebrate Christmas elsewhere this year after local officials destroyed their churches and places of worship.
The demolition campaign is part of a crackdown that has claimed not only churches but also hundreds of privately built local temples for folk worship in Zhejiang Province, Chinese officials and state-run newspapers say.
Most of the destruction appears to have occurred in the past month. However, the Information Center for Human Rights & Democracy, a Hong Kong group, says about 1,200 temples and churches have been demolished or shuttered in the province since late 1999.
Chinese officials say the buildings were targeted because they were never approved by the government, which is trying to control the spread of homegrown religion and other practices it sees as potential threats to its monopoly on power.
For instance, at Zhejiang's Yangshan Temple, which was blown up earlier this week, mediums and fortune tellers reportedly offered to heal visitors' diseases and exorcise evil spirits.
"This is like attacking Falun Gong," said Lu Tianlei, an official with the propaganda department in Zhejiang's Wenzhou City, referring to the spiritual meditation group the Chinese government outlawed last year. The temples and churches "didn't follow the procedure of the state."
Since last year, Beijing has waged a war to destroy Falun Gong, which claims millions of adherents. Although it failed to break the group, the nationwide crackdown has led to the deaths of more than 70 members in government custody, according to the Hong Kong center.
Religion is one of the most sensitive issues for China's authoritarian regime, which permits various forms of worship - including Christianity, Taoism and Buddhism - but requires that groups register with the government and submit to official oversight.
The Communist Party, increasingly unpopular here, fears that religion could be used as a platform to challenge its already shaky legitimacy.
The recent demolition campaign focused on several areas in Zhejiang Province, particularly Wenzhou, a city of more than 6 million people known for its energetic merchant class and deep religious roots. Protestant and Catholic missionaries began converting people in Wenzhou beginning in the latter part of the 19th century when the city became a treaty port. With more than 700,000 Protestants and several hundred thousand Catholics, it has a higher percentage of Christians than any other municipality in China.
China's state-run media rarely - if ever - publicize demolition campaigns because it only invites international condemnation. This time, though, the government gave some media a green light to report on the demolitions.
Late last month, the Wenzhou Daily reported that thousands of government employees and Communist Party cadres in Zhejiang's Ruian City demolished 28 unapproved "religious sites" and 356 small temples, occasionally using dynamite when needed.
An article in the Wenzhou Qiaoxiang newspaper ran a photo of a piece of heavy machinery tearing the roof off a yellow building that had served as a temple.
The reasons behind religious crackdowns in China are often complex. It is not entirely clear exactly what prompted this one or whether it is part of a coordinated national effort.
Joseph Kung, who chronicles the plight of China's underground Catholic Church for the Connecticut-based Cardinal Kung Foundation, attributes the recent campaign to the coming holiday season. "Every important date on the calendar - Christmas, Easter - there is always some sort of arrest, detention, blowing up of churches," Kung says. "They never fail."
Chan Kim-kwong a religious scholar and researcher in Hong Kong, thinks the demolition springs from various factors, including local officials' desire to curry favor with their provincial bosses before end-of-the-year evaluations.
Local salaries and budgets are based in part on how officials carry out certain policies, such as cracking down on unregistered places of worship. Many local governments ignore these edicts for long stretches while the offending communities operate with great autonomy.
All of the churches that were destroyed in Wenzhou, for example, had been standing for months, if not years.
"They have been turning a blind eye," says Chan. Local officials want "to show the government that they are doing something."
Demolition campaigns are not uncommon in China. Last year, government officials in coastal Fujian Province - just south of Zhejiang - dynamited and bulldozed more than 20 unregistered churches. Some were huge, expensive structures paid for with the wages of overseas Chinese who worked in garment factories and restaurants in the United States and Europe.
One church, situated near the airport outside the provincial capital, Fuzhou, stood about 80 feet high and resembled a redbrick version of the Cathedral of Notre Dame.
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Anti-Cult Association Founded in China
(XINHUA, November 13, 2000)
The China Anti-Cult Association was established in Beijing Monday, grouping renowned personnel from various circles of the country, including scientists, doctors, lawyers, religious leaders and journalists.
Cults that have run rampant in the world in recent years have become obstacles to social progress and brought tragic disaster for numerous families and individuals, according to a written proposal launching the association, which was read at the founding ceremony.
The proposal says that the Falungong and other cults pose a grave threat to social stability as they cheat and fool the masses through the worship of cult leaders and the evil theories they have fabricated, which are strongly opposed by governments and people of the world.
To safeguard social stability and maintain order, the Chinese government has banned the Falungong cult. The move has received popular support from the people and most former Falungong practitioners have realized the evil nature of the cult.
However, there are still a handful of staunch Falungong members who wish to stage a desperate fight against the people and the government, the proposal says, adding that the purpose of setting up the association is to mobilize social forces to fight against Falungong and other cults.
At Monday's meeting, the chapter for the association was passed and leaders of the association were elected, with Zhuang Fenggan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as the president. It was decided at the meeting that a seminar on anti-cult efforts will be held in Beijing in December this year.
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Police: China Detains 30 Protestants
(AP, October 20, 2000)
BEIJING (AP) - Authorities in central China have detained 30 members of a Protestant group that defied the government by worshipping outside the state-approved church, a police official said Friday.
The 30 were detained by police in Henan province's Jiaozuo city on Sept. 14, a New York-based group, Human Rights in China, said. The group said one of the detained - a 19-year-old it identified as Liu Hongtao - had died from mistreatment in custody on Oct. 16.
Backing up this report, another rights group on Thursday also said a 19-year-old Protestant died in custody in Henan, although it spelt his name slightly differently - Liu Haitao. The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said he died Oct.16.
A Jiaozuo city police official, reached by telephone, confirmed that about 30 members of the China Gospel Sect were detained in September, but he refused to say what has happened to them since.
Asked if a 19-year-old had died in custody from mistreatment, he shouted ``nonsense'' and refused to answer more questions or give his name.
Other Chinese officials said the government has banned the China Gospel Sect as a cult. A Henan police official in charge of religious affairs who declined to give his name said cult activities were common in rural areas around Jiaozuo.
None of those detained have been released, Human Rights in China said, quoting Zhang Dawei, whom it described as the overseas spokesman for China's underground church movement.
China's communist government forbids worship outside state-sanctioned institutions. But over the past 20 years, as market reforms have eclipsed Marxist ideology and social controls have loosened, religious activity has soared.
Many have turned to underground churches, frequently called ``house'' churches because followers meet in private homes. They are more charismatic and evangelical than the official non-denominational Protestant church.
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Chinese Christian Reportedly Beat
(Associated Press, October 19, 2000)
BEIJING (AP) - A Chinese Protestant arrested while worshipping at an illegal service has died in a central China jail after being beaten and then denied medical care, a rights group reported Thursday.
Police detained Liu Haitong in a raid on a private home serving as an underground church in Henan province's Xiayi county on Sept. 4, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.
Beaten by police and left weakened by the prison's inadequate food and poor hygiene, Liu began vomiting and developed a high fever, the center said. It reported that the 19-year-old died in the county jail on Oct. 16 after police refused to provide medical care.
The report could not be independently verified. A man who answered the phone at the jail refused to comment on the case, saying such information could be given out only in person.
But Chinese authorities have in recent months renewed a 2-year-old campaign against people worshipping outside the state-backed Catholic and non-denominational Protestant churches.
Henan has been at the center of the crackdown. The province is home to thriving Protestant house churches - so called because they are often private homes - and the movement is serviced by evangelical preachers, foreigners among them.
Henan Protestants who informed the Hong Kong group about Liu's death blamed police and demanded a stop to such repression, the report said without identifying its sources.
The crackdown, however, is likely to intensify following decisions made last week at an annual meeting of the ruling Communist Party's elite, the center said.
Immediately after the meeting, Public Security Minister Jia Chunwang ordered police to target members of cults, separatists and ``religious extremists.'' The latter phrase, the center said, is code for people worshipping outside official churches.
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China seen delaying ratification of UN rights pact
by Paul Eckert (Reuters, Oct. 18, 2000)
BEIJING, Oct 18 (Reuters) - China has dropped hints it might ratify a key U.N. human rights treaty this month, but foreign analysts said on Wednesday there was no firm evidence Beijing was ready to take the long-awaited step.
State media and the Chinese Foreign Ministry have said the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights would be on the agenda of China's parliament next week.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao told reporters on Tuesday the October 23-31 session of the Standing Committee of China's legislature, the National People's Congress (NPC), would deliberate the covenant.
Three years after China signed the economic and social covenant, Zhu told a news conference time was now "ripe" for ratification. He said it was up to the NPC whether China would seek exemptions to certain provisions of the rights treaty.
But diplomats said recent rounds of regular bilateral rights talks between China and foreign governments had produced no assurances Beijing was ready to ratify the treaty.
MAXIMUM MILEAGE
In a sign ratification was not an immediate prospect, an NPC spokesman told Reuters the treaties would be reviewed by "related committees," but was not on the Standing Committee agenda.
Human rights experts have been sceptical of a quick breakthrough, recalling the lengthy process before Beijing signed the economic and social covenant in October 1997 and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights a year later.
Sophia Woodman, research director for the U.S.-based group Human Rights in China, said she would welcome early unconditional ratification of both treaties, but that deliberation did not signify impending implementation.
She said Beijing would probably seek "maximum mileage" in diplomacy and public relations as it had in the signing process.
"They said 'we're about to sign, we're about to sign' and that went on for years and years," she said from Hong Kong.
Signing the covenants, releasing high-profile political prisoners and hosting visits by U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson won China kudos and helped it fend off international criticism of its human rights record for several years.
GOOD NEWS NEEDED
Again under fire for its crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual group and for other religious and media curbs, Beijing might want to offer up some good news on human rights.
"It is widely expected that the ratification would take place on the margins of some big event," said a Western diplomat.
China will hold a summit with the European Union next week in Beijing and President Jiang Zemin is expected to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Brunei next month.
But Jean Felix-Paganon, a senior French diplomat who headed a EU delegation in rights talks in Beijing last month, told reporters afterwards that the EU team got "the usual answer on the difficulties of the ratification process."
Canada hosted Chinese diplomats for human rights dialogue last week, but neither side has made public any dramatic results.
Analysts of China's involvement with U.N. human rights activities since the 1989 Tiananmen massacre say the main aim of Beijing's engagement has been to evade scrutiny, maintain its definition of human rights and uphold the principle of non-intervention in its affairs.
China argues that state sovereignty takes precedence over human rights and collective rights trump individual liberties. It also maintains that providing food, clothing and shelter for 1.23 billion people is more important that granting political rights.
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ANALYSIS-China accents the negative in security outlook
by Paul Eckert (Reuters, Oct. 17, 2000)
BEIJING, Oct 17 (Reuters) - China has served up a bleak security vision of the world's last major Communist state navigating a sea of treacherous outsiders and Taiwan separatists.
A defence "white paper" issued by the cabinet on Monday saw threats everywhere -- U.S. "hegemonism," a newly assertive Japan, leaders in Taiwan who won't meet Beijing's terms and Southeast Asians who don't respect China's territorial claims.
"Many things in the world are not going China's way and it's very frustrating for Beijing," said a Western military diplomat.
Beijing is alarmed by events since its last defence "white paper" was issued in mid-1998, when a warming of ties with the United States saw China wax confident on the world stage.
U.S. power is at the heart of most new developments which worry China, including the revision of Japanese-U.S. security treaty guidelines, NATO's eastward expansion and war in Kosovo, as well as U.S. proposals to build missile defence systems to protect U.S. forces and allies.
"In the last year or so, the way they see the post-Cold War global situation, security and strategic environment panning out is bleaker than it used to be," said a Western diplomat.
CRUEL WORLD STARTS AT HOME
China identified its biggest threat as the United States, slamming U.S.-proposed missile defence systems, its calls to amend the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and the Senate's refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
But many of China's deepest worries originate from places other than Washington, including the latest blow in Yugoslavia, which came too recently to make the "white paper."
The fall of Yugoslav ally Slobodan Milosevic resurrected the spectre of people power that China had vanquished violently in 1989 -- even as other Communist regimes collapsed.
Beijing also fears that NATO's intervention in the Kosovo conflict, citing humanitarian concerns and bypassing the U.N. Security Council, set an ugly precedent for foreign involvement in its own messy affairs in Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan.
Closer to home, Taipei has elected a president who was a lifelong champion of Taiwan independence, and the Falun Gong movement has survived a brutal 16-month-old ban.
Amid such embarrassments, the grim security treatise "may have as much to do with what's going on inside China as it does posturing vis-a-vis the external world," a second diplomat said.
China's military has a clear interest in highlighting threats as political leaders draw up a new national five-year plan, and set spending priorities, for 2001-05.
AS EVER, TAIWAN VEXES
The defence paper broke no new ground in reiterating China's threat to use "drastic force" to prevent Taiwan breaking away or stalling on reunification talks.
Experts say China is only slowly acquiring the capability to back up its threats with real force.
"The military balance begins to shift -- and I emphasise 'begins' -- in China's favour around 2010," said Robert Karniol, Asia/Pacific editor of Jane's Defence Weekly.
China's has offset weaknesses in amphibious capabilities and air power projection that make it unable to invade Taiwan with a steady build-up of ballistic missiles across the strait.
But Karniol said Western air campaigns against Iraq in 1991 and Yugoslavia in 1999 caused far less military damage than advertised -- results that would be "heartening to the Taiwanese" by underscoring the limits of missile warfare.
"Certainly, sustained missile attacks could generate damage in Taiwan, but unless the Chinese start targetting specifically civilian populations, their effect on Taiwan's military capability should be fairly limited," he said.
WARMING TOWARD MULTILATERALISM?
Defence analysts were sceptical about China's published defence budget of $14.6 billion and said Chinese assertions that its spending is a fraction of other countries ignores purchasing power differences and Beijing's murky accounting practices.
But many commentators saw promise in one truly new aspect of the 2000 "white paper": language endorsing multilateral security approaches, such as the ASEAN Regional Forum and the Shanghai Five grouping of China, Russia and central Asian states.
"As a Western liberal democrat, I am truly encouraged by this," said the military diplomat, who noted that Beijing had long insisted on bilateral forums to deal with conflicts.
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Open Doors Challenges Claims of Religious Freedom in China
by Lori Arnold ("Christian Times," October 10, 2000)
SANTA ANA (October 3, 2000) - When millions of Chinese evangelicals gather for services in their homeland, the worship is rarely music to the ears. Forget the last minute sound checks, voice warm-ups, or instrument tuning. This worship is music to the heart.
Anything louder would be to risk arrest, heavy fines, and beatings.
If anyone doubts the danger, just ask Terry Madison, president of Open Doors USA, an international outreach with offices in Orange County that has, for 45 years, supported the persecuted church oversees.
According to Madison, China's tolerance for Christianity has blown with the wind over the past two-plus decades in which Open Doors has had workers within the nation's borders. Although the Chinese Community Party openly supports state-sponsored churches, Madison warns that Americans not be duped.
"American Christians have gone to China and come back speaking well of religious freedom in China, that everything is okay," said Madison, adding that visiting dignitaries and religious leaders are given tours of the official church, called the Three Self Patriotic Movement.
Three Self refers to self supporting, self perpetuating and self governing.
"They come back and endorse what the government is doing there," Madison said. "The house church movement is called a cult by the government because it doesn't tow the government line."
Concerned over recent reports that China was relaxing its policy on churches and worship, Madison sent out an advisory earlier this summer warning that such articles only paint half the picture. Persecution among independent churches, he said, runs rampant. This summer alone, the world press has reported numerous incidents targeting the underground house church.
Late in August, three Chinese Americans were among 130 arrested by the Chinese government. The Americans-Asians who belong to Chinese Vineyard Fellowship Church in Los Altos, Calif.-were released two day days later. The Americans were in China for a two-week mission trip supporting the China Fangcheng Church, an evangelical house church that boasts more than 500,000 members. Less than a week later, a group of Roman Catholics were arrested and their pastor severely beaten.
"It goes to prove what we've been saying all along, there is not absolute religious freedom," Madison said. "It's a large country. There is a modest openness to religious freedom in some areas. In other places there is tremendous prosecution and as time changes, those boundaries keep changing.
"Almost anytime, anywhere you go, day or night, some group of Christians would be arrested, beaten or detained."
Madison said the problem is especially troublesome in rural areas, where authorities often use the fines as a major income source for their own budgets.
"It's become a growth industry," he said.
COMPLICATED CAUSE
On the surface, Madison said, Communist China has forged a more tolerant policy toward religion, a spiritual aspect of society that was virtually banned during the Cultural Evolution era of former chairman Mao Zedong. After the 1989 Tianamen Square uprising, however, the CCP carefully monitors religious activity, both inside and outside of the church.
According to Madison-a self-described student of China since 1968 who has made more than 40 trips to the Asian country and lived there for more than two years-the government doesn't permit worship outside of the recognized church and its designated hours. Teaching children about the faith before the age of 18 is also forbidden. Preaching excessively about the Lord's Second Coming is also frowned upon.
"They do exercise a lot of control over those pastors," Madison said of the Three Self church.
Despite the restrictions, Madison said many believers choose to participate in the state-sponsored church because it is often easier to secure concessions, such as programming, from the government. Although worship and teachings are restricted, Madison said the state-sponsored church is filled with sincere and committed evangelical Christians.
"There are wonderful Christians and evangelical pastors and preachers in the Three Self Patriotic Movement," Madison said. "These are people who love the Lord. In America, we seem to side with one side or the other. We support the Christians who have chosen to worship in the Three Self Patriotic Movement."
SPIRITED DEFIANCE
For those believers unwilling to bend to government authority, the house church has been their refuge.
"Over time, the body of Christ, real Christians over there, couldn't operate above ground," he said. "The body of Christ is not the building anyway. The church has survived because it's gone underground. It's not only survived, but is growing and thriving through miraculous ways. The Holy Spirit is never constrained by government authority. It was growing even when we couldn't see it."
According to Madison, an estimated 60 million to 80 million evangelicals belong to the underground house church, up from one million in 1949. As many as 15,000 to 20,000 people convert to Christianity daily.
"If you look at that in America, we don't have the numbers," Madison said. "One of the greatest revivals in our generation, certainly in the last century, is the church of revival in China, in the midst of communism. We've been astonished. Growth has not stopped."
OPENING THE DOORS
Using a vast network of sources, including some high-placed insiders, Open Doors supports Chinese evangelicals through a two-prong approach by providing biblical resources and sponsoring mini-training workshops that Madison has dubbed Seminar on the Run. To lessen the risk of getting caught, volunteer instructions will lead a two- to three-week session then leave.
"They sneak in and run home," he said.
Last year, Open Door supplied more than two million books, including one million Bibles. Other supplied resources include commentaries, hymnals and Christian living devotions.
"We have developed 25 years of trust-making relationships that have served us well," he said. "It's wonderful how the Lord has people at all levels. Even in China there are Christians in high places who love the Lord.
The resources are vital to believers, Madison said, since many converts are poor farmers and peasants who have no access to Bibles.
"For them to come up with a Bible would be very difficult," he said. "They would have to travel too far, if they knew where to look."
Before supplying materials, Madison said Open Doors is careful to research the needs, making sure the resources match those on the receiving end. Pastors are given appropriate study Bibles for their work and children are given Bibles they can understand.
"We don't do dump-and-run Bible distribution," he said.
Recognizing that new Chinese converts come from a wide variety of backgrounds, including Confucius, Madison said a major challenge for the house church is helping believers learn how to practice Christianity without incorporating non-Christian elements.
"We have seen all kinds of aberrations that have nothing to do with the Bible," he said. "We have to teach the whole counsel of the Lord and teach it in a systematic way."
It can be a daunting task given than many pastors oversee fellowships of 100,000 to 800,000.
"The pastors just can't keep up with the discipleship," he said. "Many of them haven't been trained themselves."
Although many trust their fellowships to what Madison called "sub-leaders," the workload is immense. Even the training sessions are intense, running from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.
"Our people come back and they can't believe it," he said. "These people are like dry sponges. They just can't soak up enough."
Among the biggest needs in China, Madison said, is prayer. Many young, college-age people, disillusioned by the offerings of the Community Party, are looking for something, an ideology that can become their life's work. Madison believes they will find what they need in Christianity and the house churches.
"There is this wonderful energy and, in the middle of this, we have persecution," he said.
The issues of modern-day China are not too far removed from those of the New Testament church, Madison said.
"They didn't have a lot of fancy air conditioned churches," he said. "They were meeting in homes, breaking bread. In areas where Christianity is in the minority, believers often find their reward outside of a building. They are so beleaguered and set upon by the larger society that they find encouragement and enjoyment in just getting together."
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The Catholic Church Worries China
by Philip Bowring ("International Herald Tribune," October 11, 2000)
HONG KONG - China's strongly worded attack on the Pope's Oct. 1 canonization of 120 Chinese and foreign missionary saints is reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution. It suggests real concern in Beijing about any beliefs which the state cannot control. Such language may also indicate that the leadership's control of the propaganda machinery is now weak. This fear of beliefs was already obvious in the case of the Falun Gong movement, which is proving more widespread and persistent than could have been imagined two years ago, in the face of a barrage of propaganda against it and the widespread arrest of adherents. But the Falun Gong, despite having a leader resident in the United States, is hard to characterize as anything other than Chinese in its origin and practices.
The Catholic saints on the other hand can be portrayed as criminal foreign missionaries or their Chinese dupes. Xenophobia is the preferred weapon against the adherents of the papacy.
It is of course quite true that Christian missionary activity, especially in the latter part of the 19th century, went hand in hand with Western imperialism, treaty ports and the humiliation of China.
The Western traders and government representatives may have had little personally in common with the missionaries who suffered much discomfort as well as death to bring Christ, schools and public health to China.
But both were part of the same Western expansionism and treated as such during the Boxer rebellion, the populist anti-foreign and anti-Christian movement suppressed by an international force in 1900. Most of the new saints lost their lives to the Boxers, who have mostly been seen as a patriotic movement.
Some Catholics might question the Vatican's wisdom in canonizing so many victims of Chinese patriotism. However, the propaganda goes way beyond linking missionaries to imperialism. According to the current propaganda, the Christian martyrs were not just misguided agents of imperialism. They were positively and personally very evil.
Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, describes St. Albericus Crescitelli (1863-1900) as a serial rapist who violated wives prior to their weddings, and as an evil money lender to impoverished peasants.
St. Auguste Chapdeleine (1814-56) employed bandits to spread the gospel, Xinhua says. Other new saints are denounced as smugglers, traders in Chinese relics and so on. The Vatican's canonization investigators may sometimes be too forgiving of saints as well as other sinners, but did they really overlook so many mortal sins?
Islam may have no Pope claiming universality, but it too is under attack by China's centralizing, ethnic-Han state. China's use of phrases such as ''Muslim extremists'' and ''fundamentalists'' are often accepted without query in the West and Russia where knee-jerk anti-Muslim sentiment finds a ready press.
But in China, as in Chechnya, the words are a handy misnomer for what are in effect nationalist movements which just happen to be among adherents of Islam. Turkic peoples of China's Xinjiang Province plant bombs in Urumqi in protest against Han colonization of what they regard as their country, not to promote radical Islam. Yet for Beijing to admit this would be to admit how deep is the racial divide between the Turkic peoples and their Han overlords.
The problem for Beijing is not necessarily of religion or spiritual concepts per se. The fear of the leadership is that as the opiate of Communism wears off, other beliefs of all sorts, -spiritual, secular, ethnic nationalist - will erode its authority.
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Inside Beijing's New Net Rulebook The central government gives bureaucrats broad power to rein in the Net. The big question: Will it be wielded?
By Bruce Einhorn ("Business Week Online," October 10, 2000)
Got to hand it to Chinese government. Executives in the Internet industry have been hoping for months that Beijing would finally issue some clear regulations governing the Internet -- even though it has long been a given that the regs would be unreasonable and burdensome. But at least people would know what they should be doing, rather than just guessing. Transparency, that's what people wanted.
Sure enough, the regulations Beijing issued recently were predictable all right -- but they still have Net entrepreneurs spooked. The rules establish the primacy of the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), giving the bureaucracy the authority to issue licenses to all Internet content providers (ICPs). Those ICPs currently in operation have 60 days to get the official stamp of approval. But most everyone who follows the Internet in China already knew that the MII was hoping to be China's online overlord, so the fact that the government has made this official isn't big news.
TAKING NAMES. Other predictable elements in the new regs include prohibitions against spreading word of democracy, Taiwanese or Tibetan independence, or advocating religious freedom for the banned Falun Gong movement. Finally, the government also is requiring Internet companies to keep records of their users for six months and make the data available to the police should the Public Security Bureau officials demand them.
It's the last requirement that could be troublesome. Paul McKenzie, a partner with U.S. law firm Perkins Coie in Hong Kong, worries that the threat of the cops getting their hands on such information will frighten some Chinese Net surfers off the Web. "There is an inherent tension between the privacy of people using the Net and the power of authorities to regulate illegal activities," he says. As a result of this new policy, McKenzie predicts, "There is going to be a chilling effect on the use of the Internet."
A lot depends on the zeal with which regulators decide to enforce the new rules. Until now, people could make an argument that providing information over a Web site was not a "value-added telecom service," the kind that requires MII approval. But Beijing has decided that such activity amounts to a value-added service -- meaning companies need to get MII's blessing. "There is now a new layer of regulatory compliance that companies have to worry about that they didn't have to worry about before," he says. This gives MII and its related agencies "far-reaching powers if they want to exercise them."
CONTENT COPS. Not everybody is so concerned. "Regulatory issues in China are just a fact of life -- you have to deal with them," says Matt Adams, a senior associate with CS First Boston in Hong Kong. For Adams, it's logical that Beijing should try to crack down on its freewheeling Internet culture. "The Internet combines two of the most sensitive areas for the Chinese government: telecom infrastructure and content," he says. Most companies already had instituted measures to avoid trouble with the government, he says. Popular portals have their own content cops on the prowl, looking for anyone who posts material that crosses the Chinese government's line.
Still, the government approved the new regulations in September -- yet didn't get around to telling anyone until early October. That doesn't bode well for transparency. And the Chinese Internet scene has been dominated by lots of startups in a vibrant and unruly market. Now that the MII has the express authority to shut them down, McKenzie frets, "This is a real wet rag over the activity of a lot of those companies."
China's Internet scene could be about to get a lot less raucous. And, sadly, that may be just what Beijing wants.
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Hong Kong Catholics Fire Back at Chinese Over Canonizations
("Religion News Service," October 6, 2000)
(RNS) Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in Hong Kong are incensed over orders from Chinese leaders to keep celebrations of 120 new Chinese saints "low-key."
On Sunday (Oct. 1), Pope John Paul II canonized 120 Chinese martyrs -- 87 native Chinese and 33 foreign missionaries -- who were killed for their faith between 1648 and 1930. The canonizations fell on China's 51st anniversary, a national holiday.
The canonizations glorified centuries of Western imperialism, China said, and "seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and is also a severe provocation to the Chinese nation," the official China Daily newspaper said, according to the Reuters News agency.
The Rev. Lawrence Lee, chancellor of the Hong Kong Diocese, told the Associated Press that Chinese representatives told him that the government had "concerns" about any canonization-related celebrations and he was told to keep such ceremonies "low-key."
"It would have been more appropriate if they didn't say those words," Lee said.
Bishop Joseph Zen, deputy to Hong Kong Cardinal John Baptist Wu, wrote in Hong Kong's daily Ming Pao newspaper that China's record on religious freedom, not the canonizations, was the problem.
"What hurts the feelings of countless Chinese citizens and peace-loving people all over the world is the violent suppression by central authorities of churches in the country," Zen wrote, according to Reuters.
China recognizes only state-sponsored Catholic churches, and churches loyal to Rome operate only underground. Beijing severed diplomatic ties with the Vatican in 1951.
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China Warns Hong Kong Churches
(Associated Press, Oct. 5, 2000)
HONG KONG (AP) -- China told Hong Kong's Roman Catholic church to keep celebrations of the Vatican's canonization of 120 Chinese and foreign missionary martyrs ``low key,'' a church representative said Thursday.
The warning from Beijing's representative office in Hong Kong caused ``concerns'' among Hong Kong Catholics, said Father Lawrence Lee, spokesman and chancellor of the diocese.
``It would have been more appropriate if they didn't say those words,'' said Lee. He declined to comment on whether the warning amounted to direct interference.
He said celebrations went ahead in Hong Kong churches ``as usual'' over the weekend.
Officials of China's Central Liaison Office conveyed the message to Bishop John Tong after summoning him to a meeting in mid-September, Lee said.
Officials at China's Liaison Office declined to comment.
The communist government in Beijing severed ties with the Vatican in 1951 and set up its own China Patriotic Catholic Association to oversee churches and ordain bishops without Rome's approval. It has vehemently protested the canonizations of people it accuses of helping to persecute Chinese.
Worshipping at churches outside the officially sanctioned Patriotic Association is illegal in mainland China. Hong Kong residents, however, enjoy religious freedom along with other liberties guaranteed to the city when Britain returned it to China in 1997 after 150 years of colonial rule.
News of the warning from Beijing was disclosed in an article written by another prominent Hong Kong Catholic leader, Bishop Joseph Zen, carried in Wednesday's edition of the Chinese-language newspaper Ming Pao.
Zen accused Beijing of meddling with Hong Kong's religious freedom.
Referring to the Liaison Office's request to go ``low-key'' over the canonization, Zen wrote: ``That baffles us. What are the measures for 'high' and 'low'?''
The row over the saints has threatened recent attempts to end the half-century rift between China and the Vatican.
Beijing said the canonization, which took place on Sunday, China's National Day and the 51st anniversary of communist rule, was an insult. It condemned the 87 Chinese and 33 foreign missionaries as agents of a western imperialist invasion that carved China into spheres of influence in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
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Catholics across China join to slam Vatican
("China Daily," 10/5/2000)
Chinese Catholics in six provinces and municipalities all joined to criticize the Vatican's "canonization", saying that they support the condemnation of the Vatican by the Chinese Government and the Chinese Catholic Church.
Catholics in Beijing, Shanghai and Hebei, Shanxi, Fujian and Guizhou provinces respectively held symposiums today, voicing their indignation over the Vatican's act to distort history and intervene in China's internal affairs through religious activities.
At the symposium held in Shanghai, Bishop Jin Luxian said that Catholics should firmly stand by the government and the people in issues of state sovereignty, national dignity and religious future.
As the Vatican's "canonization" was actually manipulated by the so- called "Taiwan Catholic Bishops College", the "canonization" reveals that while catering to the Taiwan authority, the Holy See intended to split China. Therefore, the "Canonization" seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and it is also a severe provocation to the Chinese nation.
At other similar symposiums, Bishops, priests, nuns and converts pointed out that infamous foreign missionaries such as Auguste Chapdelaine, Franciscus de Capillas and Albericus Crescitelli had only themselves to blame because they had stopped no evil and are still being hated by people. They also said the Vatican's "canonization" for political purpose violates its own traditional canonization procedures, thus it is a desecration to Catholics.
The Catholics also called upon the Holy See to repent for its wrong-doing and to not set barriers to China-Vatican relations.
The Catholics all agreed that they will stick to patriotism and the religious policy of independence and self-management, stressing that patriotism is the order from God and nothing is capable of shaking the love and loyalty of Catholics to the motherland.
According to religious resources, Catholics and other religious people across the country will hold similar symposiums to voice their condemnation of the "canonization".
(Xinhua)
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China's State Administration of Religious Affairs spokesman on Vatican's 'Canonization of Saints'
("China Daily," 10/2/2000)
The Vatican's canonization of 120 "saints" that were "martyred" in China is a serious confrontational incident against the 1.2 billion Chinese people, which interferes with China's internal affairs, said the spokesman of China's State Administration of Religious Affairs Sunday.
Disregarding strong opposition from the Chinese Government and the Chinese Catholic Church, the Vatican today held a ceremony to canonize 120 foreign missionaries and their followers who committed monstrous crimes in China.
Knowing that the so-called "saints" were preaching in China during a miserable time for Chinese people when they were invaded, humiliated, pillaged and slaughtered by colonists and imperialists, the Vatican still branded Chinese people's righteous struggle against aggressions as "cruel persecution and threats" and therefore made a "judgment" that severely distorted history in defense of the imperial and colonial invasion.
The Vatican admitted that the hundred-year period prior to 1949 was the most complicated and difficult time in Chinese history and the canonization of the missionaries was not intended to excuse the actions of foreign governments. Yet, the Vatican still eulogized the invaders who were punished for their intolerable crimes and called them unscathed by cruel persecution and threats.
Because these missionaries committed many evils and were the very "perpetrators and accomplices" of the colonial and imperial invaders, the Vatican have admitted that they had their limitations of human nature, but still stressed that people should recognize their "glorious" side despite their "mistakes and limitations."
"Are libertinism, impudence, doing evil, bullying officials and laymen, and committing all manner of crimes just limitations of human nature or even the 'glorious side' of these missionaries?" the spokesman asked.
The spokesman cited two cases of missionaries being canonized Sunday.
Auguste Chatdelaine, a French missionary, was punished for his felonies, but the imperialists made use of this "religious incident" as pretext to launch the second Opium War and later burn Yuanmingyuan, the Garden of Ten Thousand Gardens, in Beijing.
Aldericus Crescitelli, an infamous Italian missionary canonized today, was notorious for taking the "right to the first night" of each bride under his diocese.
"Did they represent God's 'true love' to the Chinese people like the Vatican said?" the spokesman asked.
Canonization of these missionaries and their henchmen who committed monstrous crimes against the Chinese people is a sheer " distortion of history" and "glorification" of the colonists and imperialists, which denigrates the Chinese people's patriotic resistance against invasion and their efforts to safeguard state sovereignty, the spokesman said.
The Vatican has thus "seriously hurt the dignity of the Chinese nation and the feelings of the Chinese people."
"The Chinese people, including Chinese Catholics, can by no means tolerate the canonization," he said.
The spokesman noted that the Chinese Catholic Church and the Chinese Catholic Bishops College issued a solemn statement on September 26, which pointed out that the "canonization" was a blasphemy against Catholicism, because it had not only arbitrarily distorted history and intervened in China's internal affairs, but had also totally violated regulations and procedures of the Catholic Church, and therefore, it had been resolutely opposed by the 4 million Chinese Catholics.
The spokesman also pointed out that the Vatican had recently to some extent repented its errors in history. But it failed to express any remorse for the crimes it has committed against the Chinese people, such as participating in the colonist invasion, being the first to acknowledge the puppet regime of the state of Manchu backed by the fascist Japan and supporting Japan's militarist invasion of China.
Instead of sincerely and responsibly examining its historical wrongdoing to the Chinese people and extending a sincere and responsible apology to the Chinese people, the Vatican tampered with history by "canonizing" a number of "saints," hurting the dignity and feelings of the Chinese people, the spokesman said.
The Vatican's "perverse and vicious act" goes against the will of all conscientious people on earth.
The Vatican, while expressing its intention to improve its relations with China, has time and time again interfered in China' s internal affairs, the spokesman said, pointing out that the Vatican's so-called "canonization" had severely damaged the basis for the normalization of China-Vatican relations, and the Vatican should be held responsible for all of this.
China, with its independent foreign policy, is willing to develop good relations with all countries. The Chinese government supports its religious communities in administering their own affairs in line with the Constitution and development of friendly relations with religious circles in other countries on the basis of equality, the spokesman stressed.
The Vatican should face up to history and have a clear understanding of the current situation to alter its erroneous stance and demonstrate, not only in words but also in deeds, its sincerity to improve China-Vatican relations.
(Xinhua)
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Pope Names First Chinese Saints
by Ellen Knickmeyer (Associated Press, Oct. 1, 2000)
VATICAN CITY (AP) - Pope John Paul II declared sainthood Sunday for 120 Chinese and foreign missionaries killed in the church's five-century - and ongoing - struggle in China. Stung, Beijing called the martyrs ``evildoing sinners'' and their canonization ``an open insult.''
Naming of the church's first Chinese saints threatened to worsen already stiff relations with China, which at home is combatting Vatican-allied Roman Catholicism and other banned spiritual movements it sees as challenges to its authority.
The date of the canonizations was enraging to China - falling on China's National Day celebrating 51 years of communist rule. So was their chosen subject: 87 Chinese and 33 foreigners, most killed in what China still views as the righteous 1900 Boxer Rebellion against foreign imperialism and religions.
John Paul, looking wan and tired on a rainy morning in St. Peter's Square, insisted ``the celebration is not the time to make judgments.''
``The church only intends to recognize that those martyrs are an example of courage and coherence for all of us, and give honor to the noble Chinese people,'' the pope said.
John Paul named three other new saints as well, all nuns: one-time socialite Katharine Drexel, who devoted her life and inheritance to founding schools for American Indians and blacks; one-time Sudanese slave Guiseppine Bahkita, and Maria Josefa del Corazon de Jesus Sancho de Guerra, the first saint of Spain's trouble Basque people.
The solid bank of rain-slick umbrellas in the square covered tens of thousands, including ethnic Chinese from Taiwan, Hong Kong and elsewhere.
If any Catholics from mainland China dared attend, they kept it a secret.
China's Communist leaders ordered Catholics to renounce loyalty to the pope in the 1950s. Religious and human rights groups regularly report arrests of clergy who attempt to worship outside the state-monitored official Catholic church.
``Today is National Day, and more than ever Chinese Catholics should stand with the nation,'' Bishop Fu Tieshan, the state-appointed bishop in Beijing, told worshippers Sunday morning at the Chinese capital's South Cathedral.
``Choosing this date to canonize the so-called 'saints' is an open insult and humiliation against the Chinese Catholic adherents,'' Fu was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua News Agency.
China's Foreign Ministry denounced the newly canonized as ``evildoing sinners.''
``Some of those canonized by the Vatican this time perpetrated outrages such as raping and looting in China and committed unforgivable crimes against the Chinese people,'' the ministry said in a statement carried by Xinhua.
John Paul took note of the underground Chinese Catholics unable to attend Sunday's ceremony. ``I wish to assure you once more that I pray for you every day,'' he told his far-off followers.
The Rev. Anthony Chen, 75, born in China and retired from the Chicago diocese, said he saw no slight for China in the canonizations.
``This should be a subject of glory and pride for the whole Chinese people,'' Chen said, choosing his words slowly. ``It's an honor, to me.''
Chen noted the canonizations covered faithful killed in religious persecutions between 1648 and 1930. ``It doesn't even try to talk about those to talk about communist times,'' he said.
John Paul singled out for notice Sunday such martyrs as 18-year-old Chi Zhuzi, who proclaimed to those preparing to skin him alive in the Boxer Rebellion: ``Every piece of my flesh, every drop of my blood will repeat for you that I am a Christian.''
The Vatican has denied that Sunday's ceremony was politically motivated. Vatican officials say Sunday was chosen, not because it was China's National Day, but because it marks the feast of Saint Therese of Lisieux, patron saint of missionaries.
The mass ceremony brought to 447 the number of saints added to church rolls in John Paul's 22-year papacy.
The 80-year-old pontiff has named more saints than all his predecessors of the last 500 years combined, viewing sainthood as a way to point out role models for Catholics and bring recognition to the church in different countries.
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Pope Apologizes to China Over Missionary Errors
(Reuters, Oct. 2, 2000)
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - Pope John Paul has extended an olive branch to China, which is angry at the canonization of martyrs it calls ``evil-doing sinners,'' by apologizing for any errors committed by Western missionaries in colonial times.
At an audience Monday for pilgrims who came to Rome for Sunday's 120 canonization's, the Pope said the Church was not passing a positive judgement on colonial times nor on the behavior of some governments toward China in the past.
He said criticism of missionary activity in colonial times was often the result of ``a partial and non-objective reading of history which sees only limitations and errors...''
He added: ``If there were any (errors) -- and is man ever free of defects? -- we ask forgiveness.''
The Pope offered his apology as an irate Beijing kept up attacks. The Chinese government exploded in anger at the weekend when the Pope made saints of 87 Chinese Roman Catholics and 33 missionaries who were killed in China between 1648 and 1930.
The canonization's were even harder for Beijing to swallow because the ceremony took place on the 51st anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
The Vatican said the ceremony was held on October 1 because it was the feast of St Teresa of Lisieux, patroness of missions.
In his homily Sunday the Pope said the canonization's were an attempt to honor all Chinese people.
Sunday night Beijing fired the latest salvo in its war of words by providing what it said were details about two of the new saints.
CHINA DETAILS ``MONSTROUS CRIMES'' OF TWO NEW SAINTS
A spokesman for China's State Administration of Religious Affairs cited examples of ``monstrous crimes'' committed by two of the new saints against the Chinese people, including one who he said slept with all the brides of his followers.
Alberto Crescitelli, an Italian missionary killed in 1900, ''was notorious for taking the 'right to the first night' of each bride under his diocese,'' Xinhua news agency quoted the spokesman as saying.
A second missionary, Auguste Chatdelaine of France, who was executed in 1856, instigated the second Opium War and the burning of the imperial Summer Palace in 1860 after he was punished for felonies, the spokesman said.
``Did they represent God's 'true love' to the Chinese people like the Vatican said?'' asked the spokesman.
The Vatican says the martyrs were killed because they were loyal to their Christian faith.
China says most were traitors executed for breaking laws when colonial forces invaded China during the 1839-42 Opium War, and during the 1898-1900 Boxer Uprising.
The canonization was one of the most politically delicate acts of the pontificate and the Pope went ahead with it knowing that it could set back efforts to normalize relations with China, which does not allow its Catholics to recognize him.
China's government-backed church says it has four million members. The Vatican says eight million Chinese are loyal to the Pope and worship in secret.
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Chinese Catholics Denounced By State
by Christopher Bodeen (Associated Press, Oct. 1, 2000)
BEIJING (AP) - China's state-run church urged Catholics to ``stand with the nation'' on Sunday, the same day the Vatican plans to bestow sainthood on victims of Chinese religious persecution in a move that has infuriated the communist government.
The Chinese government bitterly objects to Pope John Paul II's plans to make saints of 120 Western and Chinese Catholics killed in China - and to do so on Sunday, China's National Day and a date given to celebrating the triumph of communism in 1949.
Addressing worshippers in Beijing's South Cathedral, Bishop Fu Tieshan did not comment directly on the canonizations. But he reminded them that Sunday should be a rallying point for Chinese.
``Today is National Day, and more than ever Chinese Catholics should stand with the nation,'' Fu said at morning services in the high-vaulted church, built in 1904 on a site where Catholics have worshipped in Beijing for more than 300 years.
The canonized died during religious persecution between 1648 and 1930. Most were killed at the hands of the anti-foreign Boxers sect 100 years ago.
The Chinese government, the state-run church and Fu's Bishops College have attacked the move, saying that the martyrs either aided or sided with foreign powers preying upon China. They have accused the Vatican of allowing bishops from rival Taiwan to manipulate the canonization to divide Chinese Catholics.
``We express our indignation at this distortion of history,'' Bishop Fu said in the interview shown Sunday on state-run China Central Television's overseas service. ``This is a public humiliation that we cannot accept.''
Fu's sentiments were repeated among worshippers at South Cathedral, which was burned to the ground by the superstitious Boxers, who are praised by the Communist Party as forerunners of the revolution.
``Canonization is a good thing. But these were not carried out in consultation with Chinese Catholics, and some of them aren't deserving,'' Zhao Honglan, a 66-year old retiree, said as a representative of the official church stood nearby.
``Saints should be role models, but these were criminals against the Chinese people. This is an insult to China and an insult to the Chinese Catholics,'' said another churchgoer, who gave only her surname, Li.
China broke ties with the Vatican in 1951 and demands Catholics worship only in churches approved by the official China Patriotic Catholic Association. The official church claims 4 million believers but an equal number worship in an underground church loyal to the Vatican and relentlessly persecuted.
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