Wednesday, June 14, 2017

Vietnam and China may sport posh hotels and joint ventures with US companies, but they are still ruled by God-hating Communist regimes

From Vietnam:

Officials at a Vietnamese prison are torturing a pastor for violating an order to keep silent to U.S. officials about they ways prison officials previously abused him.
Pastor Nguyen Cong Chinh, father of five, met with officials from the U.S. consulate in Ho Chi Minh City in May and told them that prison officials had beaten him, put him in stocks, put glass in his food, and humiliated him, according to UCA News Tuesday.
Chinh’s wife, Tran Thi Hong, who was also beaten and imprisoned for two months and continues to suffer harassment, told UCA News that prison officials put Chinh in solitary confinement in a small space immediately after his meeting with U.S. officials. Prison officials warned Chinh the day before the meeting that he was not to speak of the abuses they inflict on him.
“I am very concerned about his poor health in solitary confinement because he is suffering severe sinusitis and high blood pressure,” Hong said.
The Vietnamese government arrested Chinh in 2012 on the charge of “undermining government solidarity” for criticizing how religious expression is limited in Vietnam and sentenced him to 11 years in prison, according to Jackie Wolcott from the U.S. Commission of International Religious Freedom.
Chinh has been abused for six years for refusing to admit wrongdoing, despite prison officials’ attempts to make him confess. Vietnamese government officials attempted to break Chinh earlier this year by lying to him that his wife, Hong, had been unfaithful.
From China:

Along the valleys and mountains hugging the East China Sea, a Chinese government campaign to remove crosses from church spires has left the countryside looking as if a typhoon had raged down the coast, decapitating buildings at random.
In the town of Shuitou, workers used blowtorches to cut a 10-foot-high cross off the 120-foot steeple of the Salvation Church. It now lies in the churchyard, wrapped in a red shroud.
About 10 miles to the east, in Mabu township, riot police officers blocked parishioners from entering the grounds of the Dachang Church while workers erected scaffolding and sawed off the cross. In the nearby villages of Ximei, Aojiang, Shanmen and Tengqiao, crosses now lie toppled on rooftops or in yards, or buried like corpses.
On a four-day journey through this lush swath of China’s Zhejiang Province, I spoke with residents who described in new detail the breathtaking scale of an effort to remove Christianity’s most potent symbol from public view. Over the past two years, officials and residents said, the authorities have torn down crosses from 1,200 to 1,700 churches, sometimes after violent clashes with worshipers trying to stop them.
“It’s been very difficult to deal with,” said one church elder in Shuitou, who like others asked for anonymity in fear of retaliation by the authorities. “We can only get on our knees and pray.”
It's mainly limited to one province at present, but strong signals are coming from the central government:

In a major speech on religious policy last month, Mr. Xi urged the ruling Communist Party to “resolutely guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means,” and he warned that religions in China must “Sinicize,” or become Chinese. The instructions reflect the government’s longstanding fear that Christianity could undermine the party’s authority. Many human rights lawyers in China are Christians, and many dissidents have said they are influenced by the idea that rights are God-given.
In recent decades, the party had tolerated a religious renaissance in China, allowing most Chinese to worship as they chose and even encouraging the construction of churches, mosques and temples, despite regular crackdowns on unregistered congregations and banned spiritual groups such as Falun Gong.
Hundreds of millions of people have embraced the nation’s major faiths: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam and Christianity. There are now about 60 million Christians in China. Many attend churches registered with the government, but at least half worship in unregistered churches, often with local authorities looking the other way.
But Mr. Xi’s decision to convene a “religious affairs work conference” last month — the first such leadership meeting in 15 years — suggested that he was unhappy with some of these policies. People familiar with the party’s discussions say it intends to apply some lessons from the campaign in Zhejiang to rein in religious groups across the country.
Yes, you can have a nice vacation in, or business trip to, these nations, but behind the welcoming facade is Marxist-Leninist doctrine, which tolerates no god besides the state.
 
 
 

3 comments:

  1. Commies are incredibly cruel and the torture techniques of the Eastern inquisitors are way exceptional, always have been. Ask John McCain.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Indeed. Armando Vallarares can tell us a thing or to about it as well.

    ReplyDelete