Yes, there are those man-made islands in the South China Sea, and the sheer ambition of the Belt and Road Initiative, as well as intellectual-property theft that is baked into the above-mentioned business relationships. But the opening of Chinese society that has occurred over the last 30 years can't be undone, can it?
Well . . .
The 62-year-old Chinese shopkeeper had waited nearly his entire adult life to see his dream of building a church come true — a brick house with a sunny courtyard and spacious hall with room for 200 believers.But in March, about a dozen police officers and local officials suddenly showed up at the church on his property and made the frightened congregants disperse. They ordered that the cross, a painting of the Last Supper and Bible verse calligraphy be taken down. And they demanded that all services stop until each person along with the church itself was registered with the government, said the shopkeeper, Guo, who gave his last name only from fear of retribution.Without warning, Guo and his neighbors in China’s Christian heartland province of Henan had found themselves on the front lines of an ambitious new effort by the officially atheist ruling Communist Party to dictate — and in some cases displace — the practice of faith in the country.
Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, believers are seeing their freedoms shrink dramatically even as the country undergoes a religious revival. Experts and activists say that as he consolidates his power, Xi is waging the most severe systematic suppression of Christianity in the country since religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.
The crackdown on Christianity is part of a broader push by Xi to “Sinicize” all the nation’s religions by infusing them with “Chinese characteristics” such as loyalty to the Communist Party. Over the last several months, local governments across the country have shut down hundreds of private Christian “house churches.” A statement last week from 47 in Beijing alone said they had faced “unprecedented” harassment since February.A dozen Chinese Protestants interviewed by the Associated Press described gatherings that were raided, interrogations and surveillance, and one pastor said hundreds of his congregants were questioned individually about their faith. Like Guo, the majority requested that their names be partly or fully withheld because they feared punishment from authorities.“Chinese leaders have always been suspicious of the political challenge or threat that Christianity poses to the Communist regime,” said Xi Lian, a scholar of Christianity in China at Duke University. “Under Xi, this fear of Western infiltration has intensified and gained a prominence that we haven’t seen for a long time.”Officials once largely tolerated the unregistered Protestant house churches that sprang up independent of the official Christian Council, clamping down on some while allowing others to grow. But this year they have taken a tougher approach that relies partly on “thought reform” — a phrase for political indoctrination. Last November, Christian residents of a rural township in southeast Jiangxi province were persuaded to replace posters of the cross and Jesus Christ inside their homes with portraits of Xi, a local official said.“Through our thought reform, they’ve voluntarily done it,” Qi Yan, a member of the township party committee, told the AP by phone. “The move is aimed at Christian families in poverty, and we educated them to believe in science and not in superstition, making them believe in the party.”The poster campaign appears to symbolize what analysts see as the underlying force driving the change in the party’s approach to religion: the ascendance of Xi.
The poster campaign appears to symbolize what analysts see as the underlying force driving the change in the party’s approach to religion: the ascendance of Xi.
“Xi is a closet Maoist — he is very anxious about thought control,” said Willy Lam, a Chinese politics expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “He definitely does not want people to be faithful members of the church, because then people would profess their allegiance to the church rather than to the party, or more exactly, to Xi himself.”
One not need bandy about vaguely defined terms such as "globalist" in order to see that China should have been eyed more warily through the years. The authoritarian hand of the state has been a factor through times of relative openness as well as subsequent swings back toward heavy-handedness.
And the system in place throughout it all has lent itself to the rise of an ambitious figure such as Xi.
And it's not like this is a crackdown on some aspect of popular culture - although some of that is part of the Chinese picture as well. This is about terrorizing people into ceasing to witness for the Lord.
Societies so overtly engaged in that kind of activity ought to be regarded rather differently from those the governments of which don't see divine truth as a threat to their appropriate status and function.
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