[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 107 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
ROUNDTABLE ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN CHINA
=======================================================================
ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION
__________
MARCH 25, 2002
__________
Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
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CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
Senate
House
MAX BAUCUS, Montana, Chairman DOUG BEREUTER, Nebraska, Co-
CARL LEVIN, Michigan Chairman
DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California JIM LEACH, Iowa
BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota DAVID DREIER, California
EVAN BAYH, Indiana FRANK WOLF, Virginia
CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska JOE PITTS, Pennsylvania
BOB SMITH, New Hampshire SANDER LEVIN, Michigan
SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio
TIM HUTCHINSON, Arkansas NANCY PELOSI, California
JIM DAVIS, Florida
EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS
PAULA DOBRIANSKY, Department of State
GRANT ALDONAS, Department of Commerce
D. CAMERON FINDLAY, Department of Labor
LORNE CRANER, Department of State
JAMES KELLY, Department of State
Ira Wolf, Staff Director
John Foarde, Deputy Staff Director
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
STATEMENTS
Opening statement of Ira Wolf, Staff Director, Congressional-
Executive Commission on China.................................. 1
Quigley, Thomas E. U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops........... 2
Marshall, Paul, senior fellow, Center for Religious Freedom,
Freedom House.................................................. 5
Aikman, David, foreign affairs consultant, and former Time bureau
chief in Beijing............................................... 8
Kung, Joseph, president, Cardinal Kung Foundation................ 10
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Quigley, Thomas E................................................ 34
Marshall, Paul................................................... 36
Kung, Joseph..................................................... 39
ROUNDTABLE ON RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN CHINA
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MONDAY, MARCH 25, 2002,
Congressional-Executive,
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 2:30
p.m., in room SD-215, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Mr. Ira
Wolf (staff director of the Commission) presiding.
Also present: Mr. John Foarde, Deputy Staff Director; Mr.
Geoffrey Gleason, Office of Congressman Wolf; Ms. Holly
Vineyard, U.S. Department of Commerce; Mr. Robert Shepard, U.S.
Department of Labor; Ms. Karen Finkler, Office of Congressman
Pitts; Ms. Sharon Payt, Office of Senator Brownback; Ms. Teresa
McNeil and Ms. Amy Gadsen, U.S. Department of State; and Mr.
Michael Castellano, Office of Congressman Levin.
OPENING STATEMENT OF IRA WOLF, STAFF DIRECTOR, CONGRESSIONAL-
EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
Mr. Wolf. Let us get started.
I would like to welcome everyone to the third of the public
roundtables that we have been holding on behalf of the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
Today we are going to look at religious freedom issues in
China, and we have four distinguished members of our panel:
Thomas Quigley, from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops;
Paul Marshall from Freedom House; David Aikman, a consultant on
foreign affairs and former Time bureau chief in Beijing; and
Joseph Kung, president of the Cardinal Kung Foundation.
I would like to note that, although the title of today's
hearing is religious freedom, we are actually focusing on the
issues of freedom to practice Christianity.
We will have a roundtable on June 10, that will focus on
Tibetan Buddhism, as well as Islam and Uighur Muslims.
Before we turn to today's panel, let me just note that the
next roundtable will be on April 15, and we will be discussing
the Internet and free flow of information in China.
Also, the next full Commission hearing, chaired by Senator
Baucus and Congressman Bereuter, will be held on April 11. The
topic will be human rights and legal reform.
We are going to follow the usual format today. Each panel
member will have 10 minutes to make his presentation. The
yellow light will go off at minute 9, and that means please try
and finish off the last bit of your commentary.
After the four presentations, each of the staff members
will have 5 minutes to ask questions. Then, depending on the
time, we will continue going around until everyone is
exhausted.
We will go from left to right and start with Tom Quigley.
STATEMENT OF THOMAS E. QUIGLEY, U.S. CONFERENCE OF CATHOLIC
BISHOPS
Mr. Quigley. Thank you for this opportunity to offer some
brief comments on the issue of religious freedom today,
especially with reference to the Catholic Church in the
People's Republic of China.
I will confine my remarks to several recent developments in
China that directly touch on the role of the Catholic Church
there.
First, some numbers. Out of well over a billion people,
Chinese Catholics number between 8 and 12 million. The 12
million is probably safe; roughly 4 million in the open,
registered church, roughly 8 million in the underground, or
unregistered.
The government, of course, does not recognize the latter,
so official figures have it that there are about 100 million
believers in the country, less than 1 percent--which is a gross
under-count--of which 4 million, according to the government,
are Catholic.
The number of Catholics is small, growing at a very slow
pace, but 12 million is still far larger than the roughly 3
million Catholics before the Communist takeover. As Dick
Madsen, one of the best China church-watchers in this country
likes to note, there are a lot more Catholics in China than
there are in Ireland.
Let me frame these remarks by several fairly recent events.
Last year, 2001, was significant in a couple of ways for the
Church in China. Just over a year ago, in April, there was the
Hainan Island collision and the downing of the U.S. spy plane,
which, coming on the heels of the Belgrade embassy, plunged
Sino-American relations very low indeed.
But then the plane business was resolved. Secretary Powell
went to Beijing in July, and President Bush planned his State
visit to China for October, coinciding with the APEC meeting in
Shanghai.
Then came 9/11, which caused the State visit to be
postponed, but the President still went ahead with a quick Asia
trip in October, enabling him to meet briefly with Jiang in
Shanghai, and then finally to have the postponed State visit
just a month ago, in late February.
These United States-China visits have a bearing on the
matter of religious freedom, because in both his October and
February meetings with Jiang, Mr. Bush raised quite
dramatically the issue of religion, including his own faith
commitment, and pressed Jiang to grant religious liberty, to
free Catholic clergy, especially bishops under detention, and
to pursue dialog with the Vatican, as well as with the Dalai
Lama.
The question of encouraging China's dialog with the Holy
See is something that both the Vatican and our bishops'
conference have consistently urged our government for some
time.
The essential goal of the dialog is the restoration of
normal relations between the Holy See and the People's
Republic, relations which the Chinese broke off when they
expelled the Apostolic internuncio, Antonio Riberi, and
arrested, imprisoned, and finally deported all the foreign
clergy and religious in 1951.
But the more immediate, practical goal of such talks, aimed
at allowing a Vatican representative to reside in Beijing,
whether or not full diplomatic relations are restored, is the
opportunity for the Vatican to explain and interpret the
sometimes complex reality of the Church to the Chinese
authorities.
Thus, when Bishop X is accused of breaking the law, simply
because he declines to have his ministry governed and
controlled by the CCPA--the Chinese Catholic Patriotic
Association--the Papal representative could at least make the
case that the bishop's arrest serves no valid purpose, that it
can more likely lead to popular discontent than to dampen it,
that it is in fact counter-productive to China's desire to be
fully accepted into the world community which places high value
on the free expression of religious belief, and so on. And
thus, by persistent diplomatic pressure, changes in this
behavior might eventually be effected.
The other effect of 9/11 was, of course, China's apparent
signing on in the war on terrorism, resulting in the greatly
improved United States-People's Republic of China [PRC]
relations, evidenced clearly in the Bush State visit last
month. The President referred to the relationship as
``constructive and cooperative.''
Now, a second set of events, these specifically of the
Church, were the two Ricci meetings last October, one in
Beijing and one in Rome. They were to commemorate the 400th
anniversary of the arrival in Beijing in 1601 of the great
Jesuit scholar and missionary, Matteo Ricci.
There was at that time a flurry of press speculations that
these symposia would herald a major breakthrough in China's
relations with the church, even rumors that China was about to
let the Holy See set up an apostolic delegation in Beijing.
The speculation was totally groundless, of course, but the
Ricci events did produce one of the most dramatic developments
in the centuries-long relationship between the Catholic Church
and China.
On October 24, Pope John Paul II issued a statement to the
Sinologists then meeting at Rome's Gregorian University on the
theme of Encounters and Dialogue. In the course of a fairly
long discourse tracing the story of Ricci's contribution, the
Holy Father turned to the present.
Then, after expressing the Church's affection for the
Chinese people and her desire to give service for the good of
all the people, and noting the long line of generous
missionaries and the many works of human development they
accomplished down the centuries, especially in the fields of
health care and education, he said the following.
History, however, reminds us of the unfortunate fact that
the work of members of the Church in China was not always
without error, the bitter fruit of their personal limitations
and of the limits of their action. Moreover, their action was
often conditioned by the difficult situations connected with
complex historical events and conflicting political interests.
. . .
In certain periods of modern history, a kind of
``protection'' on the part of European political powers not
infrequently resulted in limitations on the Church's very
freedom of action and had negative repercussions for the Church
in China. . . .
For all this, I ask the forgiveness and understanding of
those who may have felt hurt in some way by such actions on the
part of Christians.
This extraordinary apology by the Pope was met by basically
embarrassed silence by the government. The spokesman for the
foreign ministry was trucked out to repeat the standard mantra,
the Holy See must break relations with Taiwan and the Vatican
must not use religion to interfere in China's internal affairs.
Interfering in China's internal affairs is a code term for
China's rejection of its own constitutional guarantee of
religious freedom. It is China's denial of the Church's right
to exercise its normal and customary role of appointing bishops
as heads of dioceses all over the world, and thus a
government's interference in the internal affairs of the
Church.
Why were the authorities unable to react more positively to
this quite extraordinary papal apology? For the same reason
that they grossly overreacted to the October 1, 2000
canonization of the Chinese martyrs, as a smokescreen to cover
over the existing divisions within the Party.
The overriding factor right now is the upcoming Party
Congress this fall, which is expected to usher in a new,
somewhat younger, leadership. Bishop Joseph Zen, Coadjutor of
Hong Kong, holds out the hope that this new leadership, and the
rising of a political class of even younger people, many of
whom will have studied abroad, will gradually bring about
genuine change. Gradually, perhaps over a period of 3 years, he
thinks.
And change, openness, is the only way to avoid the bloody
outcome that some foresee; ``there are many unhappy people in
China,'' the bishop notes.
In the meantime, religious expression continues to be
either repressed, sometimes brutally, or controlled, although
the controls over the registered Catholic Church are showing
signs of wear and ineffectiveness. The vast majority of all the
registered bishops have been reconciled with Rome, which the
government obviously knows.
The power of the Patriotic Association is greatly
diminished and given to sometimes desperate gestures, such as
the staged ordination of bishops on Epiphany 2000, timed to
coincide with the Pope's ordaining 12 bishops that same day.
What is the status of religious persecution of Catholics
right now? Over the past months, we have been treated to a kind
of good cop/bad cop reporting on the State of religion in
China.
The Wall Street Journal, on February 6, claimed that
``China is rethinking its heavy-handed politics and taking a
more tolerant line on mainstream groups.'' But at the same
time, we know of the secret documents smuggled out by officials
of the State Security ministry and other government agencies
that envision a still tighter crackdown on unauthorized
religious groups.
And at the beginning of Lent this year, mid-February, the
news agency of the Vatican's missionary congregation issued a
list of some 33 Catholic bishops and priests known to have been
arrested, or disappeared, or under house arrest.
The best-known of these, and the one for whom American
ambassador Clark Randt has intervened, is Bishop James SU
Zhimin of Baoding, a well-respected figure who has been
repeatedly arrested, released, and re-arrested. His whereabouts
is presently unknown.
Is the end game in sight? We will have to wait to see what
the new leadership is like and, if more open to change, how
long it will take for them to consolidate their positions. It
seems clear that Jiang's modest moves for change in 1999 lost
out to the hard-liners.
His government now at least has acknowledged the merit of
issuing human rights reports by putting out their own report on
U.S. human rights record, detailing the many perceived
violations of human rights in this country, including, as one
chapter has it, ``Wantonly Infringing upon the Human Rights of
Other Countries.''
Those of us who advocate for international human rights and
religious freedom have our work cut out. I cite the instance of
a recent and very detailed policy brief by the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, ``Rebalancing United States-
China Relations.'' Amidst a wide-ranging list of issues
discussed, there is not a word about human rights, still less
about religious freedom.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Quigley appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Thanks very much.
Next is Paul Marshall.
STATEMENT OF PAUL MARSHALL, SENIOR FELLOW, CENTER FOR RELIGIOUS
FREEDOM, FREEDOM HOUSE
Mr. Marshall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity
to join the roundtable on the issue of religious freedom in
China. We commend the Commission for monitoring this issue.
We are alarmed by the mounting repression against the major
unregistered religious and spiritual groups in China, including
Protestants and Catholics.
As you know, Beijing controls the five authorized
religions--Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam, and
Taoism--by the Religious Affairs Bureau, controlled by the
United Front Work Department, itself controlled by the Central
Committee of the Communist Party. Other groups which are not
included in that are either unregistered, or a group such as
Falun Gong, which is banned completely.
In recent years, China has developed a new tactic of
labeling religious groups as so-called ``cults,'' and then
cracking down on them. This intensifies the repression of non-
approved religion.
With the introduction of laws regulating heretical cults on
October 30, 1999, religious offenses can now be classified as
threatening national security and possibly punishable by life
sentences, or even death.
This tactic has been increasingly employed in the last 2
years. Government spokespersons maintain that these believers
are not being repressed by restrictive religion laws, but
instead are criminals, disrupting public and social order laws.
The result of these new laws and the move against so-called
cults has been a marked deterioration in religious freedom in
China over the last year, and in particular since Congress
approved PNTR [Permanent Normal Trade Relations].
China has not ratified the International Covenant on Civil
and Political Rights and has not provided information or
permitted access to religious leaders who are in detention.
This heightened crackdown may stem from frustration and
political insecurity as authorities observe the astonishing
revival of religion throughout China, particular in
unsanctioned groups.
Thirteen million Protestants are now in the registered
churches with the government, but unregistered Protestants may
number over 50 million in house-churches.
Let me also add that, while this roundtable is focused on
Catholics and Protestants, particularly this month I would just
like to raise the situation of Falun Gong, which may at the
moment be facing its worst repression ever.
As you know, following a television program in Changchun on
March 5, there has been increased repression. According to
Falun Gong spokespersons, ``police have been ordered to 'shoot
on sight' anyone giving out written materials for Falun Gong.''
In the city of Changchun, perhaps 5,000 or more
practitioners have been arrested in the last 3 weeks, and
perhaps 100 of them have died.
Moving on to Catholics and Protestants. I will be very
brief on the Catholic situation, as we have two able
spokespersons here. We are concerned that at least 33 Catholic
bishops and priests are currently in prison under house arrest
or under strict police surveillance.
The Vatican's Fides News Service lists 13 bishops who have
been arrested, as well as 20 priests, and says explicitly that
its list is incomplete.
Among Protestants, one of the most striking cases is Pastor
Gong Shenliang, who was sentenced to death on December 5 on
charges of operating an ``evil cult,'' and on apparently
trumped-up charges of rape and assault.
In a letter from one of the members of his church dated
December 31, 2001, a woman describes the torture that was
applied to them by police to pressure them to testify against
Gong.
``Ma and her boy Longfen were both beaten almost to death.
Li Enhui fell unconscious and was awakened with cold water and
beaten again. They did this to her non-stop for 7 days and 7
nights. ``On July 20,'' last year, ``we heard the news that Yu,
who was arrested in Ma's house, had been tortured to death.''
To try to arrest Gong, the police arrested 63 of his
congregants, severely beating at least 25 of them and torturing
them with electric cattle prods.
I will focus the rest of my remarks concerning China on
what was revealed in secret Chinese Government documents, as I
already mentioned, released in February of this year.
They detail an official crackdown against large,
unregistered churches and other religious groups nationwide.
Copies of the documents were provided to Freedom House by the
Committee for Investigation on Persecution of Religion in
China.
These seven documents, issued between of April 1999 and
October 2001, detailed national, provincial, and local security
officials' role in repressing religion. They show that China's
Government, at the highest levels, aims to repress religious
expression outside of its control and is using more determined,
systematic, and harsher criminal penalties in this effort.
Hu Jintao, regarded as the successor to President Jiang
Zemin, is quoted in them as endorsing the drive against the
Real God Church. The Minister of Public Security is quoted as
giving the order to ``smash the cult quietly.''
Several of these documents focus particularly on measures
to ``smash'' the South China Church and the Real God Church,
which, Chinese authorities state, rivals Falun Gong in its
reach and dangerous effects.
Other documents list several Christian churches, Falun
Gong, the Unification Church, and other banned religious
groups. They list 14 in all, describing them as evil cults.
The documents also note with palpable alarm that, for
example, the Real God Church is growing rapidly throughout 22
of China's provinces. One of the documents says that the inner
circles of the Communist Party and government officials have
secretly joined the church.
They also show once more that China, as an officially
atheist state, still arrogates to itself the authority to
define orthodoxy, determine dogma, and designate religious
leaders.
The documents are often notable for their crudeness is
understanding the religions they report to control. For
example, one document uses the basic Christian doctrine that
Christ is in every believer to accuse churches of ``deifying''
their leaders, a practice which they then define as ``cult-
like.''
They also show particular concern about public unrest over
China's entry into the World Trade Organization [WTO], and it
ties this to Western support of democracy movements and
religious groupings, especially Falun Gong. It accuses the
Vatican of ``still waiting for any opportunity to. . . draw the
patriotic religious believers up to them and incite them to
rebel.''
In Document 4, activities such as ``praying for world
peace,'' ecumenical relations between churches, printing
religious publications, or developing a diocesan, parish, and
prayer group-like organizational structure, are all seen as
dangerous.
They view with particular alarm ecumenical relations
between the Protestant house-church Real God and the
underground Catholic Church. The Real God Church is said to
have ties with Tiananmen Square student protest leaders, as
well as the Communist Party and the government.
Measure to be taken against the banned religious groups
include surveillance, the deployment of special undercover
agents, the gathering of ``criminal evidence,'' ``complete
demolition'' of a group's organizational system, interrogation,
arrest, confiscation of church property, and homes at which
meeting are held.
The second document repeatedly refers to the use of
``secret agents'' to infiltrate what it calls cults,
underground Catholics, and also businesses, joint ventures,
people with ``complicated political backgrounds,'' prestigious
colleges and universities, and other organizations.
As the United States Commission on International Religious
Freedom has recommended, we, too, would recommend that United
States policy should press the Chinese Government to end its
current crackdown on religious and spiritual groups; to reform
its repressive legal framework and establish an effective
mechanism to hold officials accountable for religious freedom
and other rights violations; to affirm the universality of
religious freedom and China's international obligations, and
also to ratify the international covenant on civil and
political rights; fourth, to foster a culture of respect for
human rights.
The United States Government's China policy should support
and, as appropriate, fund religious freedoms and other United
States advocates in China, as well as those, wherever they are
found, who are promoting the rule of law, legal reform, and
democracy there.
The United States Government should make sure that Tibetan
and other ethnic minorities, as well as representatives of
religious communities and other nongovernmental organizations,
are included in exchange programs with China.
Through public diplomacy, the United States should directly
explain to the Chinese people this message and the reasons for
our concerns. Such efforts should include the expansion of
Radio Free Asia and Voice of America broadcasts throughout
China.
Since the United States permits Chinese media, including
the official Chinese Central Television Company, access to
American markets, we should ensure that United States media,
including broadcast companies, are allowed a similar presence
in Chinese markets.
Also, the United States Government should ensure that
United States companies doing business in China do not engage
in practices that would facilitate violations of religious
freedom and other human rights, such as, for example,
disclosing employees' religious or spiritual activities or
affiliations to Chinese Government officials.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Marshall appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Thanks very much.
Next is David Aikman.
STATEMENT OF DAVID AIKMAN, FOREIGN AFFAIRS CONSULTANT, AND
FORMER TIME BUREAU CHIEF IN BEIJING
Mr. Aikman. China has been going through one of the most
remarkable periods of growth in its Christian population of any
country in the last 2,000 years, in the history of
Christianity.
Mr. Quigley has already mentioned the expansion of the
Roman Catholic Church from an estimated 3 million in 1949 when
the Communist Party came to power in China, to an estimated 12
million currently.
The figure for Protestants, although this is based upon
estimates and there were no reliable statistical firm notions,
is even more startling. From a figure of less than three-
quarters of a million, or around three-quarters of a million
for all of China in 1949, Protestants have now increased to the
point where the Three Self Patriotic Movement, which is the
officially sponsored Protestant organization controlling
permitted Protestant religious activity, says that there are
about 20 million Protestants, of whom 15 or so are actually
associated directly or are members of Three Self Patriotic
churches.
But the Public Security Bureau of China has privately, and
the State Statistical Office on other occasions, has released
figures that give us reason to believe the number of Protestant
Christians in China may approach 70 million.
That is an expansion of less than 1 million to 70 million
since 1949, most of that growth having been in the period from
1980 to the current year, the reason being that the open-door
policy inaugurated by Deng Xiaoping, China's Communist leader
at that time in 1979, resulted in large numbers of clergy being
released from prison and a sort of uncertainty about what the
government's religious policy really should be. For a period of
time in the early 1980's, there was quite a remarkable degree
of unofficially approved freedom.
The growth of the Christian church has caused great
perplexity in the Chinese Communist Party and in the leaders of
the State Council, so much so that in mid-February there was a
working meeting held by leaders of the State Council and the
Communist Party in Beijing, attended by and addressed by
President Jiang Zemin, Prime Minister Ju Rongji, and others, in
which approximately the following was said. I am paraphrasing,
of course.
According to Jiang Zemin, religion is an extremely
important element in China. Some people interpreted this
comment as the opening of a new period of liberalization by the
regime authorities toward religious expression, but so far
there has been no indication of anything like that at all.
In fact, one of the follow-up points made by President
Jiang, who of course is also the head of the Communist Party,
was that religion was so important, that the officials both of
the State structure and the Party itself should focus very much
on working to control it, or if you like, to cope with it.
In practice, what this has meant has been a number of
different things in different parts of the country. The
phenomenon of Falun Gong, which suddenly erupted into public
view in April 1998, led to a serious crackdown upon all
religious groups that were not registered with the government,
but particularly on Falun Gong itself.
The manifestations of demonstrations by Falun Gong
practitioners against the government led in turn not only to
very harsh crack-downs on Falun Gong, but to the passage of a
law against the religious cults that Dr. Paul Marshall has
already referred to.
In practice, what this means, is that local Public Security
Bureau officials, that is, policemen, decide whether or not
something is a cult. So, for example, one of the groups that
was singled out as a cult in some very interesting secret
documents recently smuggled out to the United States were
people who believed that you could pray against sickness, and
this was something that Christians might actually want to do
occasionally, and also that you could exorcise demonic spirits.
This was also considered cult-like, although, of course, it
has been part of mainstream Christianity for the last 2,000
years. Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox all subscribe to some
form of these practices.
What we can expect now, I think, is as has happened in the
past, different regional groups, different provincial police
leadership responding differently to religious phenomena in
their own local areas. It is evident that some parts of China
have Public Security Bureau leadership that is more tolerant
and more respectful of private religious practice than others.
Yet, some parts are extremely repressive. Hunan Province,
for example, which has seen the largest Protestant growth of
any part of China in the last 20 years, is particularly harsh
upon the unregistered leadership groups in its midst.
I do not have any specific policy recommendations for the
United States, except I share very much Dr. Marshall's
recommendations for public diplomacy, at least at the very
outset of U.S. official positions.
I think the Chinese Government and the Chinese people,
insofar as this is possible, need to be informed not only of
their obligations as signatories to international human rights
conventions, but at the very positive advantages of having
religious freedom.
Wherever religious freedom has been implemented, countries,
by and large, have benefited enormously from it. I would say
that is probably going to be as true in China as it is in the
United States and many other countries.
Thank you.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks very much, David.
Mr. Kung.
STATEMENT OF JOSEPH KUNG, PRESIDENT, CARDINAL KUNG FOUNDATION
Mr. Kung. When I entered this country 47 years ago in 1955,
China was a young Communist country. At that time, the
Communists were already throwing the bishops, priests and their
faithful into jail and labor camps.
Forty-seven years later, China is still a Communist
country. China is still throwing the religious believers into
mainland labor camps by the thousands. Although China has
changed by opening its door to the outside world, the
persecution of religious believers has never stopped.
This persecution has recently become so bad at a time when
China is making significant economic progress, at a time when
China has joined the World Trade Organization, and at a time
when China professes fighting terror, while it continues to
create its own terror among its own religious believers.
Since late 1999, the Government of China has destroyed
1,200 churches in one eastern province alone. An 82-year-old
priest, Father YE Gongfeng was savagely tortured to
unconsciousness and Father LIN Rengui was beaten so savagely
that he vomited blood.
Underground Catholic seminarian Wang Qing was tortured for
3 days, being suspended by his wrists, beaten, and force fed
with contaminated liquids that caused severe injury and
illness.
Catholic priest Hu Duo suffered broken legs in police
beatings. Even a 12-year-old could not escape the brutality.
She told the interrogators that she had become a liturgy
lector. As a result, she was beaten so savagely that she had to
be hospitalized.
There is a tiny village called Donglu in Hebei. In that
village, there is a shrine for the Blessed Mother. Each year,
tens of thousands of pilgrims visited this shrine from all over
China.
However, in May 1996, 5,000 Chinese soldiers, supported by
dozens of armed cars and helicopters, destroyed and leveled
that shrine. The government confiscated the statute of the
Blessed Virgin Mary and arrested many bishops and priests.
Bishop Su Zhimin, the underground bishop of this shrine,
was arrested at least five times in the past, and has already
spent approximately 26 years in prison. He disappeared after he
was last arrested in October 1997. We do not even know if he is
dead or alive.
The auxiliary bishop of this shrine, Bishop An Shuxin, was
last arrested in May 1996. He has been in prison for the last 6
years. We do not even know where he is. The pastor of this
shrine, Father Cui Xingang, was also arrested 6 years ago in
May 1996.
There are approximately 50 bishops in the underground Roman
Catholic Church. Almost every one of them, not just 33 of them
mentioned by Paul Marshall and Mr. Aikman, is either arrested,
under house arrest, under strict surveillance, in hiding, or on
the run. None of them has freedom to go around.
For instance, Bishop Jia Zhiguo, Bishop of Zhengding in
Hebei, was just arrested 5 days ago. We do not know where he
is. I had a press release, yesterday, come out. Obviously,
there is severe, ongoing persecution of the underground Roman
Catholic Church in China at this time.
The Communists took over China in 1949. After 7 years of
severe persecution, the Communists failed to stamp out the
Catholic Church. So, in 1957, the Chinese Communist Government
created its own church called the Chinese Catholic Patriotic
Association, in order to replace the Roman Catholic Church in
China and to have complete control of the church.
Although this Patriotic Association's Church calls itself
``Catholic,'' it does not take its mandate from the Pope. It
takes orders only from the Chinese Government. It is under the
sanction of the Chinese Government, therefore, it is not
persecuted.
To this day, the Patriotic Association continues to openly
advocate independence from the Pope. Our Pope has refused to
recognize this Patriotic Association, otherwise called the
``Official Church.''
In contrast, underground Roman Catholics have no public
churches in China because they are illegal there. A Holy Mass,
a prayer service, and even praying over the dying by Roman
Catholics are considered illegal and subversive activities by
the Chinese Government.
Religious services for the Roman Catholic Church can only
be secretly conducted in private homes or deserted fields. The
Chinese Government deems these private gatherings of Roman
Catholics as illegal, unauthorized, subversive, and punishable
by exorbitant fines, detention, house arrests, jails, labor
camps, or even death.
Approximately 5 months ago, Chinese Government authorities
arrested underground Bishop Lucas Li of Fengxiang and 18
underground priests, and closed an underground monastery and
two underground convents. The reason? The Patriotic Association
was coming to town.
The government is now forcing underground Roman Catholics
to register with the Patriotic Association. Refusing to do so
is now liable to sentencing to 3 years' labor camp.
Being ordained as an underground Roman Catholic priest and
conducting evangelization without permission from the Chinese
Government are now also considered a crime punishable by 3
years in the labor camps. This punishment is illustrated in a
court paper dated April 13, 2001 and is attached at the back of
my speech.
Let me say a few words about Cardinal Kung. In fact, no
description of the persecution of religious beliefs is complete
without mentioning him, because he is the symbol of persecution
in China.
Cardinal Kung was the Bishop of Shanghai for 51 years,
until he died 2 years ago on March 12. He was imprisoned for
32\1/2\ years, mostly under solitary confinement, because he
refused to renounce the Pope.
Pope John Paul II secretly created Bishop Kung a Cardinal
in 1979 while he was still in jail and proclaimed him publicly
a Cardinal 12 years later in 1991 after he arrived in the
United States. Cardinal Kung lived in the United States for 12
years.
When Cardinal Kung received his red hat in the Vatican, he
received an unprecedented 7-minute standing ovation from 7,500
people. When he died, the Pope called him ``this noble son of
China and of the Church.''
In an interview with the Chinese Press in New York on
February 12, 1998, Mr. Ye Xiaowen, the director of the
Religious Bureau of China, stated: ``Gong Pinmei, ``which is
the Chinese name of Cardinal Kung, ``committed a serious crime
by dividing the country and causing harm to its people.''
One month later in March 1998, the Chinese Government
confiscated the passport of this then 97-year-old Cardinal
Kung, officially exiling him and making him stateless.
Why is the Chinese Communist Government so fearful of this
97-year old Cardinal that it had to confiscate his passport to
prevent his return to China? Even after his death, Cardinal
Kung was still persecuted and insulted by the Chinese
Government.
After the Cardinal's death, the Chinese Government issued a
statement. It said, ``Gong Pinmei was a criminal of China found
guilty by the Chinese court. Kung committed a serious crime of
dividing the country and dividing the church. History will
judge him for his crime.''
I believe that history will indeed judge. However, history
will judge that Cardinal Kung was not a criminal. History will
also judge that those religious believers who have been
persecuted by the Chinese Government are also not criminals.
The criminals will be those who sent Cardinal Kung to life
imprisonment. The criminals will be those who have been
persecuting millions of Chinese religious believers who only
want to practice their religion according to their conscience,
not according to the choice of the government. The criminal
will obviously be the Beijing Government.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Kung appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Wolf. Thank you, Mr. Kung. I thank all of you.
We will now go in the order that everybody has arrived.
As economic reform takes effect in China and state-owned
enterprises are disappearing, the social safety net that is
inherent in them is also disappearing.
Resources of the Chinese Government are limited, to say the
least, to act as a substitute. We are seeing some of the impact
of that on the front pages of our own newspapers, as they
report on the increasing labor unrest in China.
I note, in this book about the official Catholic Church in
Shanghai today, a few of their activities. There is a home for
the elderly; there is a school that trains disabled individuals
in computers; and there is a home for senior citizens.
Is there any indication that there are elements in the
Chinese Government who recognize that religious groups are able
to provide for many of the social services that are so
necessary as one aspect of civil society? Do you see any debate
going on within the Chinese Government about this practical use
of religious organizations?
Maybe, David, you could start out. I would be happy to hear
from anyone.
Mr. Aikman. Yes. Sure. There certainly is a recognition of
the role of charitable organizations. The official Protestant
church in China, for some years, has had a charitable
organization called the Amity Foundation, which has done
similar kinds of things.
So even at an official level, there has been an
appreciation of the fact that religious groups can perform
social welfare functions that the State either cannot afford to
fulfill, or does not wish to fulfill.
It is also clear that, at fairly high levels in the Chinese
Government, there is an appreciation that this is actually a
good thing. Christians privately, these actually non-official
Christians, contributed huge amounts of money after the
disastrous floods in China in 1999, I think it was.
But it is a two-edged sword for the Chinese Government. If
you start permitting private charitable groups to operate,
where do you draw the line?
The Chinese Communist Party, I am sure, every night goes to
bed thinking about a famous quotation from Vladimir Lenin, who
said, ``Trust is good, but control is better.'' No Communist
Party in history has ever been willing to allow social groups
to arise that would challenge its claim to be the legitimate
interpreter of history's currents.
That is as true of the Communist Party today in China,
which seems at one level to have embraced capitalism, as it has
been true, for example, in places like North Korea, which is
far more Stalinist in its interpretation of how Communism
operates.
Mr. Wolf. Paul.
Mr. Marshall. With registered churches, Protestant and
Catholic, there is the possibility of social work, even youth
camps, things of this kind, but it is restricted to them. So, I
am not sure there is too much arguing debate about that,
except, how far can it go?
In terms of debates within the Chinese Government, there
are indications that there are debates about the crackdown on
religions. Why is so much effort being put into repressing
groups and people who are fully peaceful and, in most other
respects, model citizens? I think Deng Xiaoping once remarked
that Chinese Christians make very good Communists because they
tended to work hard and be honest.
So, there are questions that, particularly on entry into
the World Trade Organization, with worker unrest and things of
this kind, why are we putting so much energy into repressing
groups who are either doing breathing exercises in parks or
getting together to sing hymns in houses? There are more
important problems facing China. So, that debate does occur.
There are questions about this type of crackdown.
Mr. Wolf. Mr. Kung.
Mr. Kung. I believe that the book you are reading is
published by the Patriotic Association Church. And as the
Patriotic Association Church is under the sanction of the
Chinese Government, they can do whatever they want to do, as
long as it is in line with the policy of the Chinese
Government.
Unfortunately, the underground church is not allowed to do
anything. They are not allowed to be worshipping, they are not
allowed to do any pastoral work openly. Everything is under
secret arrangement. Even with that, the underground church
itself has charity work.
For instance, the bishop who was arrested 5 days ago, he
operates an orphanage, taking care of 100 handicapped children,
starting from babies to early teens. There is great stress of
having to play games with the Chinese Communists, they know
that this is an orphanage. It is sort of a ``one eye open, one
eye closed'' approach.
Mr. Wolf. OK. Thank you.
Next is John Foarde who is Deputy Staff Director.
Mr. Foarde. First of all, I would like to thank all four of
our panelists today for your very clear, very eloquent, and
very disturbing testimony.
Ira, I think I am going to reserve my questions until the
end of our session, because we have a number of colleagues here
that will want to ask questions of our panelists.
Mr. Wolf. All right. Sharon Payt, with Senator Brownback.
Ms. Payt. Thank you, Ira. Also, thank you, panel, for your
excellent testimony.
As you know, Senator Brownback is deeply committed to
religious liberty issues in China. The last thing he commented
to me before he left for the break, was to solicit advice on
long-term solutions for challenging religious persecution in
China, and that is my request to you.
But before you start on that, and I know this is a rather
large order, I would like to make a few observations.
First of all, we are also very concerned about Pastor
Dengsheng Gong, and whether or not he is going to be executed
in the dark, in a corner, when no one is looking and when the
phone calls have stopped. This is our concern. Could you also
address that? These are my two primary questions.
One observation. The first time I went to China, I met with
the underground house church leaders. It was an incredible
experience. In my last 10 years of doing work in religious
persecution advocacy internationally, I have never met such a
self-sacrificial group, more humble, more committed than these
underground religious communities in China.
They are really extraordinary people. I think they are hero
of hero types, and they deserve every bit of advocacy we can
give them. Of course, Senator Brownback is deeply committed to
free trade, but we also believe that this poses both an
opportunity and a responsibility to challenge the persecution
practices in China.
One of the people that I met there, just finishing here
quickly--actually, two. There was a man and a woman. They were
both evangelists. They were itinerant evangelists in a non-
denominational Christian church.
They had come from the north, I was in the south, so that
they could shake the police, the Public Security Bureau. We
were meeting underneath a tree, hidden somewhere in a park, way
in the corner.
I asked what their life was like. They said, well, they
were separate, even though they had been married. They came
down together, but they lived separate lives. They lived on the
road. They could not have a home.
He could not go back to see his mother. His mother was
dying. He had not seen her in several years, because if he went
back the Public Security Bureau would have picked him up. They
knew that he was concerned about his mother.
They would always live on the run. They would never be able
to settle down. They could never stay longer than 1 week in a
given village, because then the Communist committees would find
out and turn them in. This is their life. This is how they
anticipated they would die, too. This is the new underground
church.
I just wanted to salute them, because I am leaving the
Senator's office, after a short 5 years of advocacy, and I
wanted to thank you all for your amazing help.
And if you could answer the questions.
Mr. Aikman. Thank you, Sharon. Let me take the opportunity
of thanking Sharon Payt for her extraordinary work on behalf of
Christian believers, and other believers, undergoing
persecution in many different parts of the world in her
capacity as legislative aide to Senator Brownback.
I fully commend you for that and support your eloquent
description of unregistered church leaders in China. It is, in
a way, from a Christian point of view, like encountering people
living out the book of Acts, the combination of, if you would
like, divine leading, persecution, witnessing, miraculous
events. It is an amazing phenomenon.
I believe in a polyphonic approach to China. There is
nothing wrong with a sledgehammer, but there is also nothing
wrong with a rapier, either. There is nothing wrong with a
feather duster, if the feather duster sometimes works in
certain circumstances as effectively as a sledgehammer or a
rapier.
By polyphonic, I mean it is revealing that many of the
senior house church leaders, at least the Protestant ones, and
I am sure this is probably true in the Catholic case, too,
supported American approval of China's entry into the World
Trade Organization because they argued that the more open or
the more accessible China as a society was, the less problems
they ran into from the local authorities. I would say that that
is probably an accurate judgment, from their perspective.
But polyphonic involves, at times, speaking very loudly,
sometimes speaking rather rudely. Rudeness is sometimes an
effective way of getting a person's attention.
It certainly means the formulation of policies that would
be encouraging to any Chinese organization not only to foreign
corporations that are sympathetic to the practice of religious
freedom, but also to Chinese Government agencies.
I think we should encourage corporations to invest in
provinces that have better records of religious freedom than
nearby provinces that do not. Thank you.
Mr. Marshall. Just on Pastor Gong, his case is a very
important one, for a few reasons. One, obviously, he is still
under a death sentence, though the implementation of that has
been delayed. Whereas, members of other religious groups have
been executed, the use of the death sentence against Christian
groups is highly unusual. In the 1990's, that did not happen,
except for possibly one case.
So, it would be a major repressive step if the Chinese
Government then began to do that. So, for that reason, this is
a particular case which the U.S. Government should keep
raising. Otherwise, if he disappears from our sight, he may
disappear from everybody's sight.
Ms. Payt. How do we ensure or how do we monitor that
effectively, making sure that he does not get executed some
night when no one is looking.
Mr. Marshall. By continually raising the question and, I
think, asking to see him. The Chinese Government does not like
that. But keep raising the question. We would like to visit
him, and other people, too.
Ms. Payt. Thank you.
Mr. Wolf. I think Sharon's question about long-term
recommendations for the U.S. Government is very important and
of interest to all of us, so I hope you will weave it into some
of the answers as we go along.
Next is Teresa McNeil representing Assistant Secretary
Kelly.
Ms. McNeil. A question for Mr. Quigley. You mentioned that
the bishop in Hong Kong had noted that control seemed to be
showing signs of wear, and the Patriotic Church seems to be,
perhaps, losing a bit of control. How would you account for
that trend?
Mr. Quigley. Well, it really receives almost no heartfelt
support from the members within it. That is, the people in the
registered church are not happy with the CCPA. It is a
controlling agency.
The Bishops of the open church do consider themselves to be
authentic bishops of the Catholic Church. They pray for the
Pope regularly. They recognize they cannot be in visible union
with him, although at least three-quarters, if not more of
them, have in fact been quietly reconciled with the Holy See.
But one of the reasons the Patriotic Association fears the
restoration of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and
China, is that the Patriotic Association will become
meaningless. It will be absolutely unnecessary if there is a
way in which the universal Catholic Church can deal with the
church in China.
So it is, in some ways, some would say, on its last legs.
It is still going to be fighting. The ordination of the bishops
at Epiphany 2 years ago was an example of that, a very ill-
timed and kind of an aggressive way of rejecting the Vatican in
a public way.
But the majority of the bishops are not of that mind. Once
the situation loosens, once there is the possibility of a
diplomatic presence, or at least a representative of the
Vatican in Beijing, then I think you will see a more rapid
weakening of the influence of the Patriotic Association.
I do not know if that is true with the Three Self Movement.
I do not know how threatened it is by other forces within China
or whether it is content to continue with the relationship it
presently has.
Ms. McNeil. Thank you.
A question for Mr. Aikman. You talked a lot about regional
differences, places where the authorities are either better
able or more inclined to crack down. He also talked about how
one of your recommendations might be that people are encouraged
to invest in areas where there is less of a crackdown, there is
more freedom.
Could you talk a little bit more about that? Do the areas
where the authorities seem less able or inclined to crack down
correspond with those areas of China that have been prospering
in the last couple of decades?
Mr. Aikman. It varies. For example, Roman Catholics are
very numerous in Hebei Province. That, of course, has been
where the worst crackdowns seem to have taken place.
The Protestant house churches, the unregistered
Protestants, have been strongest, as I have mentioned, in
Hunan, which has not, by and large, been the focus of extensive
foreign investment.
But if you go down to Fujian Province opposite Taiwan, for
example, you have a huge amount of foreign trade and foreign
investment, much of it by the Taiwan Chinese, by overseas
Chinese, and all kinds of strange loopholes where you actually
have Christian schools that are not part of the Three Self
association. Protestant Christian schools are legally
operating.
Now, whether or not Beijing knows, or Mr. Ye Shaowen of the
Religious Affairs Bureau, I do not know. I hope they do not
tell him.
So it is very strange. I would advocate something close to
the equivalent of what the Sullivan rules were for American
corporations doing business in South Africa during the
apartheid regime, where you basically--and you have to do this
by a combination of legal measures, perhaps government
regulation, I am not sure what--but more often moral pressure
within the corporation by shareholders saying, we do not want
you to invest our company's capital in such and such a place
because this is what has happened in that county of China in
terms of religious believers and curtailment of belief or
persecution.
On the other hand, we know that such and such a province
has done a pretty good job, by and large. We encourage you to
go there. Chinese provincial leaders are nothing if not
extremely pragmatic.
I do not think it would take too much of this to begin to
see the opening up at the provincial level of opportunities of
religious freedom that did not previously exist because of a
very subtle form of economic pressure.
Mr. Wolf. Next is Mike Castellano with Congressman Levin.
Mr. Castellano. The first question is directed at Mr.
Quigley. You discussed efforts by the Holy See to increase its
presence, whether officially or unofficially, in China. I am
just wondering if you sought U.S. Government assistance in that
effort, and if so, how would you characterize that assistance?
Mr. Quigley. That is a very delicate question. In fact,
President Bush, as I mentioned in the testimony, did raise the
issue and urged President Jiang to open dialog with the
Vatican. There is a dialog of sorts. There have been some
conversations, basically fruitless so far.
We, in our bishops conference, have encouraged the U.S.
Government. We wrote to President Bush before both of those
visits urging him to raise these kinds of questions.
On the other hand, I think we have to recognize that there
is a potential down side to that, that if the Chinese
authorities believe that, in fact, by opening up a dialog with
the Vatican, they are being pressured by the United States
Government, they may see this as less a religious issue and see
it more in its political terms. It has its political aspect,
obviously.
But we do encourage the quiet diplomacy of the United
States in trying to present reasons why, as I mentioned in the
testimony, it might be more in the interests of the Chinese to
open up some kind of dialog with the Vatican, to allow for
interpretation of what is going on within the church in China
to be made by such a representative.
I think it is fair to say that the Chinese authorities,
with their history of misrepresenting to a certain extent the
history of Christianity in China in the past and not being,
except for a few persons, well-versed on what is this thing,
the Catholic church, the Protestant churches, and so on, and
religion in general, that they are in need of a certain amount
of education in the sense of learning more about what these
groups represent.
So it will be to their advantage to have a more open
relationship with somebody from the Catholic Church outside of
the Chinese context. That is, someone from the Vatican.
Mr. Castellano. Thank you.
This is for any of you all, picking up on Sharon's
questions. We often hear about rule of law versus rule by law.
It seems like China does a pretty good job on the rule by law
side of the equation.
I am just wondering if there are any particular laws that
are used that you think, the repeal of which, might assist the
freedom of religion in China.
Mr. Marshall. I think, especially as mentioned before, the
1999 cult law. There was repression of unregistered groups
before that, but the laws governing that were milder in
American terms.
Part of the testimony which I did not read says it was sort
of like a misdemeanor, where you could get a couple of years in
prison. Now, it becomes a national security issue.
So laws of 1999 are a particular problem in ratcheting up
the level of penalties against those groups designated as
cults. Just to add, I do not believe you should designate any
groups a cult, even if you find their views weird. But many of
the groups which are designated as cults in China would be
mainstream religious groups in the United States.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks. Bob Shepard with the Department of Labor.
Mr. Shepard. Dr. Marshall, you noted in your conclusion
that the United States Government should ensure that United
States companies doing business in China do not engage in
practices that would facilitate violations of religious
freedom.
Without getting into specific companies, has that been a
policy of the Chinese Government in any way to lean on
companies or employees of companies?
Mr. Marshall. I am not sure there is a specific policy that
stated, we will do this. But any person in China, and any
company operating there, the Chinese Government would want it
to report, would require it to report, any activities it sees
which the Chinese Government says are illegal.
So, that would be an expectation of the Chinese Government.
I know of no particular instances that have been publicized
where that has been the case, but this would be an ongoing
expectation. If it is, in fact, happening, I would like to make
sure it does not happen and make this a stated policy.
As with the World Trade Organization, we expect this amount
of activity to increase. There have been cases. There is one
case, and I would need to go back and get the details, where
someone was fired by a United States company for religious
activities which the Chinese Government said were illegal. This
is apart from any charges or whatever, it was simply a
government determination about this person, so the company let
them go.
Mr. Shepard. This is for any of you. It appears, based on
the absence of any mention in any of your statements, that the
expatriate communities in China seem to be more or less exempt
from the treatment given to Chinese who are followers of
religions. Is that true? I did not hear any mention of it.
Mr. Aikman. A friend of mine was the Consul General of a
major western power, not the United States, in Shanghai in
charge, as an organizer, of a group of international people
living in Shanghai who had a worship service in a hotel which
they had conducted for several months with no problem at all,
with full permission from the hotel. The authorities knew about
it.
All of a sudden, I think this was probably in the year
2000, one December day the police came in and said, this church
service has to stop now. Now, this was foreigners.
To my knowledge, there were not any Chinese present. But
for some reason, somebody had gotten offended by what was going
on. It was demonstrating too much independence of religious
activity. They were ordered to stop, and it was not resumed.
Mr. Kung. I want to add something. There are at least more
than 1,000 foreign priests in China teaching English, and they
are not doing any pastoral work, anything like that. They are
not even allowed to show their collars. If any one of those
people starts evangelizing people, if they are found out, they
will be kicked out so fast, before you know it.
Mr. Shepard. One final question. Are there other countries
that have put religious freedom high on their agendas to the
extent that the United States has that you work with, or whose
representatives you deal with?
Mr. Marshall. I do not know any country which has put as
great as stress as the United States, or who has passed
legislation in this regard. Countries such as the Netherlands
and Ireland--this is often a thing they raise in international
forums, so there is particular commitment there. But generally,
it is the United States, which is far stronger.
I would just add one thing. This is not on religious
freedom, per se, but on human rights in general. The French now
have an ambassador for human rights. I was talking with him
last month. He said, we do not like to say this, but we are
adopting the American model and we have looked at it and think
that it is fairly good. So, the United States, on this, is not
out of line, but out front.
Mr. Kung. I think the Vatican places freedom of religion at
the top of its agenda.
Mr. Aikman. If I could just comment on the problem of
certain countries. Unfortunately, part of the Chinese
implementation of the cult law was based upon advice by
European parliamentarians who have indeed conducted a crackdown
on what they consider non-mainstream religious activity in
Europe.
So sometimes the Chinese officials explain to foreigners
who complain about their cults, well, listen, the French say it
is all right, the Belgians say it is all right. So, if these
modern Western countries do not like cults either, why are you
complaining that we are doing the same thing?
Mr. Quigley. Let me just add, I agree with all of the
previous. I think it is worth noting that the salience of
religious freedom, as an issue within the human rights
community, is growing all the time.
When the major human rights organizations like Amnesty and
Human Rights Watch, and so on, were founded, they paid almost
no attention to religious freedom. That was not an issue. It
was not on the table at all.
Partly because of the work of Paul Marshall's group and
others, that has now become much more accepted and is, in fact,
growing. So, I think other European countries, including the
French, who in their cult laws decided they wanted to think of
the Jesuits, perhaps, as a cult----
Mr. Aikman. Baptists.
Mr. Quigley. And Baptists, and others, and the Russians
have done very much the same thing, with simply
misunderstanding or not understanding the nature of various
kinds of groupings. But clearly, human rights and religious
freedom issues have taken a major leap forward in the United
States, as Paul said, much more than anybody else. But I think
the rest will come along.
Mr. Wolf. I think that is an interesting comment. You can
make the same argument on labor rights--that if you go back 5
to 10 years, it was not a significant theme in the human rights
community, much to the chagrin of the labor movement in the
United States. Now it is front and center with other human
rights issues.
Next is Karin Finkler with Congressman Pitts.
Ms. Finkler. Thank you all for your testimony.
Two questions. First, is how effective is it to ask to go
visit prisoners? We have tried to do that before with little or
no luck, so I would appreciate your comments on that.
Also, in terms of your observations of China over the past
however many years, with what you see right now, what would you
surmise is going to be the trend in the next 5 to 10 years in
light of the current actions of the Chinese Government?
David, go ahead.
Mr. Aikman. I will start off. I am sure I am not alone in
responding to this. I would say, keep knocking on the door all
the time. Keep sending postcards and letters. If you send a
postcard protesting the government policy of a Communist Party
state, they are so bureaucratic, that somebody has to make a
note of who it came from and what it said, and it infuriates
them. There is nothing like infuriating a bureaucrat for
changing or opening the door just a little bit. So, keep
knocking, keep asking. Eventually, they will let you in.
The future of China? Boy, people have lost their careers by
responding to that question. But China is very conscious that
it is in the world spotlight in the years leading up to the
Olympic Games in 2008. I personally very much supported that
decision, for all kinds of reasons I will not go into now.
There is a big anniversary coming up. The year 2007 is the
200th anniversary of the first Protestant missionary, Robert
Morrison, in China. The Chinese unregistered house churches
very much want to honor that occasion. So, we are going to see
all kinds of things happening.
There is some very interesting cooperation now between
unregistered house church leaders and people at middle levels
of the Three Self Patriotic Church, that is, the official
Protestant church, which is not authorized by the head of the
Religious Affairs Bureau, much less by the Communist Party.
I think this shows a moving together of the Three Self
clergy who support unfettered religious activity, and the house
church leaders themselves who obviously seek to move in that
direction.
Mr. Marshall. Again, on requests to see prisoners, if they
keep saying no, that means somewhere else they are going to
have to say yes. If you just have a no, no, no, you are
annoying somebody. So, that pressure will show at some point.
I will talk about not what the future is, but what some of
the trends are now. I mean, in the last year or two you are
seeing fewer controls on the registered churches. Their
possibilities are opening up more, using a carrot to try and
get the unregistered to join them. Then there is more
repression of the unregistered, particularly those described as
cults.
The other trend is also, as David mentioned before, this is
uneven across the country. The Chinese Government has said,
when bad things happen it is just local officials doing bad
things. That is not the case. This is centrally directed and
organized, but the locals often ignore it.
It is the fact that local officials do not go with the
national campaign. There are areas, particularly in the coastal
zones and in the south, where unregistered underground activity
is, in some places, not cracked down on.
So you are seeing quite a few different lines going on at
the same time. I think this indicates tensions and differences
within the leadership dealing with religion. So, I think the
real possibility is there to sort of help wean the Chinese
Government away from arresting people who are engaged in
peaceful activity and divert resources to the many real
problems they face.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks. Mr. Kung.
Mr. Kung. Very quickly. I think we are talking about
knocking on the door and sending postcards. They are all
important. But I think one of the very important ingredients we
did not mention, is we are all religious believers right here
and we really have to pray. Pray very hard for this.
Mr. Wolf. Thank you.
Holly Vineyard with the Commerce Department.
Ms. Vineyard. Thank you all for coming in today.
I am wondering if you could comment on, if you have seen
any changes in Hong Kong since 1997 since the hand-over.
Mr. Aikman. As a former pessimist about the future of Hong
Kong under its new status as a special autonomous region, I
have to admit, some of my worst fears have not been borne out
at all. I think Hong Kong has done surprisingly well in terms
of, by and large, most details of daily life have not come
under the kind of control that we might have expected, or I
certainly feared might be the case.
There are some problems with Hong Kong relating to the rule
of law and the fact that the Hong Kong Government has basically
decided to use the National People's Congress, in effect, as
its ultimate supreme court, ignoring the Hong Kong
constitutional provisions of its own supreme court with common
law justices brought in from other common law jurisdictions.
But I have been pleasantly surprised by the fact that Hong Kong
has done quite well.
Mr. Quigley. I usually take the more optimistic view. But
on this one instance, in terms of Hong Kong, I just recently
read interviews with both Bishop Tong, who is the auxiliary
bishop of Hong Kong, and Bishop Zen, who is the coadjutor
archbishop who will succeed when Cardinal Wu steps down. They
each have commented that pressures are building in terms of
turning over schools and other institutions of the church in
Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is an area where there is a great deal of
institutional presence of the Catholic and Protestant churches,
and they are coming under some, not immediate, but foreseeable
pressure to either give up their schools or get out of certain
kinds of activities.
Mr. Kung. One particular incident, along the lines of what
Mr. Quigley is talking about, is about the right to live in
Hong Kong for those immigrants to Hong Kong. As the Hong Kong
Government says, if those children come to Hong Kong, no school
will accept them.
Then the coadjutor bishop, Bishop Joseph Zen, told the
government, if you do not accept them, the Catholic school has
places for them. We will open a school and accept every one of
them. This creates some sort of a reality to the Chinese
Communists of how powerful the Catholic educational structure
is in Hong Kong, because of the built-in educational system by
the religious schools.
Mr. Wolf. Thank you.
Geoff Gleason, with Congressman Frank Wolf.
Mr. Gleason. Thank you very, very much for being here this
afternoon. I have a question related to today's editorial in
the Washington Post that you probably saw, ``Europe and Human
Rights,'' if I can read this.
As the 6-week session got under way at the Human Rights
session last week, none of the commission's 53 members was
prepared to raise the subject of China, even though Beijing's
record of political and religious oppression has grown only
worse in the past year.
Fifty-three countries.
The editorial ends up, ``Now European Governments have 6
weeks to show what their values are.'' But it just strikes me
that there are 53 countries. What types of economic and other
forms of intimidation are used? If each of you could comment on
that, and maybe comment on this editorial.
Mr. Quigley. I do not think I can make any useful comment
on it. Precisely why are these countries today so reluctant to
address the issue of China? It has been on the agenda for the
U.N. for quite some time, the Human Rights Commission.
So, I cannot account for what has happened right now in
terms of these countries that are reluctant to step forward on
this issue. It has been similar with some other countries. The
United States has, as was said earlier, taken the lead in
raising human rights issues in the Geneva meetings. But I am
simply at a loss to know why they are so isolated in this
issue.
Mr. Aikman. I alluded earlier to what I consider a
disturbing trend in European jurisprudence to narrowly define
certain religious activities as cults. The French law basically
left it open for the courts to decide whether a religious group
could be held in contravention of anti-cult law by saying to a
person, you are a sinner, because that imposes emotional stress
upon a person, etc. You know all the arguments.
So, I think within Europe there has been a trend against
the notion of religious freedom, or to put it in more specific
terms, freedom of conscience that we in the United States have
wholeheartedly embraced from generation to generation and still
define as one of the core principles of liberty under the law
within these United States.
Within Europe, you do not have that heartfelt tradition of
celebrating religious freedom, freedom of conscience, that we
have enjoyed in this country. I think it is exhibited in cases,
like the reluctance of European legislators to bring this up.
In fact, somebody told me today that the European
parliament had passed a law yesterday--I did not see this--
which was very restrictive of certain rights of religious
believers.
Mr. Marshall. Obviously, the answer is very complex in
terms of countries' behavior. But one point needs to be borne
in mind. The United States is much larger than any of these
countries, so in many situations the United States, vis-a-vis
China, in talking about economics, we have the clout to do
various things that almost no other country does.
So, in terms of Germany dealing with China, they would say,
there is no act that Germany itself could take which would have
that much effect on China. So, it needs to be coordinated. And
that is extremely difficult. To do it within one country is
hard enough, to coordinate others is very difficult.
So, lack of American presence and leadership is important,
simply because the United States is bigger. People say, why
does America throw its weight around? Well, it has weight.
Everybody throws their weight around if they have got it. It is
a question of whether you have it or not.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks.
John Foarde.
Mr. Foarde. As I suspected when I reserved my questions,
virtually all of the ones that I had jotted down during your
testimony were posed by my colleagues here.
But there is one that I am interested in that is not
necessarily on the same direct topic as the questions you have
just answered. This is really for Mr. Marshall and Mr. Aikman.
Are there any continuities between the Protestant and
evangelical groups that were seen in China before 1949 and the
ones that are becoming more and more active today in China? For
example, the Jesus Family, the Children of God, the Shouters. I
take it there are a number of other ones. Anything that you
could say to help us put this in an historical perspective
would be really useful.
Mr. Aikman. Very definite continuity. All of the largest
networks of Protestant unregistered Christians, the so-called
house churches, can trace a lineage back to either a
missionary, a Western missionary who was in a certain part of
China, or to an indigenous Chinese church that operated before
the Communists came to power in 1949.
One of the reasons for the rapid expansion of Christianity
after 1979, was that the relaxation policy of Deng Xiaoping
freed from prison literally thousands of Roman Catholic and
Protestant clergy, who returned to their communities and took
up where they had been active earlier as leaders of church
groups. So, there is a definite continuity.
Finally, one of the most remarkable things about China in
the Protestant church is the concept of ``Back to Jerusalem.''
Chinese unregistered house church Christians believe their
providential calling is to take the gospel back to where it
started, Jerusalem.
Well, if you look at the map, you are basically looking at
parts of the world which missiologists sometimes refer to as
the 10/40 window, which have been traditionally and
historically extremely hostile to the gospel.
But that movement, the Back to Jerusalem movement, was
specifically founded in the 1940's by indigenous Chinese
Protestant missionary sending agents in part of China.
Mr. Marshall. I have just three things. As David said, most
of these groups trace their roots back before 1950. Second,
when the Chinese Government says there are strange groups,
there are strange beliefs, there are radical groups around,
there are. One reason for this, of course, is these people are
forbidden to have trained clergy. They cannot study and go to
seminaries.
I am not sure the government should be saying what is
orthodox. But if you do want more orthodox Christian views, why
do you not let them have trained clergy, and read, and have
access to books? You are creating the problem of weird beliefs,
you, the government.
A third thing. I am not sure if it is of immediate
political relevance, but given the sense of history, it is
important in China. It also needs to be said that, as far as we
know, the earliest Christians coming to China were Iranian.
They were Nestorians, perhaps in the sixth or seventh century,
maybe before, but at least they had put down roots and
buildings at that point.
So, I think that is important to mention, particularly when
Christianity is called recent or foreign. Obviously, it is
foreign everywhere except Israel and Palestine. But this is
nothing which comes recently to China. It is over 1,000 years
older than Communism in China, for example.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks. We have moved so fast, it is not even 4
o'clock. So I would like to go around one more time. But we are
going to do it really efficiently.
So, 3 minutes instead of 5. A quick question and a little
less historical depth, which is incredibly valuable, but some
quick answers.
I will go first. Is there a difference in the depth of
belief held by members of official churches, either on the
Protestant or the Catholic side, versus the members of the
unofficial churches in China? Joseph.
Mr. Kung. Yes, there is. As far as the Catholic church is
concerned, for instance, there is an underground church that
not only is loyal to the Holy Father, not only do they love the
Holy Father, but they also recognize the Holy Father, the Pope,
is the head of the Universal church. This means they recognize
the administrative, judicial, and legislative authority of the
Pope.
The Patriotic Association, even though they also say they
are loyal to the Pope, they also say they have love for the
Pope, they also say prayers for the Pope, but nevertheless,
they do not recognize the universal administrative,
legislative, and judicial authority of the Pope. That is the
main difference between the underground church and the
Patriotic Association.
Mr. Quigley. I would just say, for one thing, we do not
know a great deal about the internal beliefs and attitudes of
members of either sector of the Catholic Church in China. There
are very few good research studies made of attitudes.
A second factor, is that the second Vatican Council
occurred long after the Communist takeover, so none, or very
little, of the church's changes and developments since the time
of the second Vatican Council in the early 1960's have really
impacted the Catholic Church in China. They have, to some
extent. There is a degree of communication and contact, but it
is not the way it would be under normal circumstances.
So, we know little. The differences between them, I think
we know still less. Joseph Kung is quite correct, in terms of
the attitude taken toward ties with the Holy See.
But I think the beliefs in the Sacraments, for example, and
the basic teachings of the church, they would understand them
from pre-Vatican II days, and probably do not differ very
greatly.
Mr. Wolf. David.
Mr. Aikman. As far as the Protestants go, we actually do
know quite a lot, both about the profession of faith of the
unregistered house church Christians and the official doctrines
approved by the Three Self Patriotic movement authorized by the
Religious Affairs Bureau.
In terms of official belief, there is no question that the
Protestant house church movement is far more evangelical,
explicitly and overtly so. Nevertheless, you do find some Three
Self Patriotic movement pastors and large numbers of lay people
who are very zealous in their faith, who are very evangelical,
and who in fact often have contact, unofficially, of course,
with the unregistered house church leaders.
Mr. Wolf. Thanks.
John.
Mr. Foarde. No questions.
Mr. Wolf. Sharon.
Ms. Payt. I am going to be very brief, I promise you.
What is the impetus, if any, among the different religious
convictions, the Buddhists, the Christians, the Catholics,
Protestants, Falun Gong, and other religious movements to come
together to counter religious persecution?
Mr. Marshall. As far as I know, say, between Buddhists,
Muslims, Christians, and so on, I am not sure about much
contact of that kind. Organizationally, it would just be very
difficult to do, and I am not sure if there is any impetus to
do that.
The documents you are referring to seem very scared by the
fact that different Protestant groups and Protestant and
Catholic groups seem to be teaming up.
Mr. Aikman. I am not aware of any interreligious
cooperation, for example, as Paul suggested between, say,
Buddhists, Muslims, and Christians. There is not that degree of
security, I think, in one's own belief vis-a-vis an all-
powerful State for that thing to arise.
I am sure, once you have got a measure of religious freedom
as we understand it, that sort of thing would happen.
Mr. Quigley. My sense is that the degree of Catholic/
Protestant ecumenism among the open church is very limited,
indeed. It may exist. I think you are quite correct, that there
is a degree of reaching out because of similarities of
situation among the underground churches.
What is also happening though in recent years, is there is
a less tense relationship between the underground and the
overground church within the Catholic Church, partly because
the underground churches recognize that many people within the
open church have been able to stand up to some degree to the
government's edicts.
In the ordination of half a dozen, or five, bishops on
Epiphany 2 years ago, the government had tried to have 12
bishops to match exactly the number that the Pope was ordaining
that day, and many bishops and priests simply refused.
Seminarians that were trucked out the day before to
practice for the singing at the Mass refused to come. So, there
is a degree of getting their back up a little bit in terms of
being under the control of the CCPA.
Mr. Marshall. Remember, also, that people in registered
churches suffer major disabilities. As a religious believer,
you cannot be in the Communist Party, which means you are
barred from access to government jobs and other things of this
kind. So, people who are members of registered groups usually
have a real commitment and belief, otherwise, why set yourself
up for a loss?
Mr. Wolf. Bob Shepard.
Mr. Shepard. Yes. The history of religious persecution is
often about hatred at sort of the grassroots level, people
trying to practice and people in the community seeing the
religious groups or the worshipers as alien to their community.
In China, it seems as if the case is that, from what has
been described and what I have read previously, the persecution
seems mostly the monopoly of the state. Is there a grassroots
hostility? Is that a difficult problem? Are religious groups,
religious people, treated with hostility or as aliens within
their own communities?
Mr. Aikman. There have been examples of hostility by local
communities to the arrival of Christian groups, usually from
people threatened because of access to worship is regarded as
unacceptable, at least by most Protestant evangelical groups.
But one of the interesting reason that I have heard from a
number of sources for the rapid rise of evangelical Protestants
in China, unregistered house churches in the 1980's and 1990's,
was the fact that Communist Party wives had gone to Beijing to
have illnesses fixed up medically, and the hospitals in Beijing
were unable to cope with their illnesses. They would come back
to their locality. This was particularly true in Hunan
Province.
Some dear old Bible lady would come and pray for them, and
whatever you think about prayer and healing is neither here nor
there, but very often these people would actually recover.
Because they were so astounded, often you had house church
groups meeting in the homes of Communist Party cadres.
Sometimes the husband would then be refreshingly--I
remember back in the 1980's, in Beijing, there was a newspaper
article in the Beijing Daily complaining that too many
Communist Party wives were being healed and, therefore, were
sort of becoming advocates of Christianity at the grassroots.
Mr. Wolf. Karin Finkler.
Ms. Finkler. Anything you would like to express that you
have not been able to express?
Mr. Quigley. May I just say one thing on the last question?
I have no evidence for this, but I put it out as a hypothesis.
In terms of popular hostility toward religious groups, just on
the part of people at the base, the Chinese have gone through
the cultural revolution, they know what that created. With that
as a memory, they may well, indeed, be more tolerant of
differences and so on than they were a couple of decades ago.
Mr. Kung. Some of you here may know Mr. Marc Thiessen, who
was the righthand person of Senator Helms before. Recently, he
wrote a splendid article in a magazine called Crisis Magazine.
I have two copies right here.
The title of the article he wrote is, ``A Tale of Two
Bishops.'' He describes the difference between the underground
church and the Patriotic Association. So, it is a very in-depth
analysis or insight. If anybody is interested in reading it, I
will leave it right here.
Mr. Wolf. Thank you.
Geoff Gleason.
Mr. Gleason. When you look into the future, what do you see
in the next 5 or 10 years? I have been working here on Capitol
Hill since 1978 and have heard the argument thousands of times,
that with greater economic prosperity we would see more
personal freedoms. It has been going on and on.
The current administration, the previous administration,
the President's father's administration. Yet, I look in the
Washington Post today and we again see Beijing's record of
political and religious oppression has only grown worse, and
they were just given PNTR. Now you mentioned the next
generation. Maybe after the hardliners are appeased, what
occurs? How much longer is it going to take to see some
progress in this area?
Mr. Quigley. This is a view that the two bishops in Hong
Kong have expressed quite publicly, and I suspect many others
in other ways, that there is a generational shift coming about
in the Party.
If that bodes well, if the change is indeed a positive one,
that over a period of 3 or more years--it certainly is not
going to be immediate--once the new leadership feels confident
that they can, in fact, effect change, we may see that. I
cannot imagine anything happening in the next 12 months, other
than the election of new people.
Mr. Marshall. Again, I do not want to attempt to predict
the future. But the classic way of combining relatively open
markets with authority on governments is fascism. You hold
society together by using a very extreme form of nationalism as
the glue. If you can whip that up, people will coordinate their
activities voluntarily. You can be very popular. China already
has some of those characteristics.
What one might fear, is that those would become full-blown.
So, one aspect of that, particularly in the subjects we are
talking about now, is that xenophobia would become much worse.
So, I am not saying that that is going to happen. That is a
particular danger I see, and we need to be aware of that.
Communism is still used, but functionally it does not explain
much about it.
I do not want to use the term too loosely, but I would
worry about fascist directions in China. I mean, free markets
coordinated in a national goal, held together by ideological
nationalism.
Mr. Wolf. We are going to keep going.
My next question is on the issue of Bibles. The numbers
that you read in the press of Bibles printed and available in
China are enormous. I understand that the purchase of Bibles
must be through organized churches. They are not for sale in
public bookstores.
Is there much leakage, so to speak? Are Bibles there
available to underground church adherents? Can they get Bibles?
And what are the other issues relating to availability of
Bibles?
David, why don't you start, then Mr. Kung.
Mr. Aikman. Bibles are available in some parts of China
through official churches and can be obtained quite easily. The
difficulty, is distribution. Many counties of China do not have
state-authorized churches, and therefore do not have a legal
outlet.
So, if there is a large Christian community there, where
are they going to get their Bibles from? If they send a
delegation to the nearest large town, chances are that their
request for 20,000 Bibles might be met, if not with
incredulity, certainly with a request for their names and
addresses.
So, the problem is in largeness of numbers. Bibles can be,
and indeed are, legally printed in China. You can actually
order 50,000 Bibles from the Amity Press, as long as you pay in
dollars.
The question is, if you rent a truck to carry that stuff,
it is the people who rent the truck out who may report you to
the Public Security Bureau for doing something that is
technically quite legal.
Mr. Kung. One more thing I want to say about it. Plenty of
Bibles are available in China, but the problem is this. The
Patriotic Association printed millions and millions of copies
of Bibles. They alter the Bible where there are references
about the authority of the Pope. They scrape it out. They alter
it. They just scratch it out or scrape it out, with a space
between, leaving a blank.
In my house, I have two copies of the Bible. One is a
genuine Chinese Bible, another one is a Bible from the
Patriotic Association. Even somebody who does not speak
Chinese, who speaks English, could see the difference because
there are blank spaces there.
Mr. Quigley. This is true in the case of the Catechism of
the Catholic Church that was issued a few years ago, and the
Chinese have allowed that to be printed so that you can now buy
the Catechism of the Catholic Church in China. But there were
several sections which were omitted, including those having to
do with Communism.
But, just as Joseph indicates, they did not bother to move
the pages or the paragraphs together, so you see these blank
spots. Therefore, everybody wants to know what was there, and
they will find ways of finding out what was there.
Mr. Wolf. Karin, did you have something?
Ms. Finkler. Yes. My question is in follow-up to your
statement, Mr. Quigley, that in 1 to 3 years there could be a
change.
What do you, and anybody else on the panel, see as positive
things that the U.S. Government could do to encourage those who
would make changes in the next few years?
Mr. Quigley. Well, I think engagement is exactly the right
thing. I do not think that by trying to isolate and not work
with China is going to be of any value, with China, or with
other countries with which we have great differences.
So China's accession to the World Trade Organization, I
think, basically is a positive thing, that they will have to
live by the rules of the WTO, and that is going to be tested
every step of the way.
The question that was raised earlier about whether it is
useful to have the U.S. Government really press on religious
freedom issues is--on religious freedom issues, yes. The
question came up specifically about the matter of the Vatican's
relationship, and that is more delicate, where the U.S.
Government should weigh in on that.
But on human rights issues and religious freedom, I think
we have all indicated that it is a role that organized states
can play both indirectly by its policies toward human rights,
and quite directly. The Ambassador in Beijing did raise the
issue of Bishop Su. I think that can be done over, and over,
and over again.
Just on that point, in terms of engagement with China, I
always tend to say, everybody believes in engagement with China
because the alternative is to try to pretend it does not exist,
or going to war, or something. It is a question of what form is
the engagement.
One of the things I would stress, is continually making
this an irritant. Other things being equal, you do not like to
irritate people. You like to get on well. But in this case,
knowing this is an ongoing concern, I think it was important to
the Chinese that they realized that it was very important to
President Bush. It is important to America, but also to this
particular guy who you are going to have to deal with for at
least another 2\1/2\ years, or whatever.
So the fact that this is always a problem, I think that
this would strengthen those in China who, themselves, see the
attempt to repress religion as being worse than useless.
Ms. Payt. Are there any patterns or trends that you are
noticing from the research you are doing right now on religion
in China?
Mr. Aikman. Well, I think the most interesting pattern, in
a very broad sort of cultural context, is the possibility that
certain aspects of Chinese culture may be significantly and
permanently changed by the large number of Christians, both
Catholic and Protestant.
Just to illustrate this, the city of Wenzhou, which is a
provincial capital of Zhejiang, is believed to have the largest
percentage of Protestant believers in China, maybe as high as
30 percent. I mean, you go there, you see churches everywhere,
and most of them are unofficial. Wenzhou citizens are extremely
diligent business people.
So you have communities of Wenzhou Chinese Christians with
churches in places like Moscow, Paris, Bucharest, Budapest,
Barcelona, and Florence. You even have pastors to illegal
Chinese immigrants in New York from Wenzhou.
I think that, whatever you believe about Christianity or
any other religion, you can put aside for the time being. I
think one of the most fascinating historical questions is, is
China going to make a leap from what I call the historical
determinism of Marxism and Leninism and the sort of ethical
determinism and the hierarchical determinism of the Confucian
tradition, to be an open society with a concept of time as
linear rather than circular--you know, the dynastic cycle,
etc.--and if so, what would be the impact upon a China with a
significantly changed culture if it became the major super
power at the end of the 21st century? It is a very interesting
historical question that is worth posing, even though we
obviously do not have any definitive answers right now.
Ms. Payt. Thank you.
Mr. Wolf. All right.
Please make any concluding statements.
Mr. Quigley. No. I think you have actually exceeded your
goal of ending by before 4:30, and I think you ought to rest on
your laurels. I have no concluding comment to make. Thank you.
Mr. Marshall. Just to reiterate a point I made a few times
in terms of divisions within the Chinese leadership on the
campaign against unregistered religions.
As we said, the campaign is uneven across the country, so
you have got conflicts between local, provincial, and central
officials. Within the central government, many of these
conflicts seem to be of the kind not so much that--there are
people who say, this is inhumane, we should not be doing this.
But probably more common, is saying that this is useless.
Why are we doing this? We have got all of these businesses
that are going to go bankrupt, we have got unemployment, we
have got movement to the city, and we have got police forces
and security officials going around chasing people for singing
hymns in their living room.
That sort of frustration, and that is a very pragmatic
attitude, is something we should try and sort of encourage and
appeal to in our dealing with China.
Mr. Aikman. Nothing further.
Mr. Kung. Three years ago, I think, the Holy Father made a
speech, broadcasted directly to China. In that speech, there
was one sentence that reminded the Chinese Government, all of
these Catholics, even though they are underground, they love
China. They are very patriotic.
I think that is a very important point right now. I am
afraid that the Chinese leadership has a mistaken idea that
those Christians do not love China, and they are not patriotic.
That is why the persecution is going on.
Mr. Wolf. Well, thank you. We want to thank all four of you
very much. This is a critically important issue, and you have
all added a lot to our understanding.
We will have a full transcript of this. We will have it
posted on our Web site in about 5 weeks. Anything supplementary
you want to put into the record is welcome. We will both
publish it and post it on our Web site. It will be used as
important input for the report that the Commission will make to
the President and to the Congress in October. This will all go
into that.
So, all I can say is, thank you very, very much for a
superb 2 hours.
[Whereupon, at 4:21 p.m. the roundtable was concluded.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
PREPARED STATEMENTS
----------
Prepared Statement of Thomas E. Quigley
march 25, 2002
Thank you for this opportunity to offer some brief comments on the
issue of religious freedom today, especially with reference to the
Catholic Church in the People's Republic of China. I'll confine my
remarks to several recent developments in China that directly touch on
the role of the Catholic Church there.
catholics in china
First, some numbers. Out of well over a billion people, Chinese
Catholics number roughly 12 million, with some four million of these in
the open or registered Church, roughly eight million in the underground
or unregistered Church. The government, of course, doesn't recognize
the latter, so official figures have it that there are about 100
million ``believers'' in the country--less than 1 percent, surely a
gross undercount--of which 4 million, according to the government, are
Catholic.
The number of Catholics is small, and growing only at a very slow
pace, but 12 million is still far larger than the roughly 3 million
Catholics before the Communist take over. And as Dick Madsen, one of
the best China church-watchers, likes to note, that's a lot more
Catholics than there are in Ireland.
sino-american relations
Let me frame these remarks by several fairly recent events. Last
year, 2001, was significant in a couple of ways for the Church in
China. Just over a year ago, in April, there was the Hainan Island
collision and the downing of the US spy plane, which, coming on the
heels of the Belgrade Embassy, plunged Sino-American relations very low
indeed. But then the plane business was resolved. Secretary Powell went
to Beijing in July, and President Bush planed his State visit to China
for October, coinciding with the APEC meeting in Shanghai.
Then came 9/11, which caused the State visit to be postponed, but
the President still went ahead with a quick Asia trip in October,
enabling him to meet briefly with Jiang in Shanghai, and then finally
to have the postponed State visit just a month ago, in late February.
These US-China visits have a bearing on the matter of religious freedom
because in both his October and his February meetings with Jiang, Mr.
Bush raised quite dramatically the issue of religion, including his own
faith commitment, and pressed Jiang to grant religious liberty, to free
Catholic clergy, especially bishops, who are under detention, and to
pursue dialog with the Vatican, as well as with the Dalai Lama.
dialog with the holy see
The question of encouraging China's dialog with the Holy See is
something that both the Vatican and our bishops' conference have been
urging on our government for some time. The essential goal of the
dialog is the restoration of normal relations between the Holy See and
the People's Republic, relations which the Chinese broke off when they
expelled the Apostolic internuncio, Antonio Riberi, and arrested,
imprisoned, and finally deported all the foreign clergy and religious
in 1951.
But the more immediate, practical goal of such talks, aimed at
allowing a Vatican representative to reside in Beijing, whether or not
full diplomatic relations are restored, is the opportunity for the
Vatican to explain and interpret the sometimes complex reality of the
Church to the Chinese authorities. Thus, when Bishop X is accused of
breaking the law, simply because he declines to have his ministry
governed and controlled by the CCPA--the Chinese Catholic Patriotic
Association--the Papal representative could at least make the case that
the bishop's arrest serves no valid purpose, that it can more likely
lead to popular discontent than to dampen it, that it is in fact
counter-productive to China's desire to be fully accepted into the
world community which places high value on the free expression of
religious belief, and so on. And thus by persistent, diplomatic
pressure, changes in this behavior might eventually come about.
The other effect of 9/11 was, of course, China's signing on in the
war on terrorism, resulting in greatly improved US-PRC relations,
evidenced clearly in the Bush State visit last month. The President
there referred to the relationship as ``constructive and cooperative.''
the ricci symposia
Now, a second set of events, these specifically of the Church, were
the two Ricci meetings last October, one in Beijing (October 14-17) and
one in Rome (October 23-25). They were to commemorate the 400th
anniversary of the arrival in Beijing in 1601 of the great Jesuit
scholar and missionary, Matteo Ricci. There was at the time a flurry of
press speculation that these symposia would herald a major breakthrough
in China's relations with the Church, even rumors that China was about
to let the Holy See set up an apostolic delegation in Beijing. The
speculation was totally groundless, of course, but the Ricci events
produced one of the most dramatic developments in the centuries-long
relationship between the Catholic Church and China.
On the 24th of October, Pope John Paul II issued a statement to the
Sinologists then meeting at Rome's Gregorian University on the theme of
Encounters and Dialogue. In the course of his fairly long discourse,
tracing the story of Ricci's contribution, the Holy Father turned to
the present:
The Chinese people, especially in more recent times, have set
themselves important objectives in the field of social
progress. The Catholic Church for her part regards with respect
this impressive thrust and far-sighted planning, and with
discretion offers her own contribution in the promotion and
defense of the human person, and of the person's values,
spirituality and transcendent vocation. The Church has very
much at heart the values and objectives that are of primary
importance also to modern China: solidarity, peace, social
justice, the wise management of the phenomenon of
globalization, and the civil progress of all peoples.
papal apology
Then, after expressing the Church's affection for the Chinese
people and her desire to be of service for the good of all the people,
and noting the ``long line of generous missionaries'' and the many
works of human development they accomplished down the centuries,
especially in the fields of health care and education, he said the
following:
History, however, reminds us of the unfortunate fact that the
work of members of the Church in China was not always without
error, the bitter fruit of their personal limitations and of
the limits of their action. Moreover their action was often
conditioned by the difficult situations connected with complex
historical events and conflicting political interests. . . .
In certain periods of modern history, a kind of ``protection''
on the part of European political powers not infrequently
resulted in limitations on the Church's very freedom of action
and had negative repercussions for the Church in China. . . .
I feel deep sadness for these errors and limits of the past,
and I regret that in many people these failings may have given
the impression of a lack of respect and esteem for the Chinese
people on the part of the Catholic Church. . . . For all this
I ask the forgiveness and understanding of those who may have
felt hurt in some way by such actions on the part of
Christians.
He concluded by expressing ``the hope that concrete forms of
communication and cooperation between the Holy See and the People's
Republic of China may soon be established.''
the prc response
What was the Chinese government's reaction? Virtual silence, one
might almost say a kind of embarrassed silence, with a spokesman for
the foreign ministry [Sun Yuxi] trucked out to repeat the standard
mantra of the past: ``The Holy see must break relations with Taiwan''
and ``The Vatican must not use religion to interfere in China's
internal affairs.''
Interfering in China's internal affairs is the code term for
China's ignoring its own constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.
It is China's denial of the Church's right to exercise its normal and
customary role of appointing bishops as heads of dioceses all over the
world, and thus a government's interference in the internal affairs of
the Church.
Why were the authorities unable to react more positively to this
quite extraordinary papal apology? For the same reason that they
grossly over-reacted to the October 1, 2000 canonization of the Chinese
martyrs, as a smokescreen to cover over the existing divisions within
the Party. The overriding factor right now is the upcoming Party
Congress this Fall, which is expected to usher in a new, somewhat
younger, leadership. Bishop Joseph Zen, Coadjutor of Hong Kong, holds
out the hope that this new leadership, and the rising of a political
class of even younger people, many of whom will have studied abroad,
will gradually bring about genuine change. Gradually perhaps over a
period of 3 years, he thinks. And change, openness, is the only way to
avoid the bloody outcome that some foresee; ``there are many unhappy
people in China,'' the bishop notes [ZENIT interview, 2/20/02].
religious repression today
In the meantime, religious expression continues to be either
repressed, sometimes brutally, or controlled, although the controls
over the registered Catholic Church are showing signs of wear and
ineffectiveness. The vast majority of all the registered bishops have
been reconciled with Rome, which the government obviously knows. The
power of the Patriotic Association is greatly diminished and given to
sometimes desperate gestures, such as the staged ordination of bishops
on Epiphany 2000, timed to coincide with the Pope's ordaining 12
bishops that same day.
What's the status of religious persecution of Catholics right now?
Over the past months, we've been treated to a kind of good cop-bad cop
reporting on the State of religion in China. The Wall Street Journal in
February claimed that ``China is rethinking its heavy-handed policies
and taking a more tolerant line on mainstream groups.'' But at the same
time, we know of the secret documents smuggled out by officials of the
State Security Ministry and other government agencies that envision a
still tighter crackdown on unauthorized religious groups. And at the
beginning of Lent this year, mid-February, the news agency of the
Vatican's missionary congregation issued a list of some 33 Catholic
bishops and priests known to have been arrested or disappeared or under
house arrest. The best known of these and the one for whom American
ambassador Clark Randt has intervened is Bishop James SU Zhimin of
Baoding, a well-respected figure who has been repeatedly arrested,
released, and re-arrested. His whereabouts is presently unknown.
conclusion
Is the end game in sight- We'll have to wait to see what the new
leadership is like and, if more open to change, how long it will take
for them to consolidate their positions. It seems clear that Jiang's
modest moves for change in 1999 lost out to the hard-liners. The PRC
has now decided that two can play at issuing human rights reports and
has now put out its own report on the dismal human rights record of the
United States, detailing the many perceived violations of human rights
in this country, including, as one chapter has it, ``Wantonly
Infringing upon the Human Rights of Other Countries.''
Those of us who advocate for international human rights and
religious freedom have our work cut out. I cite the instance of a
recent and very detailed policy brief of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, ``Re-balancing United States-China Relations.''
Amidst a wide-ranging list of issues discussed, there is not a word
about human rights, still less about religious freedom.
______
Prepared Statement of Paul Marshall
march 25, 2002
Thank you for the opportunity to join this round table on the issue
of religious freedom in China. Freedom House commends the Commission
for monitoring this issue.
Freedom House's Center for Religious Freedom is alarmed by mounting
repression against the major religious and spiritual groups in China--
Protestant Christians, Roman Catholics, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong,
and Uighur Muslims. Beijing controls the five ``authorized'' religions
(Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Islam and Taoism) by the
Religious Affairs Bureau (RAB), controlled by the United Front Work
Department, itself controlled by the Central Committee of the Communist
Party. In turn, Party officials, by law must be atheists. The RAB
registers and controls Protestant Christians all religious groups
through the Three-Self Patriotic movement and the China Christian
Council, Catholics through the Catholic Patriotic Association and
Bishops Conference, and similar patriotic associations for Buddhists,
Muslims and Taoists. Falun Gong is banned completely.
China's new tactic of labeling religious groups as so-called
``cults'' and then cracking down on them intensifies the repression of
non-approved religion. After China stopped treating religious offenses
as counter-revolutionary, religious offenses were treated as a type of
civil offense, punishable by fines, or by minimal incarceration. This
would be comparable to a ``misdemeanor'' in America (though punishable
by possibly 3 years in a labor camp). With the introduction of the laws
regulating ``heretical cults'' in October 30, 1999, religious offenses
can now be classified as threatening national security, comparable to a
``felony'' in America, and punishable by life sentences or even death.
This tactic has been increasingly employed in the last 2 years, and
government spokespersons maintain that believers are not being
repressed by restrictive religion laws, but are criminals disrupting
public and social order laws.
The result of these developments has been a marked deterioration in
religious freedom in China over the last year and in particular since
Congress approved PNTR. China has not ratified the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The Chinese government has not
provided information or permitted unhindered access to religious
leaders who are in prison, in detention, under house arrest, or under
surveillance.
The heightened crackdown may stem from frustration and political
insecurity as authorities observe the astonishing revival of religion
throughout China particularly through unsanctioned groups. Since the
end of the Cultural Revolution, China's Christian churches, registered
and underground, Catholic and Protestant, have been experiencing
explosive growth. Thirteen million Protestants are registered with the
government. Unregistered Protestants may number over 50 million, in
house-churches, so named because services are held in houses.
While this roundtable is focused on Catholics and Protestants, it
is important to raise the situation of Falun Gong, which this month is
facing perhaps its worst repression ever. Falun Gong officials in the
U.S., say:
Police have been ordered to ``shoot on sight'' anyone posting
or handing out written materials for Falun Gong. After
practitioners showed cable TV programs with facts about Falun
Gong on March 5 in the city of Changchun, Jiang Zemin issued a
``Kill Without Mercy'' order. On March 15, Amnesty
International issued an Urgent Action request for ``Falun Gong
practitioners in Changchun City,'' saying, ``Amnesty
International believes they are at serious risk of torture or
ill-treatment . . . police `stop and search' checkpoints have
reportedly been established across the city. . . .''
Consequently, 5000 or more practitioners in the Changchun area
have since been arrested, several practitioners have reportedly
`jumped' or `fallen' from tall buildings when pursued by
police, and police have secretly cremated the bodies of
numerous practitioners tortured to death by police. Latest
reports indicate that more than 100 have died in Changchun in
this spasm of violence by authorities in the past 3 weeks.
We are concerned that some 33 Catholic bishops and priests are in
prison, under house arrest, or under strict police surveillance,
including Bishop Su Zhimin of Baoding in Hebei Province, who
disappeared into custody in 1996. The Vatican's Fides News Service list
13 bishops who have been arrested, as well as 20 priests, and says that
this list is incomplete.
Among Protestants, one of the most striking recent cases is Pastor
Gong Shengliang, who was sentenced to death on December 5 on charges of
operating an ``evil cult'' and on apparently trumped-up charges of rape
and assault. The month-long period for deciding his appeal was extended
on January 5 by a Hubei court following sharp international protest. In
a letter, dated December 31, 2001, members of an underground church in
China describe the torture and abuse that was applied to them by police
to pressure them to testify against Gong:
These few days, all of those arrested have been badly beaten
by the police. Ma and her boy Longfeng were both beaten almost
to death. Li Enhui fell unconscious and was awakened with cold
water and beaten again. They did this to her non-stop for 7
days and 7 nights. Xiao Yajun was also questioned 7 days and 7
nights. On July 20, we heard the news that Yu, who was arrested
in Ma's house, had been tortured to death.
In efforts to find and apprehend Pastor Gong and suppress the South
China Church, police arrested 63 congregants, severely beating at least
25 Christians and torturing some with electric prods. The person whom
the authors write was tortured to death is Yu Zhongju, a young mother,
who had been arrested last May in a private house connected with Pastor
Gong's congregation. She died in police custody in late July, after
having being beaten.
I will focus the rest of my remarks concerning China on what has
been revealed in secret Chinese government documents, released in
February, detailing an official crackdown against large, unregistered
churches and other religious groups nationwide. Copies of the
documents, along with translations, were provided to Freedom House's
Center for Religious Freedom by Mr. Shixiong Li and Mr. Xiqiu (Bob) Fu
of the New York-based Committee for Investigation on Persecution of
Religion in China. Freedom House's Center had the official documents
authenticated by expert and exiled former Chinese government
journalist, Su Xiaokang.
The seven documents, issued between April 1999 and October 2001,
detail the goals and actions of China's national, provincial and local
security officials in repressing religion. (The Freedom House analysis
is available online at: www.freedomhouse.org/religion). They show that
China's government, at the highest levels, aims to repress religious
expression outside its control, and is using more determined,
systematic and harsher criminal penalties in this effort. Hu Jin-tao,
designated as the successor of President Jiang Zemin is quoted in the
document as endorsing the drive against the Real God church. The
Minister of Public Security is quoted giving the order to ``smash the
cult quietly.'' (Document 4).
Ye Xiaowen, the head of China's Religious Affairs Bureau, wrote in
January 2002 that repression is not working and suggested that a more
nuanced approach is needed. In fact, the documents reveal that a
brutal, but more clandestine, approach is being employed to crush
unregistered churches and religious groups.
As a result, normal religious activity is criminalized, and, as the
December death sentences brought against South China Church Pastor Gong
Shengliang and several of his co-workers attest, the directives
outlined in these documents are being carried out with ruthless
determination.
Several documents focus particularly on measures to ``smash'' the
Christian South China church and the Real God Church, which, Chinese
authorities state, rivals Falun Gong in its reach and dangerous
effects. Other documents list several Christian churches, Falun Gong,
the Unification Church, and other banned religious groups. In all, 14
religious groups are identified in Document 1 as ``evil cults.''
The documents indicate that Beijing may feel it is losing its
battle to control religious expression. They note with palpable alarm
that the Real God Church is growing rapidly throughout 22 Chinese
provinces. Document 4 says that ``inner circles'' of the Communist
Party and government officials have secretly joined the banned Real God
Church, and instructs officials to find out who among them are members
of the group.
China is an officially atheist State that arrogates to itself the
authority to define orthodoxy, determine dogma and designate religious
leaders. The documents are notable for their crudeness in understanding
the religions the government purports to control. Revealing a
fundamental misunderstanding or deliberate misinterpretation of the New
Testament, Document 1 uses a basic Christian doctrine that Christ is in
every believer to accuse churches of ``deifying'' their leaders, a
practice defined as ``cult-like.''
Document 2 betrays deep paranoia on the part of Chinese officials.
It raises particular concerns about public unrest over China's entry
into the WTO which it ties to Western support of democracy movements
(``Democratic Party of China''), and religious groupings, especially
Falun Gong; it accuses the Vatican of ``still waiting for any
opportunity to . . . draw the patriotic religious believers up to
them and incite them to rebel.''
In Document 4, ``Praying for world peace,'' ecumenical relations
between churches, printing religious publications, and developing a
diocesan, parish and prayer group-like organizational structure, are
all seen as dangerous activities. Document 4 also views with alarm
ecumenical relations between the Protestant house-church Real God and
the underground Catholic Church. Real God is also said to have ties
with Tiananmen Square student protest leaders, as well as in the
Communist Party and the government.
Measures to be taken against banned religious groups include
surveillance, the deployment of special undercover agents, the
gathering of ``criminal evidence,'' ``complete demolition'' of a
group's organizational system, interrogation, and arrest, as well as
the confiscation of church property, and homes in which meetings are
held. Document 2 repeatedly refers to the use of ``secret agents'' to
infiltrate ``cults,'' underground Catholics, businesses, joint
ventures, people with ``complicated political backgrounds,''
prestigious colleges and universities, and other organizations.
As the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom has
recommended, U.S. policy should press the Chinese government to take
effective steps in the following four areas:
1. End its current crackdown on religious and spiritual groups.
2. Reform its repressive legal framework and establish an effective
mechanism to hold officials accountable for religious-freedom and
related human rights violations.
3. Affirm the universality of religious freedom and China's
international obligations and ratify the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights.
4. Foster a culture of respect for human rights.
The U.S. government's China policy should support and, as
appropriate, fund human rights advocates within China, as well as
those, wherever found, who are promoting the rule of law, legal reform,
and democracy there. The U.S. Government should make sure that Tibetan
and other ethnic minorities, as well as representatives of religious
communities and other nongovernmental organizations, are included in
exchange programs with China.
Through public diplomacy, the United States should directly explain
to the Chinese people this message and the reasons for our concern.
Such efforts should include the expansion of Radio Free Asia and Voice
of America broadcasts throughout China. Since the U.S. permits Chinese
media, including the official Chinese Central Television Company,
access to American markets, we should ensure that U.S. media, including
broadcasting companies, are allowed a similar presence in Chinese
markets. Also, the U.S. Government should ensure that U.S. companies
doing business in China do not engage in practices that would
facilitate violations of religious freedom and other human rights, such
as disclosing employees' religious or spiritual activities or
affiliations to Chinese officials.
______
Prepared Statement of Joseph M.C. Kung
march 25, 2002
Ladies and gentlemen:
When I entered this country 47 years ago in 1955, China was a young
communist country. At that time, the communists were throwing the
bishops, priests and their faithful into jail and labor camp.
Forty-seven years later, China is still a communist country. China
is still throwing the religious believers into jail and labor camp by
thousands. Although China has changed by opening its door to the
outside world, the persecution of religious believers has never
stopped. This persecution has recently become so bad at a time when
China is making significant economic progress, at a time when China has
joined World Trade Organization, and at a time when China professes
fighting terror, while it continues to create its own terror among its
own religious believers.
Since late 1999, the government of China has destroyed 1,200
churches in one eastern province alone. An 82 year old priest, Father
YE Gong-Feng was savagely tortured to unconsciousness and Father LIN
Rengui was beaten so savagely that he vomited blood. Underground
Catholic seminarian Wang Qing was tortured for 3 days, being suspended
by his wrists, beaten, and forced fed with contaminated liquids that
caused severe injury and illness. Catholic priest Hu Duo suffered
broken legs in police beatings. Even a 12 year old girl could not
escape the brutality. She told the interrogators that she had become a
liturgy lector. As a result, she was beaten so savagely that she had to
be hospitalized.
There is a tiny village called Dong Lu in Hebei. In that village,
there is a shrine for the Blessed Mother. Each year, tens of thousands
of pilgrims visited this shrine from all over China. However, in May
1996, 5,000 Chinese soldiers, supported by dozens of armed cars and
helicopters, destroyed and leveled that shrine. The government
confiscated the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary and arrested many
bishops and priests. Bishop Su Chimin, the underground bishop of this
shrine, was arrested at least 5 times in the past and had already spent
approximately 26 years in prison. He disappeared after he was last
arrested in October, 1997. We do not even know if he is dead or alive.
The auxiliary bishop of this shrine, Bishop An Shuxin, was last
arrested in May, 1996. He has been in prison for the last 6 years. We
do not even know where he is. The pastor of this shrine, Father Cui
Xingang, was also arrested 6 years ago in May, 1996.
There are approximately 50 bishops in the underground Roman
Catholic Church. Almost every one of them is either arrested, or under
house arrest, or under strict surveillance, or in hiding, or on the
run. For instance, Bishop Jia Zhiguo, Bishop of Zhengding in Hebei, was
just arrested 5 days ago. We do not know where he is.
Obviously, there is severe on-going persecution of underground
Roman Catholic in China at this time.
The communists took over China in 1949. After 7 years of severe
persecution, the communists failed to stamp out the Catholic Church.
So, in 1957, the Chinese communist government created its own church
called the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association--in order to replace
the Roman Catholic Church in China and to have complete control of the
church.
Although this Patriotic Association's Church calls itself
``Catholic'', it does not take its mandate from the Pope. It takes
orders only from the Chinese Government. It is under the sanction of
the Chinese government. Therefore, it is not persecuted. To this day,
the Patriotic Association continues to openly advocate independence
from the Pope. Our Pope has refused to recognize this Patriotic
Association, or the ``Official Church''.
In contrast, underground Roman Catholics have no public churches in
China because they are illegal there. 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. Religious
services for the Roman Catholic Church can only be secretly conducted
in private homes or deserted fields. The Chinese government deems these
private gatherings of Roman Catholics as illegal, unauthorized,
subversive and punishable by exorbitant fines, detention, house
arrests, jails, labor camps, or even death.
Approximately 5 months ago, Chinese government authorities arrested
underground Bishop Lucas Li of Feng Xiang and 18 underground priests,
and closed an underground monastery and two underground convents. The
reason? The Patriotic Association was coming to town.
The government is now forcing underground Roman Catholics to
register with the Patriotic Association Refusing to do so is now liable
to sentencing to 3 years' labor camp.
Being ordained as an underground Roman Catholic priest and
conducting evangelization without permission from the Chinese
government are now also considered a crime punishable by 3 years in the
labor camps. This punishment is illustrated in a court paper dated
April 13, 2001 and is attached at the back of my speech.
Let me say few words about Cardinal Kung. In fact, no description
of the persecution of religious believers is complete without
mentioning him, because he is a symbol of persecution in China.
Cardinal Kung was the Bishop of Shanghai for 51 years until he died
2 years ago on March 12. He was imprisoned for 32\1/2\ years, mostly
under solitary confinement, because he refused to renounce the Pope.
Pope John Paul II secretly created Bishop Kung a Cardinal in 1979 while
he was still in jail and proclaimed him publicly a Cardinal 12 years
later in 1991 after he arrived in the United States. Cardinal Kung
lived in the United States for 12 years. When Cardinal Kung received
his red hat in the Vatican, he received an unprecedented 7-minutes
standing ovation from 7,500 people. When he died, the Pope called him
``this noble son of China and of the Church.''
In an interview with the Chinese Press in New York on February 12,
1998, Mr. Ye Xiaowen, the director of the Religious Bureau of China,
stated: ``Kung Pin Mei committed a serious crime by dividing the
country and causing harm to its people.'' One month later in March
1998, the Chinese government confiscated the passport of this then 97
year old Cardinal Kung, officially exiling him and making him
stateless.
Why is the Chinese communist government so fearful of this 97-year-
old Cardinal that it had to confiscate his passport to prevent his
return to China? Even after his death, Cardinal Kung was still
persecuted and insulted by the Chinese government. After the Cardinal's
death, the Chinese government issued a statement that ``Kung Pin Mei
was a criminal of China found guilty by the Chinese court. Kung
committed a serious crime of dividing the country and dividing the
church. History will judge him for his crime.'' I believe that history
will indeed judge. However, history will judge that Cardinal Kung is
not a criminal. History will also judge that those religious believers
who have been persecuted by the Chinese government are also not
criminals. The criminals will be those who sent Cardinal Kung to life
imprisonment. The criminals will be those who have been persecuting
millions of Chinese religious believers who only want to practice their
religion according to their conscience, not according to the choice of
the government. The criminal will obviously be the Beijing government.
Thank you.
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