Posted by ACN News - Interview on 18/1/2011, 6:54 am
Board Administrator

Persecution of Christians in China Today An interview with Mr. Bob Fu, Director, China Aid China has approximately estimated 80-130 million Christians, 13-20 million Catholics and approximately 70- 110 million Protestant members. Mr. Bob Fu, the Director of China Aid in the USA, was born in 1960 in Shandong Province, in the South East of China, about 12 hours away by train from Beijing. He completed his undergraduate studies in English Literature in Liaocheng University in the Shandong Province and then graduate studies in International Relations in the People's University of China in Beijing. The Tiananmen Square demonstration in 1989 was a decisive moment in his life. (Mr Bob Fu) Q) You were one of the student leaders in Tiananmen Square at that time. Can you tell us what happened? A) Yes, at that moment, along with many other hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, I was in Tiananmen Square and basically protesting the massive corruption in the Chinese government and also pursuing freedom and democracy and human rights. The demonstration – held over several weeks - was met, on the early morning of June 4th 1989, with military tanks and hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army. The soldiers started shooting their own people. I had actually left Tiananmen Square three days before the massacre happened because my then girlfriend, now my wife, was very sick. Q) What happened after the event? A) After the massacre, I was basically under 'soft detention' as they call it. A special team of investigators was formed to investigate and interrogate me day and night and I was not allowed to go to my classes at the university and everyday I was treated like a prisoner; they waited for me to crack and sign a confession. I was also required to report about everybody who was involved in the student movement. Q) Did you, in the end, crack? A) I was not cracked by the Chinese Communist Party, but really cracked by the Holy Spirit. So, I had a revolutionary change in my life. Q) You lost faith in the system? A) Yes, I did because I had put my hope in the system. I tried to be active in the political field and tried to change the Communist party by joining their party activities. Q) You believed in it? A) Yes, I was relying on the system to change the system, but when the PLA stated shooting their own people and innocent lives were shed, all our dreams were broken and from disillusionment to despair I almost committed suicide until I came to know my Lord, Jesus Christ. Q) How did you come to know Jesus? A) It happened during that moment when my life was in crisis. I did not know how I would survive the next phase of the interrogation. I had tried to change others but many of my so-called friends betrayed me by lying in order to show their loyalty to the Communist Party. So I was full of hatred; I wanted to kill them and then kill myself. It was at this moment that somebody gave me a book - a biography about a Chinese Pastor. It was brought in, actually smuggled in by my American Christian teacher who was teaching English at our department. Reading that book turned my life upside down. Q) You just said: “Yes, Lord” A) Yes, and the book narrates about how a former drug addict, a very smart intellectual came to embrace the Christian faith and was totally transformed and became a new creation in Jesus Christ. Q) The Chinese police, the secret police, discovered your Bible school. What happened there? A) Officially I was an English teacher at the Chinese Communist Party School in Beijing. During the daytime I spent several hours a day teaching English to the Communist Party Leaders. The evening and the rest of my time and the weekend was spent and busily training House Pastors - an underground Bible School - until it was discovered by the Chinese secret police. In May 1996, my wife and I were both arrested and put in jail. Q) Imprisoned again. What happened there? How was it for you then? A) It was tough. The first three days and nights, they would not let you sleep at all. It was sleep deprivation in order to break your will and so the interrogators put you in the interrogation room and each interrogator took their turn to interrogate me non-stop. Q) What did they want you to reveal? Was it information or is it simply for you to deny your Christian faith? A) They wanted me to reveal how many Christians were in my House Church. How many students? Where do they come from? Who was providing funding? Who are the teachers? Basically they wanted me to betray my Christian brothers and sisters. They used my wife the same way. They constantly reminded me: “Your wife is in another room. If you do not reveal anything, she will be jailed there.” Q) Did you suffer physical torture? A) Not really that much compared to many House Church Pastors because, at least, I was regarded as a public intellectual. I even have a law degree and I kept on reminding them that they had to obey that law otherwise I would pursue them after I’m released. Q) Like St. Paul declaring: “I’m a Roman”. A) Yes, yes, that is how I reminded them; it was rough, but I would not describe it as torture. They would not let me sleep and I was knocked a few times but that was the extent of the treatment I received. Q) I want to talk a little bit about the Christian communities and how these Christian communities live their faith now. We know, or conservatively estimate, that there are about 70 million Christians. Is that a conservative number; what number could we really be talking about? A) We have learned from the former National Director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA), Mr. Ye Xiaowen, that in 2007 that the number of Chinese Christians has already reached 130 million including the Catholics. So conservatively you can say at least 70 to 130 million. In Beijing alone, I met with a very respected Pastor of the International Church and before he left China, he was informed by the Director of Religious Affairs Bureau that the city of Beijing alone has more than 9000 House Churches. So, the growth is unprecedented: From 1949 when the Communist Party took power, there were less than a million Christians and when we even look at the conservative numbers of 70 million, that is quite a growth within 60 years. Q) And yet the Christians are often violently repressed? A) Yes, and to be fair, in the past 30 years, there have been positive changes and progress not only in economic prosperity, but also in terms of religious freedom, nonetheless, overall, religious freedom is not completely without problems. There is still widespread persecution in many areas of China. Q) You fled China. What prompted you to finally leave your home country? A) We were imprisoned for two months. Because of international pressure and because they were not able to find hard evidence to indict us, we were released. We found that life outside prison was much harder than being inside the prison. We were taken back to the police station time and again and they basically wanted us to be informants. We had to report every phone call, every visitor - it was very tough. One time the security people took my wife and I to a park and they reminded us that they could arrest us anytime. We found out from an inside source that we were on the re-arrest list because of our uncooperativeness. My wife at this time was pregnant and without a pregnancy permission card… Q) Just a little bit of background, what is this pregnancy permission and how does it work in the one child policy? A) The Chinese government has carried out this birth control, or one child policy, based on the theory that: There are limited resources and the only way to make the existing population achieve economic wealth is to limit the size of the population. So they, in general, allow each family to have only one child. So when you want to have your first child after marriage, you are required to get a pregnancy permission card - a yellow card before your wife can legally get pregnant - otherwise you are arrested and are forced to have an abortion. The pregnancy permission card is issued by the woman’s work unit and as my wife, Heidi, was at this time dismissed from her graduate school from the People's University because of her imprisonment, she could not get the pregnancy permission. Q) Permission would simply not have been given? A) No, and we actually tried to find Christian doctors who were working at a hospital in Beijing and we tried one hospital who had a Christian doctor and the doctor simply could not help us because of fear of losing his job if he assisted in caring for my wife. Q) So you were facing an abortion? A) Yes, so we had to escape in the middle of the night by me jumping from the bathroom on the second floor of this tall building. Q) You fled to Hong Kong and then from Hong Kong to the United States? A) Yes, we left Beijing first and hid in the countryside because we did not have a passport or any travel documents imagining that we could never get out of China, but, really, God showed us His miracle and with lots of prayers and plenty of help, we were able to get to Hong Kong and then in 1997 to the United States. Q) I’d like to get back to this question of the one child policy. What impact is this having on the Chinese society? A) I think the impact is manifested in different aspects. Number one: The Chinese traditional concept on the importance of having a boy; every family wants to have a boy and this has already caused a huge imbalance between the male and female populations. Number two: You have a huge crisis of aging parents. One couple now has to support two pairs of parents because of this one child policy. Number three: There is a massive practice of forced sterilization and abortion going on. Last year, there was a report of about 20 million babies, which were aborted and abortion being performed as late as nine months. I, personally, had a phone conversation with a Christian lady, a wife of a Pastor who said that she was in a hospital and was 8 months pregnant and beside her on another bed was a lady who was nine months pregnant. That night 80 pregnant women were forced to have an abortion by poison being injected into the fetus. This is murder on a massive scale. Q) What does this do to the psychology of a nation? A) This is another ramification of such a policy. These women become depressed and the suicide rate is quite high. And this one child policy forces the parents to spoil this one child creating a very self-centered child. Last year, Time magazine had an article on China's one child policy: “China's Me Generation”. This has created a selfish generation - the me, me, me, self-centered generation. The ramification of this policy is just starting to manifest itself and creates another huge social problem. Q) Does funding come from abroad for this one child policy and where is it coming from? A) This one child policy is of course a national central government policy though a large portion of the funding ironically comes from international organizations such as The United Nations Population Fund that has donated hundreds of millions of dollars. The US provides funding and 40 million dollars goes to China to assist in carrying out this one child policy. So, unfortunately, the Western countries are accomplices to this policy. Q) Why is the government so afraid of Christianity? A) Spiritually speaking: Darkness diminishes when the light comes, thus darkness hates the light. Christians demonstrate integrity, love, and forgiveness and to “darkness” this is a challenge and a threat to their hold on power: a struggle between good and evil. In Chinese history Christianity is regarded as something foreign (yang jiao) and the Chinese government, especially the Chinese Communist, adheres to the atheistic - really anti-Christian – ideology. Through political propaganda, they pump up this hate ideology to oppress Christians. They portray Christians as the enemy of the people, collaborating with the West to overthrow the Chinese government and on and on. Even benevolent activities of Christians are not acknowledged or completely disregarded by the government. During the earthquake, Christians who were assisting were arrested because they were simply praying for the victims. So there are different approaches to oppressing and intimidating the Christian communities. I heard that after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the Chinese government became very nervous. Q) Because they see that as an example of what could happen? A) Yes, they said: Yesterday it was their big brother; the next would be the little brother like China. Q) Can the Christian lamb tame the Chinese dragon? Are you hopeful for your Christianity and for your country? A) I’m very hopeful. I think the Gospel of Jesus Christ is unstoppable. Physically you can bind many Christians, throw them in jail or in labor camps but it turns out that God turns these jails and labor camps into harvest fields. So many people have come to know the Lord in these labor camps. Even camp officials have been converted when they saw the light from these Christians in the labor camps. So, I’m very optimistic and I think China in the 21st century will not only be a mission receiving country but also in the foreseeable future China is being prepared to bring the Gospel back to Jerusalem, and maybe become a mission sending country all over the world. So I’m very optimistic. This interview was conducted by Mark Reideman for "Where God Weeps," a weekly television and radio show produced by Catholic Radio and Television Network in conjunction with the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need. On the Net: www.wheregodweeps.org Editor’s Notes Directly under the Holy See, Aid to the Church in Need supports the faithful wherever they are persecuted, oppressed or in pastoral need. ACN is a Catholic charity – helping to bring Christ to the world through prayer, information and action. Founded in 1947 by Fr Werenfried van Straaten, whom Pope John Paul II named “An outstanding Apostle of Charity”, the organisation is now at work in about 130 countries throughout the world. The charity undertakes thousands of projects every year including providing transport for clergy and lay Church workers, construction of church buildings, funding for priests and nuns and help to train seminarians. Since the initiative’s launch in 1979, Aid to the Church in Need’s Child’s Bible – God Speaks to his Children has been translated into 162 languages and 48 million copies have been distributed all over the world. While ACN gives full permission for the media to freely make use of the charity’s press releases, please acknowledge ACN as the source of stories when using the material. For more information or to make a donation to help the work of Aid to the Church in Need, please contact the Australian office of ACN on (02) 9679-1929. e-mail: info@aidtochurch.org or write to Aid to the Church in Need PO Box 6245 Blacktown DC NSW 2148. On Line donations can be made at www.aidtochurch.org