The Chinese Communist government has a long history of religious persecution. “It has always been bad, but it started to get much worse in 2018 when President Xi changed the constitution and became president in perpetuity,” explained Baptist missionary Luigi Bilucaglia, from Québec, Canada, to Michael Zhuang of The Epoch Times. “He [effectively] became emperor, and the Xi dynasty began. They started attacking churches severely at the time.”
Zhuang’s Epoch Times article follows a ChinaAid report, covered here last week. The portrait painted is the opposite of religious tolerance:
Under Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the CCP has implemented an unprecedented suppression of Christians. ChinaAid expressed concern over the CCP’s demanding loyalty to Xi Jinping from state-sanctioned churches, and the situation for “house churches” is much worse.
Under the CCP, the regime implemented the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement,” which organized Christian churches under a CCP-supervised entity. What’s taught at these state-sanctioned churches must be approved by the CCP. On the other hand, house churches, or underground churches, function independently of the state, often in private homes and apartments, and are targeted by the regime.
”Mr. Bilucaglia and his family were expelled from China in late 2021 after he had lived in the country since 2003 as a missionary,” Zhuang relates, and goes on to quote the Canadian Baptist on how the government tried to frame him for espionage.
But the anti-Christian agenda is not just a ramped-up persecution of believers and missionaries, it also entails attempts to change Christian doctrine: ChinaAid’s president insists that “the CCP is trying to rewrite the Bible, changing the text to say that Jesus was a ‘lawbreaker’ and ‘killer.’ This was corroborated by Mr. Bilucaglia’s experience; he said the Party rushed to state churches to buy as many copies of the Bible as they could before they stopped printing the current version.”
The surveillance of Christians is online as well as on-the-street and brick-and-mortar. Christian preachers have explicitly been prohibited from teaching children and university students. The aim is obvious: create an unnatural uniformity of opinion to bolster up the Communist Party’s hegemony.
Christianity is an enduring stumbling block to the formation of a lockstep ideological “consensus” in China, for it is the fastest growing religion in the country.
