Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, religious believers are seeing their freedoms shrink dramatically even as the country undergoes a religious revival. Experts and activists say that as he consolidates his power, Xi is waging the most severe systematic suppression of Christianity in the country since religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.Most of you have probably heard of the Surveillance State mechanisms in China, using omnipresent cameras and facial recognition software to track people everywhere and in every social or business transaction they make, so that a "Citizen Score" can be calculated.
Fu also provided video footage of what appeared to be piles of burning bibles and forms stating that the signatories had renounced their Christian faith. He said that marked the first time since Mao’s radical 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution that Christians had been compelled to make such declarations, under pain of expulsion from school and the loss of welfare benefits.
A Christian pastor in the Henan city of Nanyang said crosses, bibles and furniture were burned during a raid on his church on Sept. 5. (AP)
Your “citizen score” follows you wherever you go. A high score allows you access to faster internet service or a fast-tracked visa to Europe. If you make political posts online without a permit, or question or contradict the government’s official narrative on current events, however, your score decreases. To calculate the score, private companies working with your government constantly trawl through vast amounts of your social media and online shopping data.Christians are being given a form to sign renouncing their faith and pledging worship to His Royal Exalted Presidential Dictator for Life. If they refuse, the penalty doesn't appear to be physical death, at least not today. It appears the Party sets their citizen score to a low value, making it so they can't keep a good job, and their children can't get into a good school. Your choice would appear to be to abandon your children or lie about your faith.
They don't appear to be following the policy of sending Christians to internment camps for re-education, as has been reported about Chinese Muslims. It may be they simply don't have enough space and are using the camps for what they regard as the bigger threat. According to the Wiki, there's about 20.5 million Muslims in China. In 2011, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life estimated over 67 million Christians in China (pdf warning).
My gut feeling is that this will drive churches underground, where they will survive or probably thrive - which is the historical norm, after all. The China.gov says they're simply trying to "sinicize" the faiths; making them more Chinese. Faiths don't tend to go along with having their central tenets thrown out. In particular, they don't like their God being replaced with a living politician.
Chinese Christian bibles and church items being burned. From the Twitter account of BobFu4China.
Unfortunately China of the 21st Century has unprecedented surveillance capability with the ability to ensure, electronically, an almost seamless non-person status for those it condemns to what amounts to being cast out of society, with Google bringing all the cyber power at its disposal to make it even more airtight.
ReplyDeleteIn light of the video of Google's true feelings about democratic societies I wonder if perhaps they envy Xi? And precisely who is learning from whom?
Even if they don't envy Xi, they're more than complicit with the tyranny.
DeleteIt's arguable Xi and the Chicom government couldn't be as repressive without Google. By now, they might have enough home grown skilled people to do it.
It's not the value of the gift, it's the thought that counts.
DeleteCommies gonna commie.
ReplyDeletePity the fundamentalist faiths in this country don't start tying Google's projects to help China surveil their citizenry online to this exact persecution like a flare to a cat.
I'm thinking tagging Bill Gates Inc. with religious intolerance would go over like, well,...a hooker in church.
I'd not only do it, I'd get every pastor I could to set a fire under Goolag, for that, and homegrown deplatforming of political conservatism.
Gonna facilitate commies, and act like commies, you are commies.
I'm thinking a hand grenade like that in their shorts 24/7/365 would bring Goolag up by the short hairs in about a minute, and take all the fun out of their little progtard games.
While I generally don't like the B word (boycott), Goolag is progressively looking more every day like the best target there is. Since I closed my Book of Faces account years ago, don't do Twatter or Instagram or any other of those "social media" platforms.
Deletetownhall: [China] has roughly 38 million Protestants
ReplyDeleteThat's a large enough number that nobody has an army big enough to force that group to do anything. If they allow their lifestyle to be stripped from them piecemeal, Darwinism says they're losers.
False dichotomy:
DeleteYou're assuming the only weapon used against them is military force.
When you can't get a job except low-wage menial work, thus can't afford to live in anything but a shanty, and nothing is available except out in the countryside of BFChina, and your kids are forced into crap schooling because daddy or mommy is "unreliable", who you gonna shoot? What the military can or cannot do, at that point, is utterly irrelevant.
Read the articles: they aren't rounding these people up, they're simply persecuting them into obedience, and forcing them to either renounce their faith, or face starvation.
This would be the same country that starved and whacked 60-80M citizens, in living memory under Mao.
Getting rid of 38M Protestants would be small potatoes.
Correct, the only weapon used against them is military force.
DeleteSome entrepreneurial Christian guy stands up in the middle of his farm field and says 'Hey! I'm tired of being poor, I'm gonna grow something profitable like pot or opium or coca!' Or stands up in his apartment and says I'm going to sell sex, or gambling, or banking and keep the customer's secrets, or honest health insurance, or build sturdy houses inexpensively, or teach accurate history about the communist party, or make dentures cheaply.
And then the military force of armed government employees shows up to stop it. The economic/political environment the Chinese Christians are in is not natural like the sunshine and the rain, it's man-made by armed government employees.
Do the IRS worksheet about work management independence to determine contractor/employee, and you find doctors and nurses are government employees. I suspect you've worked in unionized environments for so long -- borders are a union idea, it's guild monopoly enforcement -- that the liberty-flavored physically possible alternatives do not readily come to mind.
A lot of those "Christian churches" are Falun Gong. And while the concept of freedom of religion is baked into my soul, I've run into them in China and fund raising in the US. And they're annoying as all get out. They're like a Christian version of the Hari Krishna movement. Sort of a hippie cult group that has adopted a Christian vibe. Are Falun Gong actually protestants? I can't say. I'm not an expert.
ReplyDeleteAnd it's a certainty that there are countless apparatchiks in our government along with industry moguls, the rich and powerful and others who are salivating at the idea of being able to create such a list that gives them the ability to punish, silence and marginalize anyone that doesn't toe their line and drink the kool aid.
ReplyDeleteImagine Chinese Christians or White South Africans loading drones with firebombs and dropping them on the building roofs and electric grid of their oppressors. It's not artillery, but it's more artillery-like than any military tool a minority previously had which individuals could build and run. How much in city activity disruption does it cost to re-string that tall electric grid wire every week? Do this enough to make tax collection cost more in destroyed infrastructure than it collects. Soon enough the border-enforcers will stop being supported by the rest of their herd because the joy of oppressing out-group humans isn't worth the lifestyle disruption. MLK won his civil rights conflict.
ReplyDelete