The Persecution of Faith in China

Professor Sen Nieh has been with the Catholic University of America, Washington DC since 1983. He has received the lectureship award of United Nations’ Development Program and honorary professorship awards from 3 universities in China. He gave the following speech at a seminar, “Communism and Human Rights in China,” in Stockholm, Sweden.

The faith-based groups in China, basically, include religions and belief systems. The most recognized religions in China include Buddhism of different sects, Tibetan Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, Catholicity, Islam, etc. The belief systems, or ways of life, include the traditional Confucianism and some qigong groups made known in recent years, such as Falun Gong.

In the past 56 years (1949 – 2005) of rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), hundreds of millions of members of faith-based groups have faced the most serious violations of human rights and suppression of freedom in Chinese history. The persecution of each of the aforementioned groups can be a subject for a semester-long college course and can easily be documented into several volumes of thick reports. With the limited space allocated I can only touch briefly on the persecution of some of the groups, and provide a summary and perhaps offer some hope.

Why Persecution?

The 5,000-year long tradition of Chinese culture was primarily based on the “faith” of people of all walks of life. Confucianism was the part of the traditional Chinese culture that focused on “entering the mundane world”; Buddhism and Taoism, on the other hand, represented the part of the traditional Chinese culture that focused on “leaving the mundane world”. Influences of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism have penetrated all aspects of Chinese peoples’ lives in the past two thousand years. They offer a very stable moral system, ethical values, and spiritual pursuit. Collectively, they provide the basis for sustainability, peace, and harmony of the Chinese society.

Originating from Europe, the philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) completely contradicts traditional Chinese culture and belief. The CCP believes in atheism, namely no God, no Buddha, no Tao, and no supernatural beings. In their eyes, the faith-based groups are major obstacles to this party’s pursuit of dictatorship and a challenge to the legitimacy of its ruling.

Eradicating Traditional Religions and Belief Systems

Ever since the CCP took control of China it started to root out the three traditional religions or belief systems: Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. It destroyed temples, burned scriptures, and forced monks and nuns to return to secular life. By the early 1960s, the three religions or belief systems were mostly destroyed. During the 10-years of Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976) it became even worse, what was left of the traditional religions, belief systems, and all other remaining faith-based groups experienced the darkest time and the greatest catastrophic destruction.

For example there were 1,000 beautiful, colored, glazed Buddha statues in Longevity Hill in the Summer Palace in Beijing city. During the Cultural Revolution, the “red guards” destroyed them all, leaving no complete statues.

In addition to physical damages, the CCP had a special way to destroy religions, namely sending the underground CCP members to infiltrate religion directly and subvert it from within. In mid-1970, the Vice-President of the Buddhist Association in China, Mr. Zhao Puchu was found to be a CCP member, an atheist and not a believer of Buddha Shakyamuni.

Persecution of Christians

Since the communists gained power in 1949, the Christians in China were forced to join the so-called “3-Self Church”, to break away from “imperialism,” to be patriotic to the communist regime over Christ, and to actively join in the war fighting against the US in Korea. The top leader of the 3-Self Church, Mr. Wu Yaozong, once stated in public, “I do not believe in the miracles Jesus had performed. I have discarded them all.” How can a person, who does not believe in miracles, in heaven, in Jesus Christ, be a genuine Christian? How can a CCP member serve well as a leader of Christians?

Over the years, the communists in China confiscated tens of thousands of churches and temples, forced Christians, Catholics, Buddhist monks and nuns, etc., to study Communism, Marxism-Leninism, and brain-washed most true believers. In some areas in China, they even forced nuns to get married and young monks to join the military. Various groups of Christians, Catholics, Buddhists, Taoists, etc. in China were largely disintegrated under violent suppression by the CCP. Many leaders were detained, jailed, tortured, or killed; the followers were forced to return to secular life or turned into “illegal” groups, the so-called underground House Churches.

According to a recent report of comprehensive surveys of more than 200 cities in China, it is estimated that there are about 60 million Christians of Underground Churches in China today. Over the half-century of the CCP’s ruling, 2.7 million (or 1 out of 22) Christians have been arbitrarily detained, 440,000 plus were sent to the forced labor camps or the so called “re-education” camps, 1.1 million were fined large sums of money, 20,000 plus were tortured until permanently injured, and more than 10,000 were persecuted to death.

Persecution of Falun Gong

During the last decade, many qigong groups were cracked down upon by the communists in China. Since July 1999, the communist regime led by the former president Jiang Zemin, started its brutal persecution of a large qigong group of 100 million practitioners, Falun Gong (or Falun Dafa), which is based on the belief of “Truth, Compassion, Tolerance”.

[Professor Sen Nieh then read an excerpt from the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, first published by The Epoch Times in November 2004].

“Ms. Zhang Fuzhen, about 38 years old, was an employee of Xianhe Park, Pingdu City, Shandong Province, China. She went to Beijing to appeal for Falun Gong in November 2000 and was later abducted by the authorities. According to people with knowledge of the case, the police tortured and humiliated her, stripping her naked and shaving her whole head. She was asked repeatedly to give up the practice of Falun Gong and her belief of Truth-Compassion-Tolerance but she refused. They tied her to a bed with her four limbs stretched out, and she therefore was forced to relieve herself on the bed. Later, the police gave her an injection of an unknown poisonous drug. After the injection, Zhang was in so much pain that she nearly went insane. She struggled in great pain on the bed until she died. The whole process was witnessed by the local officials of the 6-10 Office (a Gestapo like office created to persecute Falun Gong practitioners).” [End of excerpt]

Ms. Zhang was only one out of hundreds of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners who have suffered the cruelest methods of torture. Torture methods include electric shocks with 1 to 10 or more electric batons of 10,000 plus volts, burning with cigarettes; beating breasts and genital areas, rape and gang-rape of female practitioners, locked-up in dungeons filled with sewage for days or weeks, wearing straight jackets, injection of poisonous drugs, confinement in mental hospitals, etc.

This on-going persecution has directly affected 100 million people and indirectly affected 300 plus millions (or a quarter of the population). Millions of families were broken, adults were wandering and suffering on the streets (to escape arrest), children and senior citizens were left unattended at home as hardships and tragedies continued. According to reports confirmed deaths with detailed information of torture reached [2,781 in early September 2005], which represents only the tip of an iceberg. The actual count is believed to be 10 times more.

Summary of Persecution of Faith-Based Groups

The stories behind Communist China’s history are extremely tragic and rarely known to the European society and the free world. Under the rule of the CCP, 80 million innocent Chinese were killed, tortured to death, or died of unnatural causes. This number of deaths exceeds the total deaths in World War I and World War II combined. Since 1949, the CCP has directly persecuted more than half of the people in China through dozens of planned political movements. More than 95 percent of the families in China have immediate family member(s) killed by the CCP. Many people today wonder why the CCP has killed the Chinese people in such a large scale during the past decades of “peace” time. Why it continues its on-going brutal persecution of religions and belief systems in China. Will it stop killing?

According to the Nine Commentaries, the CCP itself is essentially an “evil cult”. It has all features of an evil cult. They harm not only people of faith-based communities in China, but all Chinese, and poses threats to all people in the world, as discussed extensively in the first half of the seminar. All orthodox religions and belief systems foster belief in God, Buddha, Tao, or Heaven, and teach their followers to harmonize with the society and other people with compassion or benevolence. The CCP’s doctrines, however, are based on animal-like “class struggles”, violent revolutions, and dictatorship, which are meant to be full of blood and violence.

However we are now able to see hope–the hope of a China without communism in the near future, a new China that allows the freedom of religion, belief, and conscience. Let us stay together, join forces, and witness the great era of the coming collapse of the evil communism. Let us put our faith together to welcome genuine freedom for the people of faith-based groups in China.

Editor’s note: The persecution of faiths by the Communist Government in China is extensive. It also includes Tibetans practising Buddhism, the Muslim Uighur people of Xinjiang province and religious observance in Inner Mongolia. To find out more about the persecution of faiths in China please see Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, and the US State Department, the International campaign to save Tibet, and the Falun Dafa Information Center and also the Lagoai Research Foundation.