China Cracks Down on Churches
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> But the government’s heavy-handed efforts to obliterate several high-profile churches have been met with resistance among Christians....
> “If you see the police, national security or community workers greet them with gentleness,” Wen Hongbin, an elder at Xishuipang, told the congregation. “If they try to grab the microphone, I ask the brothers sitting in the front row to please stop them.” ...
> Independent churches like Early Rain, with more than 500 members, have attracted large followings in recent years, especially among white-collar workers seeking an escape from rampant materialism at the center of modern Chinese life.
> While sermons at state-sanctioned churches are often tightly scripted, independent churches boom with searing indictments of corrupt officials and rousing calls to protect the rights of the poor....
> “I saw injustices in society,” Mr. Gu said. “I saw that the government’s promotion of China as a just country that enforces laws in a civilized manner was all a lie.”
> Worried for his own safety, Mr. Gu recently closed his business, hoping to avoid government scrutiny. He said he has grown fearful as he has watched the police arrest his friends.
These people are much braver than I am, and I wish them peace and strength to overcome these trials.
This is the part that confuses me.
I'm not sure what Christianity intrinsically promotes (ask 12 Christians and I suspect you'll receive 13 conflicting opinions). But practically speaking, governments and ruling classes have used it for nearly two-thousand years to promote social order and subservience.
It's been used to justify the Crusades, and slavery. Within living memory it's been used to justify Jim Crow laws, and the Salvation Army used as a tool against labor union organizing. It's been used to promote leftist regimes in Catholic South America, and the far-right "Protestant work ethic" class structure in the USA. It's been used everywhere to enforce a social order based on strict sexual norms and patriarchal gender roles.
Christianity became one of the Top Two religions on earth, precisely because of how malleable it is. In other words, in practice, it tends to promote whatever the ruling class in a given place and time WANT it to promote. It's been that way since Emperor Constantine.
So why try to violently suppress it? That's never been an effective strategy. Just co-opt it, and make it promote whatever Chinese/Confucian values you want like everyone else does.
For an example of how they frame it in propaganda: http://en.people.cn/n/2014/0807/c90882-8766262.html
And knowing what’s documented about the CIA activities in the past, which include using religion(1) I fully understand that attitude.
1) See https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/brzezinski_interview but also what was yearx before: https://www.npr.org/2010/06/05/127500908/cia-fight-against-c...
This is a fact that comes back in the stories of Chinese people very often: it doesn't matter how "approved"/legal or tolerated something is. Parts of the government go after it. Parts of the party are in open war with eachother, to the point that they send child services after eachothers' children, police after restaurants that commit the crime of allowing political rivals to eat there, and then there's the occasional moral panic, which is the most disruptive. Every now and them some fact will make the news, through social media most often.
This may be quality of goods (food for children happened once, but has likewise happened with houses, animal feed, ...), relationship stuff (e.g. a young couple, a girls pictures "leaking", in some cases outright racism (romeo and juliet couple), ...) someone dying from exhaustion while gaming, a few people very sick or dead from food poisoning, hospitals getting caught abusing psychological patients, ... and then the police will take "action".
By that of course we mean arresting hundreds whose only crime is to be in the same street as where the news event happened. Or arrest everyone under 16 out after 18h. Or arrest everyone including owner and customers in every internet cafe, or real cafe. Or ...
They're innocent. Doesn't matter of course. They get convicted. And yet, under normal circumstances, anyone in China will tell you it's absurd what you get away with.
It was the bloodiest war of the 19th century, and the bloodiest civil war in history, with an estimated 20-70 million killed.
You don't have to agree with China's response to these chruches, but maybe you can understand why they get nervous when Christians start getting uppity.
> You don't have to agree with China's response to these chruches [sic], but maybe you can understand why they get nervous when Christians start getting uppity.
That's just a pretext, if anything. This oppression isn't some challenging but benevolent attempt by the Communist Party to protect China from a bloody civil war based on past historical experiences, it's part of systematic campaign to protect the personal and institutional power amassed by China's unelected leaders and keep the country submissive to them.
This is clear when you look these actions in context: the repressive actions against democracy activists before, after, and on June 4th 1989; as well as more recent actions against human rights lawyers (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/magazine/the-lonely-crusa... ); and even Communist true believers acting outside of party control (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/world/asia/china-student-... ).
How do you know that there are not scriptures in the Bible that could support the opposite?
>Martin Luther and John Calvin
Didn't Martin Luther give rise to the thinking that ultimately resulted in WWII?
And the Calvinists that I personally know still hold to the ideas that women cannot wear pants and are not allowed to go to college.
As for the Calvinists, I hope you know you associate with very unusual people. There are a lot of Calvinist-founded colleges.
But it is also its own thing, not so much ideologically, but that it is a social grouping and and alternate hierarchy of power separate from the state. Every ruler from Constantine on has had trouble with the Church to some degree, as the Church has always laid claim to various social and political powers that rulers would have wanted for themselves.
In this sense, maybe the Chinese Communists are right to be worried, after all many of the functions churches perform in the west are the exclusive domain of the Chinese State. Coopting it would require them to become Christian themselves, which is what happened in the Roman Empire, but only after Christians had become entrenched in the upper levels of society.
Christianity i one the top ten religions on earth--or the most popular, depending on how you look at it. :)
But you are right, its interpretation depends on the Pope. While they are Orthodox and Protestants (fragmented), the Vatican sucks the oxygen out of them when it comes to the media and reputation.
What China is doing is very logical: any religion is a threat to their ideology and if you're a leader in China you don't want that. Who needs the Bible when you have the Chinese version of the Manifesto? Or the Pope when you have Xi Jinping?
The ends can never justify such means.
What is the discussion worth if it doesn’t take into consideration fundamental dignity?
if christians actually followed christ’s teachings, we’d see a lot more generosity and a lot less wealth disparity and homelessness.
There is definitely a fine line between the two that is often blurred, but Christianity at its core is about people who are oppressed finding freedom in faith. It’s one of the reasons it is easy to ‘spread’; every culture on earth has oppressors and oppressed.
I think your other point is super interesting however, in that when the oppressed are ‘free’ and become the majority, Christianity doesn’t have much to offer and then becomes the weapon of the ruling class ( or majority ) keeping people ‘in line’.
I grew up in the rural South. I assure you churches serving as the cudgel of ruling classes is not limited to a single denomination. Catholics are barely represented here, the pattern is nevertheless the same.
They also do that. The problem, from the regimes perspective, is that international Christianity (including and with assistance of domestic Christians already indoctrinated into the foreign varieties) keeps sabotaging their efforts to co-opt Christianity.
It seems to me the Christian tradition of being a persecuted religion makes it well suited to fostering an underground movement in an oppressive climate. I imagine this is the Crux of the issue, both a reason it appeals and a reason the government is trying to shut it down.
I'm seeing some remarks in comments that don't fit my understanding of the history. Christianity spread in part because it was very open to embracing local customs. This is why we have an Easter Bunny and Santa Claus associated with major Christian religious holidays. Jesus also said "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's." Iirc, he was talking about paying taxes.
So, on the one hand, it's a subversive religion. On the other hand, it's a religion that is flexible and not absolutist. It can coexist with a lot of other things.
Jesus himself was subversive. Among other things, he overturned the tables of the money changers because he was offended that this was at the church.
The biblical stories thus contain information about how to engage in nonviolent resistance. Again, this may be a big part of the appeal. Is there much difference between saving your soul and saving you from tyranny and oppression?
> From the article: The government requires religious groups to register.
China allows for the operation of pretty much all religions including the world's favorite Abrahamic ones. Unregistered religions pique the interest of countries founded on religious persecution, and ignore the operation of registered ones.
Registered ones are able to continue verbatim teachings, but obviously cannot be used to talk about "subversive ideas", in China.
The limitation about what can be discussed, and even the strings attached to the registration requirements (gov't officials part of the church) are things to criticize. Many proponents of any of their religions find registration to be an unfavorable condition.
The point is that this title could just as easily be "China's Christian registrations flourish". Because they do and they are probably the second largest Christian population in the world - simply because the rest of the world is less populated - while a non-registered minority also contains possibly tens of millions of people and it will seem like any massive civil rights crackdown because it also affects millions of people.
I didn't say or suggest it was a viable alternative. I literally wrote it was unfavorable.
With that in mind, what is inaccurate about what I wrote?
whats "apologism" about what I wrote?
The Christians in China are very brave for standing by their faith, and I wish them luck and peace.
Literally no one does this. Western Christians are incapable of facing persecution in the current social and economic climate. This is because Christians by and large make up every pillar of Western society. It has nothing to do with someone being a Christian else where in the world. The sentiment you are attempting to inaccurately portray is rooted in the fact that you have silly things like the "War on Christmas" and actual citizens (who are Christians) complaining that obeying the constitution and not imposing their religion on others is somehow equivalent to persecution.
Your conflation of the two is your own error, not others.
Feel free to link any kind of substantial material backing up the frequency of such opinions.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/egyptian-church-hit-by-bomb-bla...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/29-coptic-christians-mu...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/06/18/mosuls-christians-say-g...
No one has said that Christians aren't persecuted around the world. No one has even implied this was the case. Because people don't hold such opinions.
He is implying that people hold these opinions. I am asking for some kind of substantial material validating the frequency of such opinions.
It helps to respond to the actual conversation instead of contrived strawmans. You are very much proving my point.
+1 For self-awareness, it would have saved you writing out that post.
What are the odds that I could go to ten different blogs from ten different Joe's from across the internet saying how bad it is for Christians in the world, come back here, link them, that you'll backpedal more to say that the sources provided aren't authoritative enough?
Because it's a common response to things like the gay wedding cake and "happy holidays," etc. It's not surprising those things evoke such a dismissal.
But such a dismissal is not all inclusive. Because we don't see, say, gay marriage as a persecution of Christianity doesn't mean we believe Christians are intrinsically incapable of being persecuted.
The poll won't yield the results you want. The prattling grandstand isn't clever, it's just a rather annoyingly insecure flamebait after you fumbled your original reply to me with links to articles that were entirely irrelevant to what was being discussed.
No one believes Christians can't be persecuted. OP is conflating the dismissal of Western Christian "persecution" with somehow believing that people just don't think it can happen elsewhere. I am here to tell you that people are quite aware of the possibility of true persecution happening against any group of people, and most certainly the actual persecution of Christians elsewhere in the world. The error, however honest it may be, is his. And apparently yours too.
This belies a grave misunderstanding of how human societies actually work. It doesn't matter how many of your team are out there in the world when you are one team blue in a room full of twenty team red. If a team has at least two members, then even in a society of billions it is possible for them to be the majority sometimes.
I mean if you're going to just go "big number greater than smaller number" and attribute that to a deep understanding of human societies and general political power structures how on earth are you going to explain the current geopolitical situation as it stands today? That's incredibly daft, and your attempt at labeling it as "grave misunderstanding of how human societies actually work" is absurd.
It is not a Christian thing, it is a religion tradition all over the world to persecute other religions. Christians have done this for millennia and sometimes they are victims themselves. I think the solution is to stop with the craziness altogether.
It's amazing that these types of unexceptionally wrong perspectives, especially whimsical bio-truths, continually get posted on this forum.
But when Muslims persecute yazidis, it is because Mohammed did so, and Quran has verses allowing it.
To stop with the craziness, one should look at what motivates and incentivizes the craziness. And it turns out some religions are crazier than the others.
Of course Christians can be persecuted. Any minority is likely to face some level of persecution.
But in the US, it is so commonplace, so entrained in our society that it's hard to take the persecution claim seriously, particularly when weilded in response to things like bakers and their cake businesses.
In fact, that's an example of American ideals working as applied to government action. In an otherwise zero sum game it seeks to shield the minority at the expense of the majority.
>While sermons at state-sanctioned churches are often tightly scripted, independent churches boom with searing indictments of corrupt officials and rousing calls to protect the rights of the poor.
>Early Rain, which Mr. Wang founded in 2008, was among the most daring. Mr. Wang called Mr. Xi a sinner, held prayer sessions each year to mark the brutal crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations around Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, and organized a fund to support relatives of political prisoners in China.
So just good old fashioned suppression of political dissent. The fact that they were churches could be entirely irrelevant.
I wonder if the assumption is that, all the descriptions in the article are already known to the CCP.
Killing for a dogma is the issue. And those who claim that religion is responsible for all misery are precious few philosophical steps away from doing exactly that.
edit - for some perspective, here's Tony Benn on the many links between socialist ideologies and christianity. - https://jacobinmag.com/2018/12/tony-benn-christianity-social...
edit2 - For another perspective, while the crackdown on christianity is harsh, the crackdown on muslims is next level. Which is odd on the face of it as muslims tend to be more left wing in practice than christians.
Looking for social change towards atheism, like a third-wave atheism is very different from imposing atheism on people.
There are positions one can take between "all religions are peaceful, good, and true", and "kill the religious"
There isn't a simple road between the two positions you gave, there is an entire territory.
Examples:
2 Timothy 3:12 - "Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted,"
John 15:18 - “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you."
Or just think of the story of Jesus; when the main character(s) in your religion gets beaten and killed, the followers really feel like they're on the right path when it happens to them too.
For those not getting the reference,
The problem are the troublemakers that set themselves at the head of those sects and mess things up for those who happen to choose a different mindset.
http://www.chinapartnership.org/blog/2018/12/my-declaration-...
A somewhat tongue in cheek take is: China's state religion is Communism and it's state Church is the Communist Party of China. All of its leaders, officials, and people are required to study Communism and pay lip service to it, whether the believe it or not. However, no one there can take Communism too seriously, because the party's real religion is that of centralized power and submission to it: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/11/world/asia/china-student-...
When indignation goes into the red, intellectual curiosity is the first casualty, so the mandate of the site requires moderation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Personally, I think a unilateral severing of economic ties would be extremely counterproductive. However, I think eliminating the policy compartmentalization between trade and human rights issues should be seriously considered. Basic democratic representation and de jure and de facto protection of basic human rights (or at least concrete and verifiable steps towards that goal) should be fundamental requirements for having an open trading relationship with any country. Then it's up the the human-rights abusing country to make the choice about whether it wants to trade or not.
My understanding is that many of these trading relationships were liberalized with the idea that trade would bring political liberalization and human rights with it. That idea has been shown to be false, so policy that's based on it should be reconsidered.
The US severed economic ties with Cuba in the 60s and look what happened (only recently celebrating Christmas became legal, and property that belonged to the church was returned). There are countless examples like that.
They are still stuck in the 1960s, their economy is absolute garbage and the people are dirt poor, they lost multiple generations of opportunity.
Have you been to Cuba? It’s like going back in time 70 years.. the country itself is beautiful if they had taken a different path they could be incredibly propsorous. A small country like Cuba could get by on tourism alone and do much better than they do now.
Everyone needs to take their own path, if suppressing people’s religions and no freedom is that path the Chinese want to take then that’s their choice.
Our government and our corporations should not support that.
Repression of the Church didn't happen until years after the revolution and the Soviet Union had become its main ally.
Cuba is worse off today than it was 60 years ago by the way, so in that sense, they aren't "stuck in the 60s".
What did the US lose? An ally and a potentially strong economy to trade with a few miles from US shore. Cuban music had quite some influence on the music of New Orleans, particularly jazz. Cuban musicians would regularly travel back and forth from Havana to New Orleans before the revolution (and the other way around).
Ye they could have done that if America hadn't enacted travel bans.
Then someone else will step in. What needs to be done is clever diplomacy. A carrot and stick policy and long-term thinking.
The U.S. (and largely other Western) nations enjoy a hefty set of soft power and good economic relations with the majority of countries on this planet precisely because we have actively engaged with them. If you're worried about things getting worse or intensifying, then severing ties with these countries (and China specifically) is a good way to make those worries a very brutal reality.
And if that's not enough the blunt reality is that our economies are too intertwined at this point. We can only play the situation as it is, not back out of it completely unless we mean to shoot ourselves in the foot.
What is even more dangerous is to link religion freedom to the ongoing trade war. It makes good people who are fighting for a just cause look like pawns of the US.
You may have underestimated the value of engagement. The spread of Christianity in China could not happen without the economic ties with China in the past forty years.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_non-interventi...
An excerpt from a book by Norman Angell, (Nobel Peace Prize winner, lecturer, journalist and MP) in 1910 as to why wide scale war could not happen between major powers.
[War] belongs to a stage of development out of which
we have passed that the commerce and industry of a
people no longer depend upon the expansion of its
political frontiers; that a nation's political and
economic frontiers do not now necessarily coincide;
that military power is socially and economically
futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity
of the people exercising it; that it is impossible
for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade
of another -- to enrich itself by subjugating, or
imposing its will by force on another; that in short,
war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those
aims for which people strive.
“The First World War in the History of Globalization”
https://www.etown.edu/offices/president/2014-11-14-WW1-Globa...
The world today looks ominously like it did before World War I
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/29/the-w...
Globalization = No War? Does an increasingly economically interconnected world cut the chance of war? Maybe, but it doesn’t eliminate it.
https://thediplomat.com/2011/08/globalization-no-war/
We mustn’t fall for The Great Illusion again
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/955570...
The Great Illusion
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/opinion/15krugman.html
IMHO, the argument is partially true. But on the other hand, it increases the complexity of the system, and makes many otherwise unlikely "failure modes" possible.
It's also what makes things like "Secret societies", and massive conspiracies to be so damned hard to maintain. Information in a high level area wants to equalize to lower levels.
China isn't North Korea. There's a lot of travel of both Westerners and Chinese into and out of China, and free-ish communication between them. Within China, you can talk about many things privately without having to worry about the police showing up. The government's big red lines are public advocacy and especially political organization.
https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/randomized-experiment...
Fear No Evil by Natan Sharansky describes a similar situation in the Soviet Union: https://www.amazon.com/Fear-No-Evil-Natan-Sharansky/dp/18916.... (As in aside, is there a Chinese translation?)
We should have a multi-polar world, where China and Russia also get to impose their views and values.
However, whether countries should allow the propogation of religion and mythology is entirely up to them. Many countries have laws against various forms of deception - and religion straddles that line (of deception) so often. If action is being taken against the people who propagate "falsety" rather than against the "mislead", the ethicality of such action is quite defensible.
This isn't a democratic country, so you should rephrase your statement justifying this as "whether an authoritarian cabal should allow the propagation of a religion and mythology is entirely up to them"
A person's beliefs are up to them not their government.
Even democracies have rules against false advertising. We've chosen to give religion a free pass here, though the evidence to back any of its claims is quite flimsy.
This subject is somewhat tough to debate. I had a wonderful Christmas day, though I'm not a believer.
How do you square that with the fact that most religious people were indoctrinated at an early age by their relatives and community, rather than developing their beliefs on their own? At the end of the day, it's not a struggle for freedom versus government control, it's a struggle over who gets to do the indoctrinating.
Would you be okay with the country you're subject to the laws to "deciding" to put you and your family in prison for holding that opinion? Why is one thing "up to them", but this presumably not?
> If action is being taken against the people who propagate "falsety" rather than against the "mislead", the ethicality of such action is quite defensible.
Then show that is the case, and then defend it. Until then, why even mention the possibility? Isn't that kind of a rhetorical trick? Wouldn't you agree this straddles the line of deception, that is, that you're either "just" deceiving yourself with, or trying to deceive? Can you prove it wasn't your intent, but a honest mistake? If you err on the side of guilty, because "it might be defensible to persecute" is good enough for you, wouldn't it be fair to simply assume the worst of you?
That's not how I would treat people, but when someone makes an ethical argument, the first thing you always, always do is do a quick scan of applying it to them, when it's obvious that they can't be meaning what they're saying, to explain to them what they're saying.
"What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
People are avoiding their own responsibility and don't like when others exercise it. Since I can only guess anyway, that's my guess. What I know for a fact is that the reasons against such a topic simply being where the interest of people puts it, do not hold water, that is, are always selectively applied. That in itself is intellectually interesting, but we are not allowed to personally question posters on HN too much, even when it's done it's barely rewarded with an honest reply, so we aren't intellectuals enough for that stuff. It's pointless to talk about the aggregate of a group when individuals remain opaque, so the whole subject is simply beyond our reach, as intellectually stimulating and important as it may be.
We should know what a double standard is though: If we can pretend wiggly lines satisfy our intellectual curiosity, we can take note of a country that already build massive concentration camps to "re-educate" millions of muslims now does this. We can also take note of the comments welcoming it, and ponder those. But again, that's mostly homework, we don't have the culture capable of doing this as a "community" apparently. That's a "flamewar" or whatever. We don't like growing pains, so we won't grow, that is pretty much settled.
Which is arbitrarily decided on a case by case basis. It seems stuff just gets flagged off the front page by users, and sometimes it has the [flagged] thing, sometimes it doesn't.
People can already hide topics from the front page for themselves, and blissfully ignore them. What is the point of flagging things, are there limits or can people just flag until you arbitrarily take that ability away, where is the accountability? How is taking away the ability of others to speak altogether better than the possibility of some cussing or other things that are harmful to good faith communication?
It may be harder for people to remain civil around lethally serious subjects, but it's not impossible -- and it's not fair to punish everybody, to let random people punish everybody, because you predict what would happen otherwise. It's like a stone that keeps tigers away, on steroids even:
> If we did it any other way, HN would destroy itself.
Any other way? That "way" is still a black box. So this is a super tight rope, and left and right is utter destruction? What does "destroy itself" mean, that the server would vanish? Or that it would "bleed" from one topic into another, and suddenly people are also more irate about wiggly lines?
And of course, if you actually believe that claim, then you can't even make any changes, you can't try it out, because then HN would destroy itself. How perfectly circular.
How do you know the opposite isn't true, that if things are arbitrarily suppressed, it leads to a bad atmosphere and grudges, and people get tempted to bring up a topic when it's not actually the topic?
Flamewars destroy intellectual curiosity, so we have to moderate them. If we didn't, they would grow until they consumed everything. That would drive away the users who are here for curiosity. That's what I meant about the site destroying itself.
Curiosity as a motivation on the internet is vulnerable—it doesn't scale. That forces us to intervene in various ways, some of which appear arbitrary at times, if only because providing full explanations of every case would take lifetimes. But people are always welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and ask for clarification. What we can't do is not intervene at all and just surrender to internet default, because that would be giving up on the site mandate.
We moderate HN to mitigate the worst aspects of this, but there's no hope of eliminating it. HN is controlled by its community. All that moderation can do is adjust the margins.
I suppose macro trends would also explain why black social issues always get flagged on HN as well.
1: https://m.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2145...