PCUSA, government-sanctioned China council propose agreement By John H. Adams The Presbyterian Layman Volume 33, Number 3 Posted May 22, 2000 LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Leaders of the Presbyterian Church (USA), told by representatives of the China Christian Council that there is “no massive persecution of Christians in China today,” have recommended a partnership agreement with the communist government-sanctioned council. The Rev. Jia-yuan Bao, associate general secretary of the official church council in China, disputed reports about widespread persecution of Christians in China. Bao was quoted by Presbyterian News Service as saying, “A lot of what is being reported as ‘persecution of Christians’ could better be termed ‘religious persecution,’ because it is directed toward cultic groups and activities.” He said other alleged instances of persecution are merely sanctions against Christians who violate the country’s laws or regulations. If the same events took place in the United States, he said, “the media would say it is law and order.” But other reports, including a congressionally required assessment by the State Department on religious persecutions in countries where the U.S. has trade relationships, have painted a different picture of religious tolerance in China. The U.S. government report says the Chinese government has regularly violated constitutional guarantees of religious rights, cracking down on unregistered Catholic and Protestant groups, raiding worship groups meeting in private homes and sometimes detaining, interrogating or beating leaders. In a report issued March 23, the day the meeting between PCUSA and China Christian Council leaders ended, Amnesty International cited widespread government persecution of religious groups in China. “China’s two-year ‘anti-superstition’ campaign is now a massive crackdown on followers of religious and spiritual movements … ,” Amnesty said in a news release. And in an article published in First Things, a journal on religion in the public square, an American professor who recently taught in China warned against Western Christians allying “injudiciously” with the government-sanctioned church in China. Allen D. Hertze, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, described his exchanges with Chinese students that “had an Orwellian quality, especially those with party apparatchiks and the less sophisticated students.To explain U.S. concern about the religious situation in China, I would sometimes show photographs of house church Christians arrested by the government. “A common response was, so why don’t they register? What’s the big deal? “Well, I responded, the Religious Affairs Bureau is headed by an atheist, and the officially sanctioned seminaries and ministers are not free to preach the pure gospel.”

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