Beijing tries to control religious expression

By Tim Johnson - McClatchy Newspapers

BEIJING — Christian underground activist Hua Huiqi dearly wanted to attend the same church service as President Bush last Sunday, so he got up in the middle of the night to pedal his bicycle there.

After all, the Kuanjie Protestant Church is where Hua was baptized when he became a Christian in 1992, and President Bush chose it for his high-profile church visit.

But shortly after dawn, as Hua and his elder brother pedaled about a mile from the church, plainclothes policemen intercepted them and hauled them away. Next came an escape, a plaintive cry for help, and a clear vignette of how religious repression functions in China despite the claims of the nation's atheist leaders that they tolerate religious activity, a tenet that is at the heart of the Olympic movement.

Hua, 46, a pastor in China's underground Christian church, said the police took him and his brother to a nearby security office.

”They asked me why I was going to Kuanjie Protestant Church to worship and threatened me, saying, "You are not allowed to go to Kuanjie Protestant Church because President Bush is going there today. If you (try to) go again, we will break your legs,'“ Hua wrote in a letter from a secret hiding place.

”They confiscated my Bible and thereupon began their watch over me. I prayed. After about four or five hours, when I saw that the people who were watching me had all fallen asleep, I fled,“ Hua wrote in the letter he sent to Human Rights in China, a non-profit group with offices in New York and Hong Kong.

Hua said in the letter that he is afraid to go home for fear of re-arrest.

The executive director of Human Rights in China, Sharon Hom, said the Hua case underscores religious-freedom issues that ripple across to Tibet, where Buddhist monks rose up in March to protest controls on their monasteries, and in the Xinjiang region, where radical Muslim Uighurs increasingly turn to violence.

”It's an incident that opens a whole powerful window on religious repression in China. It's not just against the Christians. It's against the Tibetans. It's against the Uighurs, and the (outlawed) Falun Gong practitioners,“ Hom said.

Hua has been subject to numerous detentions and beatings over nearly two decades. His mother, Shuang Shuying, 76, is serving a two-year term in the Beijing Women's Prison for protesting an earlier detention of her son.