China's cross battle
WUXI VILLAGE, China — The battle started when a government-hired crew tore down the metal cross atop the one-room church in this village surrounded by rice paddies last month.
The next day, a church member used his own welding torch to put it back. He was promptly detained and questioned for 10 hours on the charge of operating a welding business without a license.
A week later, the crew came back to remove the cross. Once again, church members put it back up, now tattered and shorter.
The church in the eastern village of Wuxi, about 300 miles south of Shanghai, has had its water and electricity cut off. Officials have attempted to install surveillance cameras and inquired about several church members' work and their children's schooling — a veiled threat that jobs and education might be at risk. But the congregation is not giving up.
“I won't let them take down the cross even if it means they would shoot me dead,” said Fan Liang'an, 73, whose grandfather helped build the church in 1924.
Across Zhejiang province, which hugs China's rocky southeastern coast, authorities have toppled — or threatened to topple — crosses at more than 130 churches. In a few cases, the government has even razed sanctuaries.
Authorities say the churches in question had violated building codes, even though they generally won't specify which ones. They also deny that they are specifically targeting churches and point to the demolition of tens of thousands of other buildings, religious and non-religious, that have apparently broken regulations.
But experts and church leaders in Zhejiang, the only province where the incidents are happening, believe there is a campaign to repress Christianity, which has grown so rapidly it alarms the atheist Communist government.
It comes at a time when Beijing has been tightening ideological controls, placing more restrictions on journalists, rights lawyers and political activists since President Xi Jinping took office in early 2013.
An evangelist Monday said hundreds of police came with a crane to remove a 10-foot tall red cross from the steeple of a church in nearby Wenzhou, a city of 8 million that has so many churches it is called “China's Jerusalem.”
Qu Linuo, an evangelist from another church, said he and about 200 others had flocked to Longgang Huai En Church to protect it but peacefully made way for the police. Authorities told the church that the cross violated building height limits, and returned it to members, who wept and prayed, Qu said.
A man at Cangnan county's public security office said he didn't know anything about the removal, and Longgang township police didn't answer phone calls.
“The cross is the glory of us Christians,” said Cai Tingxu, who left his cosmetics shop in Shanghai to protect his hometown church in rural Zhejiang.
“Jesus was nailed to the cross for us,” he said. “My heart ached to learn that the government wants to remove the cross.”
The Pew Research Center estimated there were 58 million Protestants in China in 2011, along with 9 million Catholics in the year before. Other experts say there could be more than 100 million in all.
