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CHINA
Christians arrested
Dozens of Protestants and Catholics detained
About 130 members of an evangelical Christian group, including three Americans, were arrested in central China on August 23, according to a human rights group.
The Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said the members of the illegal church were arrested by police in an afternoon raid in Henan province. The center said three American missionaries from California, Henry Chu, Patricia Lan, and Sandee Lin, were among those arrested. The three were later released after embassy officials traveled to Henan. All except 10 of the rest of the congregation were released several days after, while the remaining detainees face possible prison terms or sentencing to a “re-education through labor” camp.
On August 19, a Catholic priest, Father Gao Yi Hua, 44, of Fujian province, was arrested while celebrating Mass in a private home, according to the US-based Cardinal Kung Foundation. The foundation said it did not know why Father Gao was arrested, where he was taken, or where he is being held. The priest, who had been ordained for the underground Church in 1984, had been forced to work in a “re-education through labor” camp for two years until his release in 1991.
Then, on August 30, police arrested 24 more Catholics, including a priest, a seminarian, 20 nuns, and two laymen, the foundation said. Father Liu Shao-Zhang, 38, was arrested and severely beaten, suffering internal bleeding. He was ordained for the underground Church in 1994. Two of the nuns were released the next day after parishioners paid a large sum to the Public Security Bureau. The location of the remaining 22 was unknown, the foundation said.
The archbishop for the underground Church in Fujian, Archbishop Yang Shudao, was arrested on February 10 and released shortly afterwards, but has been kept under constant surveillance in his home.
The Communist Chinese government requires Christians to worship only in state-controlled associations including the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which eschews any connections to the Vatican or the Pope. Many Catholics worship in illegal, underground churches following only bishops appointed by the Pope.
Forced abortion, sterilization in Tibet
Human rights abuses to quell restive population
China’s forced abortion, one-child policy has come under fire again, this time from Tibetans who are testifying to horrific human rights abuses at the hands of the Chinese, according to an August report in Jane magazine.
Tibetans are accusing China of intentionally trying to gut their population through a 20 year imposition of their one-child policy. According to media mogul Ted Turner’s UN Foundation (UNF), “allegations of procedures forced on Tibetan women include infanticide in which lethal chemicals are injected into a baby’s brain, forced abortion after nine months of pregnancy, abortion via electrical rods inserted through the vagina, rusty IUDs that may bring on tuberculosis and other diseases, and IUDs left in the uterus for eight years instead of the recommended three.”
Blake Kerr, the US doctor who reported on the situation in Tibet, said the conditions in Tibetan hospitals he visited were “a hygienic atrocity,” with bloodstained gurneys and the regular use of non-sterilized equipment. “According to the Tibetan Women’s Association, nearly 20 percent of Tibetans may no longer be able to reproduce because of sterilization procedures,” reports the UNF. “One Tibetan woman interviewed by researchers at the Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, India, said 70 percent of women over age 18 in her village, including herself, were sterilized. In one district, 308 women were reportedly sterilized in 22 days.”
This is not the first time such allegations have come to light. Just last year “the US State Department’s 1999 report on China claimed that forced sterilization and abortion are common in Tibet,” notes UNF. But China continues to deny practicing forced sterilization or abortion and has claimed that policies are implemented “in full consideration of the wishes of the Tibetan people.”
Infanticide outrage
Horrific application of one-child policy
Reports of a particularly cruel enforcement of Communist China’s one-child policy have outraged the population and caused a provincial government to make an unusual pledge to punish those responsible.
According to the reports, an official in central Hubei province had determined that a woman, identified only as Mrs. Liu, would be required to abort her fourth child to comply with the government’s population control policy. She was forcibly injected with a saline solution to kill the child, but the child was unexpectedly born healthy.
Immediately after the birth, the father was ordered to kill the baby outside the hospital, but he was unable to carry out the deed and left the child behind a building. A doctor later found the infant and reunited him with his mother and told her to take him home. When they arrived at their house, they were confronted by officials who took the baby outside and drowned him in a rice paddy in front of his parents.
The outcry in the town alerted nearby newspapers and the story soon gathered national attention, which forced the Hubei government to pledge it would punish the officials. China’s one-child policy, often ignored in rural areas but officially supported by international agencies including the United Nations, has often been derided as inhuman and brutal as tales of mothers strapped to beds for forced abortions and infanticide have filtered out of the country.
In August Zhang Weiqing, Beijing’s Family Planning Minister, said he would not tolerate officials abusing women in order to achieve birth control targets. He said: “We have a strict policy. We deal with every violation by officials seriously.”
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