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After U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell talked with China's top leader, Jiang Zemin, a Chinese provincial court gave a last-minute reprieve to the founder of a growing evangelical church movement.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry passed the news to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in advance of a congressional delegation visit. Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and Congressmen Joseph Pitts (R-Pa.) and Frank Wolf (R-Va.) had asked the White House and Secretary Powell to intervene.

In December officials charged Gong Shengliang with using an "evil cult" to "undermine the enforcement of the law." The court had also convicted Gong of "crimes of rape and hooliganism."

The case is now on hold. The pastor, 46, founded the South China Church in 1990. It has 50,000 members in eight regions.

Gong was at one time a leader in Peter Xu's Born Again Movement, one of China's largest house church groups. Gong's group has an evangelical statement of faith called "God's Forever and Ever."

In another statement, "South China Thirteen Rules," the church says it aims to "bring the gospel to the whole nation, cultivate a Christlike culture, and create a nationwide church." That nationwide goal attracted government attention.

An August 2001 top-secret Public Security Bureau document used the "Thirteen Rules" to help it decide that the church was a cult. Li Shi-xiong of the New York-based Committee for the Investigation of Persecution of Religion in China provided a copy of that secret document to CT.

Four other South China Church leaders received suspended death sentences that could be commuted to life terms. The death sentences are the first against evangelicals under China's recent restrictions on religious groups using "anti-cult" regulations. At least one South China Church member died under interrogation earlier last year.

The government has conducted a "smash the cults campaign" since July 1999. The primary target is the Falun Gong, which uses physical exercise as a spiritual discipline.

By April 2000, the office of China's highest leaders placed the Born Again Movement on its list of cults. Some months later, officials put Pastor Gong's group on its list of banned cults. Evangelical missionaries told Baptist Press that the government has targeted Pastor Gong because he refuses to register the church, although it operates openly. Baptist Press quotes house church leaders as saying, "If this group is a cult, then we all are cults."

On August 18, 2001, police raided three offices of the South China Church and arrested 14 people. Gong's niece Li Ying, a deputy leader of the church, suffered a severe beating. She later received a suspended death sentence.

Eleven women were stripped, beaten, and punched until they agreed to sign accusations that Pastor Gong had raped them. In phone interviews, relatives of the women described how police extracted the accusations.

"They used electric clubs to touch our relative's whole body, particularly her chest," one relative stated. "They forcefully unbuttoned her shirt while she yelled at the top of her voice. The interrogator told her to shut up: 'It is useless to call for help. The Party has given us electric clubs to use against you. I won't be held accountable even if I strip you naked.'"

An electric club blistered the chest, hands, and feet of one teenager. Relatives said that some older women tried to intervene, but that only infuriated the police officer. He told them, "You mention human rights. I will treat you as subhuman and give you no human rights."

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February 4 2002, Vol. 46, No. 2