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Last July 6 about 300 officers of China's Public Security Bureau (PSB) disrupted Christians at worship in the village of Hengpeng and demolished their church building. A week later, police raided a house church in Xiaoshan city while Christians were meeting at 4 A.M. for Sunday prayer and worship. Both were churches of the "Little Flock" network, founded by Watchman Nee. Nee died for his faith in a Chinese labor camp in 1973.

Authorities arrested at least three leaders in the Xiaoshan church. At the beginning of 2003, Christian leaders in China said they had learned from "inside sources" that the government was planning to systematically crush the house church movement. The SARS epidemic evidently stalled those plans, and now the campaign has begun, they believe.

Chinese authorities consider unregistered congregations political subversives. Protestant churches are allowed to register only through the China Christian Council and its related Three-Self Patriotic Movement. Most house churches balk at registering through the Council and TSPM because of their close cooperation with the government.

New regulations prepared in late 2001 allowing house churches and other congregations to register apart from TSPM "were never rolled out," says Carol Hamrin, a consultant on China.

The Chinese constitution protects religious freedom. Recently, some unregistered churches have successfully appealed to the constitution to obtain reparations for harm done to their leaders or facilities. But the Communist regime forbids worship outside state-backed "patriotic" religious bodies. Evangelism outside church buildings also is forbidden, though both officially recognized and unregistered churches are growing rapidly.

The Communist government finds this growth politically threatening. On August 28 agents of the PSB—the central government's intelligence agency—arrested 170 worshipers at a house church in Nanyang County, Henan province. At press time all but seven church leaders were released.

During a two-month period beginning in mid-August, authorities closed or bulldozed more than 100 churches in the town of Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, said Bob Fu of China Aid Association. The government has intensified its campaign to force churches to register, then declares illegal those who refuse, he said.

"The new government is at least continuing the implementation of the former government's policy in a more formal way," Fu said.

On September 26 PSB agents arrested a lawyer for the imprisoned leader of the South China Church, Gong Shengliang. Xiao Biguang, who had notified foreign media that prison authorities had beaten Gong nearly to death, was released following worldwide protests.

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January 2004, Vol. 48, No. 1