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A key witness against prominent China house-church leader Pastor Shengliang Gong says she was tortured and sexually abused to force her to sign testimony charging the pastor with sexual assault and rape.

In 2001, the Chinese government prepared a criminal case against the pastor by arresting several of his followers and allegedly coercing them to sign statements incriminating the pastor with sexual misconduct. Lianzhi (Sarah) Liu, 33, was arrested on May 27, 2001. In August 2001, the Chinese government arrested Pastor Gong and dozens his followers.

The government claimed in court that Liu and more than a dozen other female members of the South China Church had signed testimonies that Pastor Gong raped or mistreated them. Initially, the Chinese government imposed the death penalty on the pastor. After an international uproar and Bush administration intervention, the government retried the case in 2002 and handed down a sentence of life imprisonment. The case continues to reverberate internationally as evidence of government misconduct becomes clearer.

Liu was recently able to escape from close surveillance in China due to the efforts of China Aid, an American group led by Bob Fu, a Chinese church leader now based in the United States. At a press conference on February 10 at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., Fu said that Liu's treatment indicated that religious freedom in China is deteriorating.

From the beginning, defenders of Gong have charged that the government coerced or faked Liu's written affidavit at Gong's trials. During the first trial, three women who were imprisoned with Liu circulated their eyewitness accounts of how Liu was beaten, shocked, and sexually assaulted to force her to sign a statement against the pastor.

At that trial in 2001, 16 or 17 witnesses signed accounts alleging that Pastor Gong had raped or sexually abused them. But persistent leaks from eyewitnesses about police misconduct undermined the credibility of Pastor Gong's conviction.

During Gong's second trial, the Chinese prosecutors produced only four of the signed accounts. But those four witnesses have also publicly accused the police of torturing them and manufacturing their testimonies. The Chinese government was also forced to withdraw a claim that they had DNA proof of Pastor Gong's fathering a child by one of the women.

Government alarmed by church growth
Gong is the founder and leader of one of China's larger church networks. His South China Church emerged in the 1990s as one of the fastest growing and innovative of the church groups.

Gong organized "armies" of evangelists to tackle different areas of China with singing, preaching, and poster paintings teaching the gospel. An unusual feature of the movement is that all members are required to memorize the Christian confessions, including the Westminster Confession of Faith.

Alarmed by the fast growth of the church and other religious groups, the Chinese government crafted a massive response of intelligence, arrests, imprisonment, and public relations. Registered church officials defended the government's actions as necessary to stamp out "evil cults."

Critics have documented extensive use of torture, bribery, and fake evidence in the government campaign. However, few significant government witnesses have managed to escape to democratic countries where they could freely tell journalists how their testimonies were coerced and manufactured by Chinese prosecutors. The Chinese government had made Liu, a prominent leader in the South China Church, one of their star witnesses. Her sudden escape and appearance at congressional meetings in Washington, D.C., this week to tell how her court testimony was faked is certain to continue the international controversy over the Chinese government's human-rights abuses.

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February (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49