Zhejiang: more crosses and churches demolished. Domestic and official Churches persecuted

ICC Note:

The church demolition started and intensified after Xia Baolong , the party secretary of Zhejiang province, inspected a church and noticed that the cross was too conspicuous and there are too many crosses in Zhejiang province. He later gave the order to demolish or rectify churches and crosses.

What is in the party secretary’s mind? The article quoted Xia Baolong’s interview with Xinhua in February 2014 that “hostile forces of the West” had infiltrated the Christian communities. He even warned the Party of Wenzhou city against the influence of the underground church community in July 2013.

by Bernardo Cervellera

05/20/2014 China (AsiaNews)- A Catholic Way of the Cross destroyed, domestic ommunities shut down and scattered. Officially, it is to “beautify” the city by destroying buildings held to be “illegal”. But the real motivation is an attempt to eliminate anything that contrasts the Party’s power and seize land for property development . Religions are the biggest threat to society (ie the Party ) . A Protestant minister : You can destroy a building, but not the church as a community.

A source for AsiaNews in China has sent us a new list of crosses and religious buildings that have been demolished in the region of Zhejiang. After the destruction of the church of Sanjiang in Wenzhou, the campaign against crosses and buildings deemed to be overly flashy is gaining ground and targeting Protestants and Catholics buildings, of official and underground churches (see photo) . Among the photos there is also an ordinance ordering the closure of a local church and the prohibition on the faithful to gather.

Two days before the bulldozers tore down the imposing (Protestant) church of Sanjiang, it was the turn of the Catholic shrine of Longgang, where authorities destroyed many statues that were part of the Way of the Cross, forcing the faithful to transfer the larger statues to a warehouse. The central pavilion, occupied by statues of Christ , the Virgin Mary and Saint Joseph was walled to hide the religious symbols from view. Also in this case the reason given was that the constructions are “illegal” .

Since 2013 , when Zhejiang was slated to become a hub of economic development  by 2020, a campaign has been enacted to “beautify ” the region by removing the illegal structures . The campaign is called the “Rectify Three, Demolish One” campaign intended to halt violation of building regulations,  a move to “make space for development. According to the provincial government these demolitions affect all communities and private dwellings without distinction . But it is a fact that the campaign is targeting mainly Christian sites .

The faithful note that the demolition notices began to circulate after Xia Baolong , party secretary of Zhejiang earlier this year inspected a church in Baiquan and noted it had a cross that towered “too obviously”, deeimg it offensive to the eye. On later seeing a forest of crosses in the skyline in other cities, he gave the order to ” rectify ” the situation. Since then, tearing down crosses , destroying statues and razing churches has become the Party’s most conspicuous task.

Crosses were torn down in Hangzhou, Yongjia county and in neighboring Anhui. The “advice” of the Party was not to position the crosses on the spire, rather at the foot of the building, on the walls, or even better, inside the church.

The government defends itself by saying that all those crosses and demolished buildings violated building codes and that, before their forced destruction, the communities were given time to rectify the error. But the faithful denounce that the notice was imposibly short : the church of Sanjiang , only had 4 days for “rectification”, in short, to destroy over 500 “illegal” square meters.

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