1/7/11 China (ChinaAid) – The year 2010 in China was like a melodrama: the first half was uneventful, but in the second half, the stage was filled with one explosive scene after another. The impact to China and the world of the selection of Liu Xiaobo as the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel Prize was felt from October all the way to the end of the year. Almost at exactly the same time, 200 Chinese church delegates who had been invited to attend the massive worldwide evangelistic gathering—the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelism (Oct. 16-25)—were barred by the government from leaving the country; more “turning the world upside down.” In December, with only an empty chair to represent the absent Liu Xiaobo and his family, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee held a solemn award ceremony in Oslo, Norway; that same month, the Chinese government launched the outrageous “Operation Deterrence” campaign aimed at suppressing house churches.
In the past year, the Chinese church throughout the entire country continued to be the target of many acts of persecution by the Chinese Communist government because it held firm to the principles of the faith. Reflecting on the scope, impact, number of people involved and seriousness of the circumstances of the persecution of the past year, ChinaAid Association has selected the following as 2010’s Top 10 Persecution Cases (listed in reverse chronological order). They involved church leaders, human rights lawyers, house churches, Three-Self Patriotic Movement churches, Catholic churches, and minority groups, and they extended from the urban areas to the countryside, from China’s largest municipalities directly under central government control to the remote autonomous areas of mostly minority population, reflecting the year’s overall atmosphere of persecution and the dynamic life of the church.
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