Unregistered Catholic Bishop Jia Zhiguo Released Into Residential Surveillance

Officials in Hebei province released unregistered Catholic Bishop Jia Zhiguo on April 19, according to April 25 reports by AsiaNews and the Union of Catholic Asian News (UCAN). Jia, the unregistered Bishop of Zhengding diocese in Hebei, was moved from detention into 24-hour residential surveillance at his home in Wuqiu village in Hebei, according to the reports. Bishop Jia’s release came one day before President Hu Jintao met with President George W. Bush in Washington, D.C. during an official visit. Jia had been detained since November 8, 2005, and reportedly was interrogated and pressed to join the government-controlled Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA). According to a UCAN source, Bishop Jia appeared to have lost weight during the five-month detention.

Bishop Jia has been the subject of numerous official inquiries from the U.S. and other governments, and has been profiled in articles in the Washington Post and the Telegraph of London. His most recent detention was the eighth since 2004; most of the detentions were brief. Nonetheless, Bishop Jia has spent about 20 years in detention since the late 1970s. Most of the relatively short detentions occur during major Catholic religious holidays or when foreign heads of state visit China. In addition, Bishop Jia and some of the unregistered priests belonging to his diocese were detained and harassed in 2005 around the time of the death of Pope John Paul II and the conclave in Rome that elected Pope Benedict XVI. The Holy See reacted to a series of brief detentions of Bishop Jia in 2004 by declaring that the detentions are "inadmissible in a state of law that declares it guarantees 'freedom of religion' and 'respects and safeguards human rights.'"

About 25 percent of Chinese Catholics live in Hebei province, including a preponderant unregistered Catholic community, which faces severe government persecution. According to a September 2005 AsiaNews report, provincial officials have been conducting a campaign of repression against unregistered Catholics in Hebei province. In June 2005, Hebei Catholics sent a letter protesting religious persecution to a Catholic news agency based in Italy. The Cardinal Kung Foundation, a U.S. NGO that monitors religious freedom in China, publishes and updates a list of unregistered Catholic clergy who are currently prisoners of conscience. As of February 15, 2006, 32 of 42 imprisoned Catholic clergy were from Hebei province, over half of them from the Baoding diocese.

The Zhengding diocese in Hebei also has long been a particular focus of the Chinese government's persecution of unregistered Catholics. In November 2005, for example, Hebei provincial officials detained three groups of Catholic clerics from the Zhengding diocese.

For more information on Bishop Jia Zhiguo, see the CECC's Political Prisoner Database. For more information on Catholics in China, see the CECC 2005 Annual Report, Section III(d).