Freedom of Religion
Public security officers in Hebei province detained five groups of unregistered Catholic clerics during November. Hebei province has been for many years among the places in China where Catholics are most harshly persecuted. These detentions mark the first time NGO sources have reported five detentions of unregistered Chinese Catholics in a single month. About 25 percent of China's Catholics live in Hebei. According to a September 27 AsiaNews report, provincial officials currently are conducting a campaign of repression against Catholics in the province.
Public security officials in Baoding city, Hebei province, detained Lu Genjun and Guo Yanli, both unregistered Catholic priests of the Baoding diocese, on February 17, according to a February 23 report of the Cardinal Kung Foundation (CKF), a U.S. NGO that monitors religious freedom in China. Officials sent Guo to a detention center in Xushui county in Hebei province and sent Lu to an undisclosed location. For more than 10 years, the Chinese government has concentrated its effort to control the unregistered Catholic community on the unregistered Catholic clerics of the Baoding diocese.
Public security officials have detained Protestants on eight occasions and in seven Chinese provinces since February 13, according to reports by the China Aid Association (CAA), a U.S. NGO that monitors religious freedom in China.
"Chinese citizens' ability to exercise their right to freedom of religion remains as subject to arbitrary restrictions as ever," Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported in a March 1 press release that marked one year since the new Regulation on Religious Affairs (RRA) entered into force. The Chinese government had hailed the RRA as progress in protecting religious freedom, but HRW reported that, since its implementation, authorities "continue to detain and arrest religious believers, close religious sites, and impose restrictions on the movements, contacts, visits, and correspondence of religious personnel."
The Urumqi Cultural Market Inspection Brigade and the Tianshan branch of the Urumqi Public Security Bureau confiscated 350 "illegally printed" religious posters on February 10 and 11 during a surprise inspection of the ethnic language publishing market in Urumqi's Erdaoqiao neighborhood and surrounding districts, according to a February 15 article posted on Tianshan net. Urumqi is the capital of the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR). The article provided no details about the content of the posters.
The following text was retrieved from the Law-Lib.com Web site on March 27, 2006.
Cai Zhuohua, a Protestant house church leader, will be eligible for parole on March 11, 2006, after having served half of his three-year prison sentence. On November 8, 2005, the Beijing Haidian District People's Court convicted Cai Zhuohua under Article 225 of China's Criminal Law. According to its November 8 opinion, the court found Cai and his family members guilty of causing disruption by printing and giving away books without a government permit.
In December 2005, two groups of registered Catholics demanded that officials in Tianjin municipality return a number of properties confiscated from the Catholic church in the 1950s, according to foreign news media reports. Unidentified assailants allegedly beat members of the first group, and officials indicated later that they will return at least some of the property to the group's diocese. Neither officials nor church leaders have reported whether or not the municipal government has responded to the second group.
Authorities in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) have tightened controls over who may enter mosques, according to a February 6 Radio Free Asia (RFA) report. A photograph sent to RFA depicts a sign in front of a mosque in the southern part of the XUAR that forbids entry to five categories of people: Communist Party and Communist Youth members; state employees, workers, and retirees; minors under 18; local government employees; and women. According to RFA, an imam in Kashgar confirmed some of these restrictions and said that policies elsewhere are the same as at his mosque. A XUAR resident cited in the article said authorities monitor attendance at mosques and levy fines when people violate the bans.
Officials at several religious sites throughout China have not yet implemented a December 2005 national circular requiring that admission fees be waived for religious believers who visit tourist destinations that also are sites of religious activity, according to a February 7 investigative report in the China Ethnicities News. Reporters who talked to officials and visited religious sites in Beijing municipality, Sichuan, Hubei, and Hebei provinces, and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region (XUAR) found that officials in most localities were tardy in transmitting the circular to the appropriate departments and work units. Only the Hubei Province Ethnic and Religious Affairs Commission and a Daoist temple there confirmed that they had received the circular.