Struck down, standing fast

Near a grimy steel-welding factory on the outskirts of the Chinese city of Wenzhou, a six-story, 900-seat, modern gothic-style church looms overhead with its lancet windows, spires, and stained glass. A chorus of 300 voices singing hymns in a local dialect to an out-of-tune piano rises from the sanctuary, and school-aged children learn about Christ’s ascension in Sunday school classes next door.

Yet something feels amiss about the imposing building. An upward glance to the top of the church reveals nothing but gray sky and an empty steeple—the cross that once stood there, a symbol of God’s reconciliation with man through Jesus, is gone.

Across Zhejiang, the eastern coastal province where Wenzhou is located, about 2,000 of these bright-red crosses are missing after a two-year governmental cross demolition campaign that saw excavators barreling through church façades, police in riot gear clashing with worshippers, and officials arresting dissenting pastors on trumped-up charges. Many see the demolitions as a power move by a fearful Communist Party in the face of an ever-growing Christian population. While the implications of the Wenzhou cross removals for the larger Chinese church remain to be seen, the events have revealed the resilience of the Wenzhou Christians and the power of international pressure to sway the country’s Communist leaders.

The Zhejiang cross demolitions, which began in early 2014, are unique: No other Chinese city has as many prominent churches as Wenzhou, known as the “Jerusalem of the East,” where Christians make up about 11 percent of a total population of 10 million. The churches typically maintain good relations with local authorities, as some officials are believers themselves, and Wenzhou churches can legally register their buildings as sites for religious activity without falling under the authority of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the government-sanctioned Protestant denomination. It is surprising the government is now targeting these registered churches rather than house churches.

Ostensibly, the so-called “Three Rectification and One Demolition” campaign aimed to take down illegal structures in Zhejiang. But as the number of churches affected rose into the thousands, it became clear the campaign had a target. Leaked internal documents revealed the government wanted to regulate “excessive religious sites” and “bring down the crosses from the rooftops to the façades of the buildings.” And a proposed bill regulating minute details in church buildings further showed the government’s fear of Christianity’s visible influence in the city.

“Removing the crosses has become both a political statement of state sovereignty as well as an attempt to show the churches that the government could still exert more control if it so chooses,” said Jonathan Yang, an elder at a church of 600 in Wenzhou’s Yongqiang district.

The churches’ responses have differed: Some reluctantly cooperated with government officials, allowing them to take the physical cross from their roofs in hopes they could continue worshipping freely. For instance, Peter Jiang, an evangelist at a church of 500 in Wenzhou, said congregants could do nothing but watch as about 100 soldiers arrived at their five-story church to remove its cross in June 2014. “They did this just to humiliate us,” said Jiang, whose name, like that of other Wenzhou church leaders interviewed for this story, has been changed for his protection. (Chinese authorities have in the past punished those who speak out to foreign media.)

Members of Jiang’s church then took the large concrete cross and affixed it by the entryway of the church courtyard, a persistent symbol of who is Lord of the property. While the church plans to engrave the date of the rooftop removal on the base of the cross as a “permanent reminder of this humiliation,” the fervor inside the crossless church remains undiminished.

On a recent Sunday, the sanctuary filled with worshippers praying loudly as children from first to 12th grade listened to Bible stories in the adjacent administration building.

Other churches resisted peacefully, engaging in some of the most overt protests by Three-Self pastors against the government to date. Congregants physically blocked officials from reaching their cross. Pastors signed letters objecting to the campaign. One group demonstrated by walking through the streets wearing matching T-shirts and holding small wooden crosses. Yet the punishment for defiance was swift: Since 2014, hundreds of pastors have been detained for opposing the campaign. Some were released after a couple of days, according to the Christian advocacy nonprofit China Aid. About a dozen still remain in prison.

Yang, the elder in Yongqiang, felt the consequences firsthand as a key leader in uniting the churches to resist the cross ban. In 2014 he wrote a letter protesting the government’s actions that was signed by 98 churches and sent to seven governmental agencies. In response, a local official threatened not only to demolish his church building, but to audit his business and inspect his home. “If you disagree [with the government] and your church doesn’t want to take down the cross, then they arrest you on trumped-up charges of building code or fire code violations,” said Yang. “Then they bring in officials from other agencies to find additional violations.”

A short yet commanding man in his 50s, Yang invited the official to check his home, unfazed by the threats and eager to prove his house was in order. At that point, the official switched tactics, asking him to discuss church grievances in person rather than writing letters, as he feared the written correspondence would attract international attention. While discussions abated the demolitions for a little while, the government returned to strike down more crosses in the summer of 2015.

At that point, the churches turned to Beijing lawyer Zhang Kai for help. Zhang, who had provided legal aid to Wenzhou’s churches and imprisoned pastors, formed a 13-point resistance plan, including small-scale demonstrations Yang helped to organize. Long before reaching the 13th goal on the list, Zhang was arrested on Aug. 25, 2015.

The next day, government officials detained Yang along with more than a dozen Christian leaders. For 3½ months, officials interrogated the leaders—but did not torture them—in an undisclosed detainment center, keeping each detainee under 24-hour surveillance. Yang recalled officials explaining to him that the church and the government were competing for the role of “elder brother” in society: “There can only be one big brother. The government must be the big brother.”

Yang believes that what the Chinese Communist Party fears is not that the church would destabilize Chinese society, but that it would weaken or topple the party. Some analysts expect China to become the most Christian nation in the world by 2030 with a total of 247 million Christians, including Catholics, according to Purdue University professor Yang Fenggang. And the current number of Christians in China—114 million, by one estimate—already surpasses the 87.8 million Communist Party members.

For instance, Pastor Gu Yuese of the uncommonly large 10,000-person TSPM Chongyi Church in Hangzhou wrote an open letter criticizing the cross removal policy. His outspokenness led to his removal from the church and detainment earlier this year. In February, authorities arrested Gu on embezzlement charges and released him two months later to “residential surveillance.”

“Pastor Gu is a good man in a very difficult situation,” Yang said. “He sided with us during the cross ban, yet he must represent the government by his involvement in the TSPM.” Gu, who was part of China’s national Standing Committee for religious authority, as well as a provincial head of the China Christian Council, was the highest-ranking religious official arrested since the Cultural Revolution.

Yang believes it was his duty as a Christian and a law-abiding citizen to resist the government’s unlawful action. Officials had no official letter when they announced his church’s cross had to go. “Since having a cross was not illegal, for him to insist that we take down the cross was a violation of our constitutional and legal rights,” Yang said. “The party says that China has moved to become a country ruled by law. How does breaking the law further the goals of the party or the nation?”

When church leaders were unable to thwart the government’s campaign through dialogue or legal avenues, they took the issue to the watching world. The Chinese government worked overtime to wipe any mention of the cross demolitions off the internet, and the Zhejiang government disseminated propaganda claiming the campaign had nothing to do with religious freedom. Yet with the help of China Aid, and thanks to images and videos captured on cell phones, international media quickly spread stories of persecution: police beating peaceful church congregants who were protecting their house of worship, white-collared priests holding banners denouncing the demolitions, and a church’s cross burning while the government’s machinery malfunctioned.

China Aid founder Bob Fu sees his role as being a “reliable, accurate voice, providing information to the international community for the people of Wenzhou, who otherwise would not have a voice.” This dedication has made Fu a specific target for the Communist Party. In a televised confession, lawyer Zhang named Fu and China Aid, saying the group is on a smear campaign of China’s human rights record. (Many believe the “confession” was scripted and made under duress.)

To aid the release of Zhang, Yang, and other detained leaders, Fu said China Aid “successfully built up an international united front” by briefing the U.S. State Department and several European parliaments about the situation in Wenzhou. As Chinese President Xi Jinping made state visits in the West, his counterparts had up-to-date lists of the Christians currently imprisoned. Fu said this pressure forced Xi to calculate how much the continued detainment of these pastors would cost China diplomatically.

Although Chinese officials have become increasingly flippant toward human rights admonishments, the international pressure has been effective in some instances. Yang said officials referenced China Aid’s work as the reason they were being released late last year. Authorities released Zhang in March, after nearly seven months of detainment. “The campaign to free Zhang Kai proved that if we are persistent, if we join hands together and have accurate information, they will respond,” Fu said. “China does care about international opinion.”

Wenzhou church leaders interviewed for this story said that since the cross removals, authorities have neither disrupted their regular weekly ministries nor interfered with their Sunday preaching. Yet the government has appointed an on-site official to each of the churches where crosses were removed to keep close watch on their activities.

At some churches in the Zhejiang region, the government has set up propaganda bulletin boards on church property. Last year the Zhejiang government unveiled a campaign titled “Five Entries and Five Transformations,” which attempts to bring the Wenzhou churches more in line with the Communist Party through actions such as making finances public, standardizing management, and bringing traditional Chinese culture and government policies into the church. Christians have opposed these measures: One church said it planned to chant Bible verses should the government send an official to spread propaganda from the pulpit, according to a Wenzhou pastor interviewed by the human rights website China Change.

Back at Jiang’s church, the rugged, weathered, red cross greets visitors as they enter the courtyard in front of the building. Up close, the cross is massive. Thick wires keep it upright, as its base is cracked where it had been dislodged from its perch on the roof.

Daniel Liu, a church leader and successful factory owner in his 30s, pointed to the blessings the trials of the past two years have brought: “The churches in Wenzhou had become proud and arrogant. God allowed the persecutions to get our attention and wake us up to our need to cling close to Him.”

Liu gazed up at the empty church spire before turning to gesture at the cross: “The cross is in the courtyard, but our belief in Jesus is deeply rooted in our hearts. Nothing can take that out.”

—Robert Katz is a research analyst on church-state relations with an international, China-focused missions agency