XI Jinping would like westerners to think “China is cool”, but the Chinese Communist Party is up to its old totalitarian tricks again – if they ever stopped.
The CCP is quite happy to have starry-eyed western travel vloggers wandering around the country, marvelling at the scenery and the latest high-tech Chinese vehicle or some other electronic gadget performing whizzbang functions.
But it was a different story when a Sky News UK reporter ventured into China recently to talk to members of the persecuted church and mainstream churches that operate according to CCP rules – it was a case of paranoia rules.
The reporter locates a woman, the wife of Chinese pastor Goa Ying Jia, in Thailand with her young son. His father was taken away to jail in China for being the “unapproved pastor” of “an unapproved protestant church”. He was taken away by police in the middle of the night along with 18 others last October.
While talking to the pastor of one of the mainstream, “approved churches”, the smiling party secretary of the local CCP branch just happens to wander in to the church, shakes the hand of the pastor who introduces him to the reporter.
Meanwhile the pastor receives a call from “the authorities” and the message is that it’s time the reporter and her crew left.
The pastor had earlier been explaining how 12 years ago hundreds of parishioners crammed into the church to stop local authorities removing a cross from the roof of the church building.
The state won the battle, of course, and today the church is registered and abiding by the rules – a national flag, CCTV and total obedience to the state. They are still allowed to have a cross inside and another one painted on a wall.
In another mainstream church, a parishioner talks for a few minutes and then a call is received. The head of the church is “a little scared” about the reporter being there and she must leave promptly.
The action taken by CCP agencies agencies against some other churches was much less subtle – they simply demolished them, as happened to the cathedral-sized Sanjiang Church in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province in 2014, for “building violations”.
The demolition of Nangang Church in the same province prompted public resistance by Christians in 2021. The church and an entire area around it was levelled.
Xi Jingping likes to present his “thoroughly modern China” with its electric cars, spectacular city skylines and unmatched manufacturing capacity, but his CCP is the same old ideological monster that starved and murdered millions of its own countrymen in its so-called Cultural Revolution.
This is the same CCP that cannot countenance a human being having loyalty to anything else but the state. They are delusional and dangerous and they and their products should be held at arm’s length by all Australians.
