Freedom in China Summit Highlights Religious Limits
A one-day summit was held Tuesday to offer a ‘‘rare’’ opportunity to discuss the severe limitation of freedom of expression, religious freedom, and the rule of law in China.
WASHINGTON – A one-day summit featuring high-profile Chinese activists from China was held Tuesday to offer a ‘‘rare’’ opportunity to discuss the severe limitation of freedom of expression, religious freedom, and the rule of law in China.
The Freedom in China Summit 2006 hosted by the Hudson Institute and the Institute of Chinese Law & Religion invited pastors, Christian writers, scholars, attorneys, and others at the forefront of the human rights effort in China to give testimony on the current situation in China and to discuss actions that can be taken to improve human rights in the country.
“I’ve been working on human rights for many years but I won’t talk about that,” said Dr. Li Baiguang, the director of Beijing Qimin Research Center. “I will instead talk about how God has selected me to be a Christian.”
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The former university professor, freelance writer, legal professional, peasants’ right advocate and legal scholar continued to explain why religious freedom is significant for improvement of human rights in China.
“The national morale cannot be improved without proper religious worship,” Li said. “As we have economic development our morale is rapidly deteriorating partly because of lack of religious freedom.”
Bob Fu, president of China Aid Association, agrees with Li that there is a lack of religious freedom in China and explained how “secret documents” has further restricted religious beliefs in China.
Fu explained that in two such documents, the definition of religious cults was defined in such a way as to leave “open further acts of religious violation by the government.”
The document defined cults in three ways: “God is a performer of miracles. According to this definition, Protestants, and especially Charismatics, could be called a cult,” said Fu. “Second, cults are similar to clandestine organizations like the mafia society. Third, cults propagate evil teachings which are anti-civilization and anti-society. Because of the weakness of the document definition of cult, the enforcements infringe upon what little religious freedom there is in China.
The CAA president concluded, “It is really fair to say that in China there is very limited freedom of religious belief and absolutely no freedom manifestation of religious belief.
Different organizers noted several times at the summit that of the seven invitees from China, all accepted to speak at the Summit but three were prevented to come due to “direct intervention by the Chinese government,” including intense harassment, government notification of a dubious court hearing, and an ambiguous conference.
However, one of the speakers presented optimistic news about Christianity in China. The president of Westminster Theological Seminary, Dr. Pete Lillback said that China is beginning to accept Christianity as a school discipline.
“We are working strenuously right now with various universities in Beijing so that we can simply say: ‘you want high scholarship, you teach Christianity as an academic discipline, shouldn’t you have people that are experts in this field teaching these discipline?” asked Lillback, naming fields such as church history, theology, and ethics. “It is a startling reality that an atheist country that may have an inadequate record of religious freedom is starting to allow scholar exchanges of the highest level of seminary works.”
Lillback concluded, “Religious liberty must be recognized not as a means of evangelism, or a means of politics, but a fundamental expression of being a human being…. As a Christian theologian I am convinced that one of the greatest things we can affirm is that we believe everyone has the right to believe what they believe even if we think it is wrong.”
Groups that sponsored the one-day summit included Freedom House, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Becket Fund, National Association of Evangelicals, the Institute on Religion and Public Policy.
