A Protestant house church in the southeastern Chinese city of Xiamen has suffered another attack after authorities raided it for the second time in two months.
Radio Free Asia reported that authorities and bureau of religious affairs officials entered the privately run Xingguang church on June 11, driving out church members, and ransacked the place.
“When they tore it down, they did it in breach of the regulations, which state that the authorities are supposed to notify the property holders beforehand,” the report quoted a pastor familiar with the raid.
The pastor said Chinese authorities have previously granted the church permission to extend the property with a loft conversion.
“After we received the notification, we applied for an administrative review, which is supposed to be a slow process, but they didn’t do this,” he said.
The first attack happened on May 3 when state security agents “came banging at the door” and arrested and detained nine church members without a warrant.
Video footage, which was posted on Chinese social media, showed that several people were injured in the raid. See video of the incident below.
Church members claimed that they are being targeted because they refused to join the Three-Self Patriotic Association, a state-approved body in charge of Protestant Christians.
The pastor said the incident “is just a snapshot of the way things are in China now.”
He said what is happening now “is very similar to a fascist regime, or to the Cultural Revolution” during the era of Mao Zedong in the 1960s to 1970s.
“The [ruling] Communist Party would have at least pretended to follow correct procedures before, but now it’s not even pretending,” the pastor said.
The raids were part of the nationwide crackdown on religious worship following the stance of the communist leadership that Christianity is used by the “western hostile forces” to “infiltrate” the nation.
China is home to an estimated 68 million Protestants, of whom 23 million worship in state-affiliated churches, and some nine million Catholics, 5.7 million of whom are in state-sponsored organizations.
