Chinese Communist Party to commence nationwide crackdown on Christianity including Jehovah's Witnesses (page 3)

Fisherman

This isn't the 1940's anymore fisherman . Finkelstein

I never said or implied that it was.

Call it an act of improbability

Again, I never suggested what the Communist Party in China would probably do to JW.

Finkelstein

but given the choice of life or death, there will be a great massacre of jw in china.

Back tracking a little Fish ?

Even under those set of circumstances- which obviously includes given anything less- but, again I still did not say that that is what the CP would do (to give jw life and death choice) but only what JW would do given that choice.

Finkelstein

Sorry I don't see the Chinese government executing any person who proclaims themselves Christian and not pledge alliance to the communist political party.

China has slowly matured along these lines of religoius freedom from the past, North Korea is another story.

Normalfulla

My parents visited China recently and said that jw.org is blocked there just like Google so I don't know how jws exist or stay up to date there

fulltimestudent

A number of JW missionaries were jailed in China in the past. Most were caught in the first rush of enthusiastic nationalism when the Communist armies finally swept into power in 1949 and started to sweep away the unequal treaties behind which Christian churches had sheltered. Some may recall the shelling of HMS Amethyst, a British vessel that the Brits used to patrol the Yangzi River far inland, a source of humiliation to Chinese people. That was another symbol of the same feelings.

Among those jailed was Harold King.

His wife tells a strange story of their marriage at http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2004085#h=13

(An Aside: The Bill and Linda Schneider she mentions were a well-known couple in the Sydney area. I rather liked Bill, when the WTS in Australia began to become commercialisedduring WW2, Bill was instructed to take charge of some building project and point blank refused to stop pioneering.)

Another was Stanley Jones. (See - https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2507&dat=19600815&id=cYRAAAAAIBAJ&sjid=qZsMAAAAIBAJ&pg=3321,6260441&hl=en )

Nancy Yuen, a Chinese JW was also jailed. ( See - http://bringonthegoodnews.blogspot.com.au/2009/09/imprisoned-20-years-in-communist-china.html )

During the disorder of the Cultural Revolution there may have been worse things happen to local Christians. Its hard to know what was happening in many places. That's not to defend that time, which did have a good ending, in that it led directly to the CPC selecting Deng Xiao Ping as a sort of leader. Deng had opposed some of Mao's more radical ideas and had been jailed by Mao. Mao called Deng a 'capitalist roader' for his advocating more personal (private) initiative and of course that's what we now see in China. But all that is another story.

Now to NK. I do not think any outside advocates of Christianity have been executed in NK, and strange as it may seem there is (or was) a small Protestant church in Pyongyang with all local (NK) membership.

MY personal belief is that most churches are so tied up with their own nationalism that the both the first generation of Communist rulers and the NK administration sees them as potential spies. Any deluded Christian who thinks he's bringing light to the blind should be aware that he may be sentenced to years of hard labour.

freddo

Where does Hong Kong fit in to all of this? Being nominally "autonomous" and being China's link with the west and all.

sir82

As far as I know, the WTS owns no real estate in China.

Thus, they will have no qualms about allowing Chinese JWs to suffer as martyrs.

fulltimestudent

sir82 : As far as I know, the WTS owns no real estate in China.

That's probably true. In Chinese cities, rights to land use are usually held on leasehold (except in villages, where land is owned by the village). In cities, a corporation would have to have a legal existence to lease land or even lease an existing building, and I doubt very much that the witnesses have a registered entity.

It's different in Hongkong as the legal forms existing at the time that sovereignty of HK was returned to China, were to continue for another 50 years.

JW.org gives the branch address as:

Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society
22/F, 1 Hung To Road,
Kwun Tong,
KOWLOON, HONG KONG

Its in quite a substantial building, but if 22/F signifies a floor, it would appear that they are leasing the space, although it could be owned on some sort of strata title. I suspect that they do not look after their activities in China from that office. In fact may only look after HK activity*. I imagine that it would be relatively easy for the Chinese authorities to monitor the space.

Probably, the work in China is supervised from NY, all of the nearby branches (Taiwan, Japan, S.Korea) have all sorts of political/patriotic complexities.

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an interesting note about the activity in HK, from what seems to be a page from JW-org.

"My congregation is fairly typical of the situation here in Hong Kong. We have 230 publishers, 220 of whom are SISTERS! Out of the 9 brothers in the congregation we have 2 elders and 1 ministerial servant: myself."

link: http://www.needgreaters.com/HongKong.htm

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My gay xjw friend here in Sydney knows an interesting story about Cambodia, when it was under the care of the HK branch.

Two Gilead graduates (male) were sent to Cambodia, the WTS rented a small apartment for them, paid for apparently through the HK office. Some time later, one of them became ill and died. In Cambodia (a hot country) bodies must be disposed of quickly and are cremated. The surviving brother (an Australian btw, from Adelaide) did not have enough money to pay someone, and not enough money to buy the full amount of firewood needed to do it himself (i.e.to fully burn the body). So he carted the body of his partner and the firewood to the cremation site and someone showed him how to stack the wood and put the body on top. But as told, once alight the body kept falling out of the fire because of not enough wood, and the survivor had to keep pushing it back into the coals.

Bad enough, you think? The surviving missionary had a breakdown and returned to Australia. The HK branch sent someone out to terminate the lease etc. and this guy found evidence that these two missionaries had become lovers, and that the emotional impact of the incident was not just from having to cremate a body, but the much deeper emotions coming from the body being someone you loved deeply.

Chinese Communist Party to commence nationwide crackdown on Christianity including Jehovah's Witnesses

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