China's religious persecution.

One man was beaten to death and 90 worshippers arrested in China's northeastern province of Heilongjian during a crackdown on an underground Protestant church, AsiaNews reported on May 19. Li Shixiong, chairman of the U.S.-based Committee for Investigation on Persecution of Religion in China, said Communist Chinese officials declared the Three Grades of Servant church to be illegal and "evil" as early as 1999, and have been trying to stamp it out. The church claims to have several million members.

The committee says the church's spiritual leader, Xu Shuang-fu, has been abducted and is being held by police. The group said Mr. Xu was abducted by people driving a police jeep as he was making his way to Harbin airport on April 17. Chinese officials deny abducting the religious leader and claim to have no knowledge of the case. The committee said 90 other church members were arrested after Mr. Xu's abduction. Meanwhile, another church member, Gu Xianggao, 28, died in the custody of Harbin police on April 26. Officers initially told his family that he had been detained on suspicion of robbery and murder, according to his sister, Gu Xiangyan. But she said that when family members traveled to Harbin early this month, they were told he had been arrested for being a member of the church.

On May 18, the U.S.-based Cardinal Kung Foundation announced that police had arrested two underground Roman Catholic priests on May 14 in Communist China's Hebei province. The religious rights organization is named for the heroic Ignatius Cardinal Kung, who was imprisoned by the Communists for more than 30 years. The organization's announcement said that Father Lu Genjun, age 42, and Father Cheng Xiaoli, age 40, were arrested as they were about to attend classes on family planning and moral theology. Fr. Lu Genjun had been arrested twice earlier, once in 1998 and again in 2001, when he was held for three years at a labor camp in Hebei. He had just been released from the labor camp a short time before this latest arrest. "The arrest of Father Lu and Father Cheng is yet another [example of] ongoing religious persecution in China," said Joseph Kung, president of the Cardinal Kung Foundation and a nephew of the late Cardinal Kung. "This proves that religious persecution is not something of the past. It is still there."

Despite a huge propaganda effort to convince the world that China is becoming much more open and free since the June 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, religious persecution has been intensifying. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reported on February 10, 2004 that it "remains especially concerned about the situation in China, where repression of religious freedom continues to be a deliberate policy of the Chinese government." "In the past year," the commission stated, "Chinese authorities have intensified their violent campaign against religious believers, including Evangelical Christians, Roman Catholics, Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and other groups, such as the Falun Gong. This campaign has included imprisonment, torture, and other forms of ill treatment. As you know, the Commission attempted to travel to China twice in the past year but was thwarted in both attempts by unacceptable limits imposed by the Chinese government that prevented such a visit."