Deaths can be mysterious in China, not least because Chinese officialdom has a way of forgetting that anyone has died.

Deaths can be mysterious in China, not least because Chinese officialdom has a way of forgetting that anyone has died. So it was with 71-year-old Han Dingxiang, a Catholic bishop who--according to a religious-rights group--spent some 35 years in prison, labor camps, and other forms of state custody. "This name is not on our list of bishops," explained a Chinese religious-affairs bureaucrat. "We don't know this person and don't know anything about him." According to reports from his followers, Bishop Han died in police custody, and the state cremated his body six hours later. A convenient way to destroy evidence of extrajudicial murder? No one knows for sure. What we do know is that millions of Christians continue to suffer persecution at the hands of Beijing's latter-day atheist mandarins.