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<p><strong>China Compiles ‘Blacklist’ of Christians</strong></p>
<p>The Chinese government has launched a crackdown on “house
churches” — Protestant congregations that don’t belong to the
state-sanctioned church organization — branding the house church
movement a “cult.” </p>
<p>That report comes from the China Aid Association (CAA), a
U.S.-based Christian group founded in 2002, which calls the
Chinese government’s move “grave and troubling.” </p>
<p>The CAA said in a Dec. 7 report: “The all-powerful Politburo of
the Chinese Communist Party launched ‘Operation Deterrence’ on
Dec. 1. </p>
<p>“According to the Politburo’s top-secret instructions, the
crackdown on the largest component of the mainland Chinese church
is to continue through March 2011 . . . [The party’s security
apparatus has] been notified to collect information about house
churches throughout the country and turn these reports in to their
superiors. </p>
<p>“A long ‘blacklist’ of church leaders and influential believers
reportedly has been drawn up.” </p>
<p>Some 70 million Chinese believers worship in unregistered house
churches, according to a 2007 Pew Research Center report. China’s
state-sanctioned church organization, the Three Self-Patriotic
Movement (TSPM), has only about 16 million Protestant members. </p>
<p>Chinese Christians are reluctant to register with the TSPM — the
“three” are self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation —
due to theological concerns, CNSNews reported. TSPM leaders say
loyalty to the state should take precedence over belief in Christ.
</p>
<p>“Recent government actions against Christians, including official
harassment of influential house church leaders, the ordination of
a Catholic bishop in defiance of the Vatican’s wishes and even the
cyberattacks that brought down China Aid’s Chinese and English
news websites, appear to have been a prelude signaling the advent
of the crackdown,” the CAA reported in its website. </p>
<p>“Operation Deterrence harks back to the previous era of
hostilities and often brutal government persecution that had for
decades driven unknown hundreds of thousands of believers
‘underground,’ worshipping in secret and fearing for their lives
and freedom.” </p>
<p>The labeling of the house church movement as a “cult” is ominous.
China termed the Falun Gong meditation movement a cult in 1999.
Since then more than 100,000 practitioners have been sentenced to
“reform through labor” camps, according to sources cited by the
U.S. State Department. </p>
<p>“They have also been given long prison sentences and even the
death penalty simply because of their religious practices, and
reports of Falun Gong practitioners being beaten to death in
prison or while in other forms of detention have been common,” the
CAA observed. </p>
<p>“The specter of similar treatment now hangs over house church
Christians as a result of the ‘cult’ label.”<br>
</p>
<p><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://news.newsmax.com/?ZKCDacS7TkSkmgCqH9WSeERm6xbztJU1Z">http://news.newsmax.com/?ZKCDacS7TkSkmgCqH9WSeERm6xbztJU1Z</a><br>
</p>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
"Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not."
Thomas Jefferson
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