China’s communistic practices have isolated Christianity from all aspects of their daily lives. Their current regimen has taken extreme measures to even arrest those who are apart of any religiously affiliated online chat group. As a Christian myself, I found it quite difficult to imagine living in a country where my religion was outlawed. However, this is a reality that Chinese Christians have to face every day.
Within college campuses specifically, Chinese authorities have been vigorously monitoring online activity from students. A group of fifty students from a college located in the eastern province of Shandong were summoned after internet police suspected that they had Christian affiliations (Zhang Feng). Currently, this involvement can be punishable with imprisonment. Although their offenses were not enough to place them in prison, their participation did lead them to intense interrogation and penalizations from the government. They were forced to answer questions about their fellow group members’ levels of involvement and attend specific anti-religion classes created by the authorities. Students involved were then subject to cancellation of scholarships and grants. Eventually, they were all pressured into fully giving up their previous religious beliefs.
Some of the students penalized later reported that they were still unaware of how their previous religious affiliations had been discovered, as nothing had been explicitly mentioned within their online chat group. Although before researching this subject matter I had originally believed that I would still be able to live out my faith silently as a Chinese citizen, I know have started to realize that it would not be this easy. Chinese authorities have clearly intensified their search for identifying “undercover” Christians.
One reply on “Religious Social Networking”
Thank you so much for sharing this, and for engaging with the information you have come across in this personal way. I really do think it would be interesting for some and perhaps all students in the class to talk to my wife, who was involved in the life of the church in ways that were scrutinized and, when discovered, penalized by the Communist authorities in Romania, in ways that at least parallel and resemble things that still happen today in China.