Chinese Province Issues Draft Regulation on Church Crosses

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By MICHAEL FORSYTHEMAY 8, 2015

HONG KONG — Cities in Zhejiang, one of China’s most prosperous provinces, are studded with Christian churches, Protestant and Catholic alike. Until recently, many of them had been topped by large crosses soaring into the sky, often illuminated with neon lights at night.

Under a new draft regulation made public this week by the provincial government, such crosses — those that have not already been removed by government order — will most likely have to come down.

In painstaking detail, the 36-page directive sets out strict guidelines for where and how churches in Zhejiang can display crosses. They must be placed on the facades of buildings, not above them. They must be of a color that blends into the building, not one that stands out. And they must be small: no more than one-tenth the height of the building’s facade.

The rules put new legal force behind a continuing campaign in Zhejiang to remove crosses from the tops of churches, as the government works to hide the most visible sign of Christianity’s explosive growth in the province. Wenzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang with more than nine million people, is often referred to as China’s Jerusalem because of its heavily Christian population and big churches.

Christianity, which was strictly controlled in China during the first decades of Communist rule, began to flourish after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, as the officially atheist party relaxed its grip on society. Some estimates now put the number of Chinese faithful at more than 100 million, far more than when foreign missionaries and priests were expelled after the Communist takeover in 1949. Many churches are sanctioned by the government, but others operate outside the official sphere.

But since President Xi Jinping rose to the top party and government posts starting in 2012, there has been a new focus on reining in foreign influences that are seen as threatening the party’s grip on power.

In Zhejiang, the campaign against crosses can be traced to a visit to Wenzhou in October 2013 by Xia Baolong, the Communist Party’s top official in the province. He was upset that one officially sanctioned house of worship, the Sanjiang Church, dominated the local skyline with its 180-foot spire, The New York Times reported in May 2014.

The Sanjiang church was demolished in April of last year, and crosses on churches across the province have been taken down, a process that has often led to confrontations between parishioners and the police.

“We feel helpless and don’t know what to do next,” said a pastor at one Wenzhou church, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared government retaliation.

The pastor, who once served on a government-sanctioned committee that oversaw churches, said more crosses had recently been removed in the area. “We thought the storm of toppling crosses had stopped,” he said, “but it hasn’t.”
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