ChinaAid Likens China to Pre-WWII Germany, Warns EU Not to Stand By Doing Nothing

China Aid Association
(Brussels – Nov. 30, 2011) In its failure to uphold freedom of religion and in its overall human rights record, China today is like pre-World War II Germany, and the Western world must not stand idly by – as it did in the 1930s, ChinaAid founder and president Bob Fu warned the European Parliament on Wednesday.

(Photo shows the ChinaAid delegation with leaders of the European Parliament at the end of the seminar on “The Human Rights Situation in China.”)

Speaking at a seminar on “The Human Rights Situation in China” at the Parliament building in Brussels, Fu expressed gratitude for Bastiaan Belder, a member of the Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, who opened the seminar proceedings, and others like him who have publicly stood in solidarity those who under persecution in China. 
In his opening remarks, Belder expressed concern over the continued deterioration of China’s overall human rights record and of the rule of law and religious freedom, and pledged to continue to push China to do better in these areas.
Fu reminded the European Union of the rise of Nazi Germany before World War II and warned against making the same mistake again with regard to China today.
(Photo: Fu speaking at the seminar.)
In detailing the overall deterioration of human rights, the rule of law and freedom of religion in China in recent years and describing the current situation, Fu referred to a number of the most serious cases, including the disappearance into police custody of Christian lawyer Gao Zhisheng, the brutal treatment of blind activist Chen Guangcheng, the constitutional law scholar and house church leader Dr. Fan Yafeng, who has been held under house arrest for nearly a year, the members of Shouwang Church in Beijing who have been continuously persecuted since April, the Xinjiang Uyghur house church leader Alimujiang who is serving a 15-year sentence, and the persecuted private entrepreneur in Chongqing, Sichuan province Li Jun, as well as many human rights lawyers who have been arrested, detained, placed under house arrest or been harassed by the government.
The full ChinaAid report submitted to the EU is below.
Following Fu’s remarks, another member of the ChinaAid delegation, Zhang Dajun (photo at left), spoke about his personal experience as a businessman who became a human rights activist and was persecuted by the government. The persecution escalated after Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Zhang was put under almost constant house arrest or soft detention.  Following a February trip to the United States, Zhang was taken in for police interrogation for days at a time.
Then Kathy Lu, a former member of the Shouwang Church in Beijing, gave a Powerpoint presentation about Shouwang’s past 34 weeks of weekly detentions and house arrest resulting from the church’s attempts to worship outdoors after it was repeatedly kicked out of rented property.
She cried when she showed one woman, whom she knows, who was dragged with her young son to a police station and held overnight, and she described the serious abuse that others also suffered.
The ChinaAid delegation answered a number of questions from members of parliament.  They asked about the relationship between the house churches and the official Three-Self Patriotic Movement churches controlled by the Chinese government, and wanted to know what the European Union could do better to help improve the situation in China.
On Thursday, the ChinaAid delegation will speak at a public forum in Ridderkerk, The Netherlands, about the situation of Christians in China to representatives from 40 organizations, members of the European Parliament, as well as national and local media.
Below is the full text of Fu’s report to the EU.
Click this link to view or download the PDF of the report: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B_YUgSyiG6aIY2EzNGM2ODEtNzU0Yy00MjljLWJhOWMtNWU4NjhiYjU3ZWEy

 
In the first 11 months of 2011, the deterioration of human rights, freedom of religion and the rule of law in China reached the lowest level since the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement. Furthermore, this is the fourth consecutive year of such deterioration since the Olympic Games were held in Beijing in 2008. In this report to the European Parliament, China Aid Association will use material and information it has gathered (most of it from first-hand sources) in its efforts to promote religious freedom, human rights and the rule of law to summarize the current situation in China and to make recommendations for how the European Union can impact and advance China’s efforts to improve in these areas.
I. The terrible state of human rights, the rule of law and freedom of religion

1. Serious deterioration of human rights and the rule of law: dissidents and human rights lawyers are “disappeared,” imprisoned and tortured
Based on incomplete statistics, we know that about 100 lawyers, rights activists and dissidents have been “disappeared,” tortured, imprisoned and even sentenced to prison terms this year. This was not solely the result of this spring’s Arab “Jasmine Revolution”: as early as September 2010, the government had already begun a comprehensive suppression of house churches in connection with the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization. China’s 200 house church representatives to Lausanne were all persecuted to varying degrees, and all were barred from leaving the country and were unable to attend the conference. Then in October, after dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, nearly 200 rights activists, political activists and well-known intellectuals were taken into custody, beaten, placed under house arrest, barred from leaving the country or subjected to other kinds of suppression. Then in response to the Jasmine Revolution, the government ratcheted up its crackdown on dissent. From February to July, more than 1,000 rights activists and dissidents across the country were “invited to drink tea and chat” with or were threatened by police or Domestic Security Protection agents.
The suppression of rights defense lawyers began in December 2010, when Christian constitutional law scholar Fan Yafeng was seized, imprisoned and tortured. Upon his release, he was put under house arrest, where he remains to this day. Thereafter, this model of disappearance, torture and house arrest that was first used on Gao Zhisheng and Chen Guangcheng, coupled with the crackdown during the Jasmine Revolution period, was widely applied to other Christians and rights activists and dissidents.
Between February and March this year, more than 30 rights lawyers disappeared. Some of the more well-known cases of disappearances and violence are listed here:
· In January, eight lawyers appearing in a court in Heilongjiang province were beaten up by police. One was a woman lawyer who was so badly beaten that she miscarried.
· On February 16, well-known human rights lawyer Tang Jitian was kidnapped, and was held until early March, during which time he was tortured.
· On February 19, well-known law professor Teng Biao and Christian human rights lawyer Jiang Tianyong were kidnapped by police and disappeared. Jiang was held for 60 days, during which time he was tortured and subjected to brainwashing “education.” Teng was held for 70 days, during which time he was tortured.
· Also on February 19, Li Tiantian, a well-known human rights lawyer in Shanghai, was apprehended by police and disappeared. She was released on May 24 after being tortured while in police custody.
· On April 29, well-known Christian human rights lawyer Li Fangping went missing. He was released five days later and had been tortured.
· On May 4, human rights lawyer Li Xiongbing disappeared. He was released more than 30 hours later after being tortured.
· Well-known Christian human rights lawyer Li Subin was also “disappeared” for more than 24 hours.
Then there is the case of blind rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who in 2005 exposed the 130,000 forced abortions and sterilizations performed in a single year by government family planning officials in Linyi, Shandong province. He was sentenced in 2006 to a four-year, three-month prison term, which he finished serving on Sept. 9, 2010. After he returned home, Chen and his wife were placed under house arrest by the local government, which mobilized nearly 100 people to guard the house round-the-clock. (Their address is East Shigu Village, Shuanghou Township, Yinan County, Linyi.) All forms of telecommunications to the house has been blocked and they were not allowed to go outside. They are totally dependent on relatives to deliver all their daily life needs. Chen and his wife, Yuan Weijing, were subjected to severe beatings three times: on February 8, the couple was so badly beaten that they were unable to move from their beds; on February 18, after they smuggled out to international contacts a videotape of Chen describing the circumstances of their confinement, the couple was savagely beaten again by dozens of people; on July 28, the couple was brutally beaten for four straight hours. It is possible that it was this last beating that led to unconfirmed reports that Chen had died. Both of the latter two beatings were carried out by people led by Shuanghou town mayor Zhang Jian.
Since January, everyone seeking to see Chen has been forcibly turned away. In October, more than 100 people, including some well-known Chinese writers, tried to see him on five separate occasions. Each time they were barred from the village and violently attacked by stone-throwing mobs. For instance, on October 23, more than 30 people tried to visit Chen but were met by a gang of more than 300 people sent by the government who attacked the visitors, injuring every single one of them.
According to statistics compiled by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, by April 16 this year, 39 dissidents had been criminally detained. These are some of the more prominent cases:
· Liu Xia has been under house arrest since October 2010, when her husband, Liu Xiaobo, was named the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
· In late 2010 or early 2011, well-known dissident writer and Christian Yu Jie was “disappeared.” While in custody, he was so badly tortured that he nearly died several times and was taken to the hospital to save his life.
· On February 11, U.S. Ambassador John Huntsman went to visit well-known human rights lawyer Ni Yulan. On April 7, Ni and her husband were both criminally detained for “causing a disturbance.”
· On February 14, Sichuan political activist Ran Yunfei was criminally detained for “inciting subversion of state power.” He was released on August 9 but has been under house arrest since then.
· On February 21, political activist Ding Mao of Mianyang city, Sichuan province, was criminally detained. On March 28, he was formally arrested for “inciting subversion of state power.”
· On March 21, Beijing rights activist Wang Lihong was taken away by police for “creating a disturbance,” and on September 9 he was sentenced to a nine-month prison term.
· On April 3, the famous Beijing artist and dissident Ai Weiwei was taken away by police. He was released on bail on June 22. He very likely was tortured during his time in custody.
· On April 11, Zhu Yufu, a Christian dissident from Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, was formally arrested for “inciting subversion of state power.”
· On April 14, 25-year-old right activist Zhang Yongpan of Jining city, Shandong province, disappeared. Zhang had been following the case of the three netizens’ trial in Fujian province and supported in the rights defense case involving the murder case of village chief Qian Yunhui in Lequan county, Zhejiang province. Two weeks later, he was criminally detained for “creating a disturbance,” and on May 13 was released on bail.
Also, Zhang Dajun, the head of a Beijing NGO and a house church leader, was held under house arrest from February 20 to March 16.

Also worth noting is that the situation in the city of Guangzhou has also been very serious this year. Since February 20, many Guangzhou lawyers, writers, and rights activists have been detained and held incommunicado, subjected to humiliation and tortured. It was not until September that they were released one by one, though they remain under various forms of surveillance and restrictions.
· Rights lawyer Tang Jingling, a Christian, was taken away by Domestic Security Protection police on February 22, and was held in Panyu from March 1 to August 2 before being escorted by police back to his hometown in Hubei province. During this time, his wife, Wang Yanfang, and her mother were first forcibly “disappeared” and then held under house arrest until August 2. Tang returned to Guangzhou on September 24, and beginning on October 1, additional police were posted on the first floor of his apartment building to sign in and out everyone entering and leaving the building. On or about October 24, two surveillance cameras were installed in the downstairs hallway. The church he attended was forced by authorities to split up and meet in smaller groups in different locations, and because of the pressure, the church to date refused to allow him to resume worshipping with them.
· Ye Du, a writer who is the webmaster and network coordinator for the Independent Chinese PEN Center, was imprisoned on March 1, forcibly returned to his hometown in Zhanjiang on May 24, and when he later returned to Guangzhou was imprisoned again. His case was not dropped until the end of August.
· Yuan Xinting was arrested on February 25 and imprisoned until the end of July, when he was forcibly returned to his hometown in Chengdu, Sichuan province. While he was in custody, the authorities forced the sale of real estate that he owned. Under the force of government pressure, his church refuses to allow him to resume worshipping with them.
· Lawyer Liu Shihui was beaten and injured on February 20 for distributing information about the Arab Jasmine Revolution. On February 25, he was seized by police and held until the end of June. While he was in custody, authorities forced the sale of real estate he owned, and his Vietnamese wife was forcibly repatriated.
· When lawyer Liu Zhengqing, who was engaged to represent Tang Jingling, went in March to the detention center where Tang was being held to request a meeting with him, he was secretly apprehended on the spot. It was not until two months later that he was released on bail. His license to practice law was temporarily suspended until October.
· Sun Desheng was secretly apprehended on March 1 and held in custody until mid-July when he was released on bail. The church he originally belonged to has come under government pressure and refuses to allow him to resume worshipping with them.
· The famous poet and veteran journalist Langzi (real name Wu Mingliang) was secretly apprehended in early June. He was released in mid-June.
· In June, Lin Jiqiang, a citizen activist and rights defender in Guangzhou, broke through the various barriers set up by police and security guards and managed to visit Wang Yanfang and her mother, who were under house arrest. Authorities held him in custody until the end of August.
· Lawyer Wu Zhenqi was confined to his home and put under surveillance from early March to the end of August.
· Many others have been imprisoned for periods of less than a week, or have been repeatedly summoned for police questioning, or had their homes searched one or more times. Among them, some have also not been able to resume worshipping at their original churches.
In addition to the above-mentioned cases showing the deterioration of the rule of law, the October 29 adoption of an amendment to the Resident Identity Card Law provides additional legal basis for this deterioration. It was perhaps because the government felt deeply encumbered by a number of legal provisions while engaged in the past year in its widespread suppression of house churches, political activists and dissidents that the Resident Identity Card Law was amended to say, “When citizens apply for, change or register their ID cards, they should be fingerprinted.” This measure broadens the scope of the police’s ability to investigate and expose citizens’ private affairs. Furthermore, the amendments to Articles 38 and 39 of the Criminal Procedure Law say that, in the case of “crimes that endanger national security and terror crimes,” subpoenas can be indefinitely extended and notification of family and relatives of an arrest or house arrest can be indefinitely delayed. This provides sufficient legal grounds for secret detentions and imprisonments. The well-known dissident Hu Jia considers these three amendments to be “KGB provisions.”
Although the rule of law has deteriorated and China already is a police state, and despite the complete repression in China of the legal defense movement started by the house church Christian and constitutional law scholar Fan Yafeng, this rights defense model is still viable and is the most effective model for public non-violent civil disobedience. The fact that the Chinese government has adopted these two important legal amendments shows that using the law to defend citizens’ rights is a very effective model. ChinaAid’s legal aid work this year has expanded to helping some Christian dissidents, for example Ding Mao and Zhu Yufu. ChinaAid has also been involved from the start in the cases of two other well-known Christian democracy activists, Wang Bingzhang and Peng Ming, who were kidnapped from neighboring southeast Asian countries and were sentenced in 2003 and 2004, respectively, to life imprisonment.
2. Further deprivation of freedom of religion: Protestants and Catholics alike are harshly persecuted
So far this year, ChinaAid has documented the harassment, detentions and arrests of more than 1,5000 members of nearly 30 house churches in 11 provinces, one municipality under direct central government jurisdiction and three autonomous regions. In other words, in nearly half China’s regions and cities. The number of Christians detained exceeded 300.
ChinaAid has been closely documenting the peaceful actions of Beijing’s Shouwang Church, which has been trying to hold outdoor Sunday worship services since April when it lost the lease for its indoor meeting site due to government attempts to break up and close down the church. Domestic Security Protection agents and police have detained, taken into custody, and even mistreated Shouwang church members who showed up for the outdoor services. More than 700 individuals from the Shouwang Church have been detained for various periods since April 2011. Adding this number to the above-mentioned 300-plus detentions, the total number of Christians detained so far this year is more than 1,000.
The Chinese House Church Alliance is also a target of persecution. Its president, Pastor Zhang Mingxuan, has been arrested on many occasions, forcibly sent back to his hometown, and had his rental agreements terminated. Its vice-president, Pastor Shi Enhao, was sentenced in July by the Suqian Municipal Public Security Bureau in Jiangsu province to two years of re-education through labor, a term that he is currently serving.
The whereabouts of prominent Christian rights defense lawyer Gao Zhisheng, one of the first to be “disappeared” by the authorities, remain a mystery, and there is no information as to whether he is dead or alive. On January 10 of this year, Associated Press reporter Charles Hutzler published an exclusive interview with Gao entitled “Gao Zhisheng, Missing Chinese Lawyer, Described Torture Before Disappearing.” Hutzler recounted Gao’s detailed and anguished descriptions of the torture inflicted on him by the Chinese government in the 14 months after he disappeared into police custody on February 4, 2009.
Dr. Fan Yafeng, the prominent Christian constitutional law scholar, a pioneer in China’s legal rights defense movement and founder of the group Christian Human Rights Lawyers of China, was also tortured during nine days in police detention last December, and has been under house arrest since his release on December 18, 2010. All forms of communication with him have either been cut off or are controlled by the authorities.
Alimujiang, a Uyghur Christian house church leader in Xinjiang, has now served three years and 10 months of a 15-year sentence. In February of this year, his wife and other family members were notified that their appeal of his sentence, submitted last year, had been rejected and that the original 15-year sentence was upheld.
Rare cases of government action against Christians in Tibet have also occurred. On October 7, 11 Han Chinese church leaders and missionaries were arrested. They were all later released.
In early November, an 125-year-old church that is part of the government-run Three-Self Patriotic Movement in the city of Tai’an, coastal Shandong province, was forcibly demolished. Christians who rose up to defend their rights were beaten and harassed.
On November 11, the chief representative of the Beijing Shamozhihua (Flowers in the Desert) Television and Film Co., was apprehended and criminally detained for distributing a legal Christian documentary that had been approved by the government.
The persecution has not been restricted to Protestant Christians alone. Persecution of Catholics this year and relations between Beijing and the Vatican are cause for concern.
· On March 30, the government’s Catholic Patriotic Association ordained without Vatican approval Liang Jiansen bishop of Jiangmen archdiocese in Guangdong province.
· On June 26, Father Sun Jigen of Handan archdiocese in Hebei province, was taken away by police and held in custody just before his Vatican-approved ordination.
· Respectively on June 29 and on July 14, the Chinese Catholic Leshan archdiocese in Sichuan and the Shantou archdiocese in Guangdong province ordained without Vatican approval two bishops, Lei Shiyin and Huang Bingzhang.
· In August, several dozen leaders of the underground Catholic church in Tianshui, Gansu province, were detained and taken into custody.
The Chinese government’s suppression of house churches over the past few years, and especially in 2011, has undergone some disturbing changes, as evidenced by the cases referred to above and as reported by some senior lawyers involved in church rights protection.
In the past, the police and religious affairs bureau generally used the crime of “illegal gathering” when suppressing the house churches, and used detentions and fines to punish offenders. If the case involved a large amount of printed materials, prison or labor camp terms were meted out for the crime of “illegal business activity.” But starting in 2011, the police and religious affairs bureau began using such crimes as “organizing and using a cult to undermine law enforcement” or “holding illegal meetings under the guise of religion” etc. in cracking down on house churches. Furthermore, in addition to fines, they also used prison terms and labor camp terms. This was a new development. Prior to 2008, in cases where house churches were administratively punished, suits against the police or religious affairs bureau were generally accepted by the courts. But after 2008, getting the courts to accept such cases has been more difficult, and appeals are also difficult. They generally refuse to handle these cases.
In considering the situation of religious freedom over this past year, we can clearly see that the Chinese government severely and systematically violates religious freedom. Government orders to Three-Self churches and other religious organizations to join in concerts of praise to the Chinese Communist Party when the nation was marking the 90^th anniversary of the founding of the Party in July clearly demonstrate that China’s concept of religious freedom is in fact nothing more than the freedom to follow the Communist Party.
In this unsettling situation, however, we also see reason for hope. And that is the social, political and cultural effects produced by Shouwang Church’s non-violent fight for its rights. This has demonstrated that China’s house churches have become the backbone of efforts to promote freedom of religion, human rights and the rule of law and the cornerstone for the development of a civil society in China.


II. With a clear understanding of the current situation in China, Europe and the United States can jointly promote improvements in human rights, rule of law and religious freedom in China

1. Looking at pre-WWII Germany to understand China today
The past nine years that Hu Jintao has been in power have represented, to a certain extent, a restoration of the ultra-leftist political line of Mao Zedong. This was especially true during the 2008 Olympic Games, which could be said to have launched a mini-Cultural Revolution persecuting different ideologies. That a large number of well-known intellectuals and even artists were persecuted this year fully illustrates this point. Furthermore, Chongqing Mayor Bo Xilai, one of China’s princelings, has since 2009 implemented a vigorous “sing red, strike black” campaign [sing red = sing patriotic songs; strike black = crack down on crime], which is really just a copy of Mao’s Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns of the early 1950s to stamp out capitalism. For example, the owner of the Chongqing Junfeng Group, Chongqing private entrepreneur Li Jun, was imprisoned by Bo on Dec. 4, 2009 and tortured. Overnight, 4 billion yuan (more than US$ 627 million/more than 474 million Euros) worth of assets were confiscated. Li was not released until March 5, 2010. More than 20 relatives and friends were implicated and also arrested. His wife, Luo Cong, was not released until October 22, 2011 at the end of her sentence. These two replications of the most extreme political ideologies of Communism both reached their climax this year, resulting in a serious setback in the already slow development of the rule of law and the limited expression of cultural freedom in China.
However, these replications of far-left political ideology won’t return China to the past; rather, with the rapid growth of its economic and military might, China will be transformed into an extreme nationalist political entity, similar to pre-World War II Germany and Japan. If we consider the situation of the persecution of Christianity, the similarity with Germany is even more pronounced.
First, Germany after World War I resented the U.S. victory and incited the spread of a parochial nationalism that led to the rise of the Nazis. China, though it has implemented economic reforms and opened itself to the outside world, has continued to hold on to the traditional hatred among Communist countries for the free nations of the West, and has integrated this sentiment into the extreme nationalism of the Confucian culture, resulting in a swelling of the “angry youth” forces.
Second, pre-WWII Germany and today’s China have both seen great economic achievements (even though China’s income disparity is huge), and all of this economic strength goes directly into huge military investments. The 1936 Berlin Olympics and the 2008 Beijing Olympics used strikingly similar propaganda methods to show off the host country’s national pride while endeavoring to convince the world of its peaceful rise.
Finally, more similarities are evident in the treatment of Christianity: the “Chinese Protestant Three-Self Patriotic Movement” controlled by the “State Administration of Religious Affairs” of the Chinese Communist government is like the “German Christian Faith Movement” that was controlled by the “Ministry of Church Affairs” of Germany’s ruling Nazi Party. Both raise high the banner of patriotism and love of socialism. China’s “house churches,” which refuse to submit to the control of the Communist Party, are like the “Confessing Church,” which refused to submit to the control of the Nazis and therefore was supplanted and persecuted. Clearly, history is repeating itself.
2. Europe and the United States can play to their strengths and take concrete measures
Since diplomatic relations were established in 1979, the United States has exerted a great influence on the Chinese government. However, in the current U.S. administration, this influence has sharply declined. The main reason is the Obama administration’s confused China policy, which is a combination of wishful thinking of being “in the same boat” and of an ostrich-like head-in-the-sand approach. This has resulted in the Chinese government taking advantage of the situation and grasping firm hold of the initiative in the bilateral relationship. For instance, over the past more-than-20 years, every U.S. administration has been able to press the Chinese government for the release of some important political prisoners and prisoners of conscience, and some of them have even been allowed to go to the United States for political asylum. But the current administration to date has not managed to win the release of a single prisoner of conscience held by the Chinese government or to allow any to go to the United States, not even Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo.
As the influence of the United States wanes, the European Union can bring its unique advantages into play. The EU represents the attitude and interests of the world’s most developed countries, and this is something that the Chinese government does not take lightly. Although the United States remains a partner and a rival who cannot be ignored, the Chinese government today has a tendency to turn its economic and diplomatic focus toward Europe. When ChinaAid and two Chinese rights lawyers, Li Subin and Wu Chenglian, testified at an EU hearing on July 15, 2010, this was a great source of encouragement to China’s rule of law and rights advocacy communities. The decision by Norway’s Nobel Committee to award the 2010 Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo came as a great shock to China’s political environment, but was a great source of encouragement to hundreds of millions of Chinese.
Herewith, we call on the EU to pay more attention to human rights, the rule of law and religious freedom in China, and to establish a trans-Atlantic alliance with the United States to implement more practical and effective measures, specifically:
(1) use diplomatic means to press China to release some important prisoners of conscience;
(2) hold regular parties at your embassies to which are invited representatives of all sectors of society, including politicians and advocates of human rights, the rule of law and religious freedom;
(3) consulates in China can make telephone calls to those who have been persecuted;
(4) consular officials can invite to tea those people who have been persecuted;
(5) attach importance to academic exchanges with China. Embassies and consulates can hold academic forums on China’s politics, human rights, rule of law and religious freedom; these events would take place on mission premises and can be called “cultural exchanges.” This academic approach can promote ideological trends and have a far-reaching impact.
(6) through direct dialogue with Chinese leaders, urge them as individuals to respond to the EU’s requests.

Conclusion
When the government of pre-WWII Germany was engaged in large-scale violations of human rights, the rule of law and freedom of religion, Western nations failed to make a serious effort to intervene. When World War II finally broke out, the Western nations paid a heavy price to achieve success, but this also resulted in many other problems for the international community. With regard to China today, Western nations should not forget history when setting their foreign policy. They need not repeat the same mistakes, and they ought not be indecisive about paying a comparatively small price now. Whether China does become pre-WWII Germany depends on the efforts of the Chinese people and the resolute stand and actions of Western society. This will be of great benefit to the future of the Chinese people and people of the world.
Most importantly, remember that in this contest, Europe is still dominant; the Chinese government is but a paper tiger. Europe need not cower, much less kowtow, to Beijing. Rather, it should seize this historic opportunity to lead the world in helping a rising China become a moral and upstanding member of the international community.
Thank you!

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About ChinaAid’s Founder and President

Pastor “Bob” Xiqiu Fu is originally from China’s coastal Shandong province. He graduated from Shandong’s Liaocheng Teachers College in foreign languages, holds a double bachelor’s degree from People’s University and the Institute of Foreign Relations, and taught at the Beijing Municipal Communist Party School. In the United States, he earned a master’s degree from Westminster Theological Seminary and is now working on his PhD.
Pastor Fu was persecuted while in college for taking part in the 1989 Tiananmen Square student democracy movement. The resulting sense of hopelessness he felt led to a spiritual awakening, and Pastor Fu accepted the truth of the Bible and became a Christian passionate about spreading the Gospel. In 1996, when they were leaders of a house church of mainly college students, Pastor Fu and his wife were arrested and imprisoned for two months. They later escaped to the United States and in 2002 founded China Aid Association.
Pastor Fu and his ministry are highly regarded both by those in China and in the international arena. He is an expert on Christian persecution in China and religious freedom issues. He is frequently interviewed by media from around the world and has testified at U.S. congressional hearings and before the European Parliament and the United Nations. In his frequent travels, he has met with government officials in many countries and the leaders of Christian institutions, think thanks and other NGOs for extensive exchanges and cooperation. He is committed to promoting religious freedom, human rights and the rule of law in China.
ChinaAid’s websites：www.ChinaAid.net www.ChinaAid.org

China Aid Contacts
Rachel Ritchie, English Media Director
Cell: (432) 553-1080 | Office: 1+ (888) 889-7757 | Other: (432) 689-6985
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Website: www.chinaaid.org