Chinese police detained five US citizens in a raid last month on a Christian retreat in the country's southwest, an overseas church monitoring group said yesterday.
They were released after five hours of interrogation, along with two Taiwanese and 80 Chinese citizens representing congregations worshiping outside the tightly controlled official state Protestant church, the China Aid Association said.
The US citizens, three of whom are ethnic Chinese, are attached to churches in Greensboro, North Carolina, the association said. It did not identify them by name because they are still in China.
Interrogators accused the five of being "foreign religious infiltrators," it said -- not a formal criminal charge, but a reflection of the Communist Party's fears that outside forces are using burgeoning Christianity to undermine their rule.
About 120 officers took part in the raid on a conference center outside Kunming on the morning of March 23, said the association, based in Midland, Texas.
Calls to the Kunming police spokesman's office and the city Religious Affairs Bureau rang unanswered yesterday.
The association said that China detained at least 1,300 underground Chinese Christians and 17 foreign missionaries last year.
"The persecution against Protestant house churches in China has intensified," the association said in a statement.
A total of 1,317 detentions of house church pastors, leaders and believers occurred in 20 provinces while 17 foreign missionaries, including 11 Americans, were detained between February and December last year, it said.
Most were released after they had been interrogated for periods ranging from 24 hours to several months, the group said. But it claimed that police and state security agents tortured, drugged and practised other abuses against some of the detainees.
It began as a satirical online project. Now millions of young people in India are flocking to it as an outlet for their frustration. A parody political party called the Cockroach Janta Party, with the insect as its symbol, has exploded across India’s social media by turning absurdist humor into protest. Memes and short videos mocking corruption, joblessness and political dysfunction have flooded social media sites, where millions of users are embracing the cockroach — known for its ability to survive harsh conditions — as a tongue-in-cheek symbol of endurance. The online movement’s rise has been unusually rapid. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP)
SPEAKING OUT: After Siranudh Scott’s allegations surfaced, celebrities and public figures took to social media to share their own experiences of sexual misconduct and abuse A high-profile alleged sexual abuse case within a wealthy Thai beer brewing family has prompted a wave of painful accounts from survivors of unconnected abuse in the conservative nation. Siranudh Scott, a member of the billionaire Thai family that founded the ubiquitous Singha beer brand, posted an emotional video this month accusing his elder brother Sunit of repeatedly abusing him when he was a teenager. Sunit, who is in his 30s, later denied the allegations in a video posted online, but Singha parent Boonrawd dismissed him from his executive role with the company on Tuesday last week. “I felt I needed to speak
A Hong Kong astronaut is to join a Chinese space mission for the first time as part of a three-person crew launching today, as Beijing edges closer to its goal of landing people on the moon. The Tiangong space station — crewed by teams of three astronauts that are typically rotated every six months — is the crown jewel of China’s space program, boosted by billions in state investment in a bid to catch up with the US and Russia. The Shenzhou-23 mission is to blast off at 11:08pm from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, carrying three astronauts to
UPGRADED ALERT: The risk inside DR Congo is now considered ‘very high,’ while neighboring countries face a ‘high’ threat as the outbreak continues, the WHO said Ebola is spreading faster than responders can track it in eastern Congo, where health workers managed to follow up with barely one in five identified contacts in a single day. Authorities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) reported 83 confirmed infections, 746 suspected cases and 1,603 identified contacts as of Thursday, but health workers were able to follow up on only 342 contacts that day — about 21 percent of the total under monitoring — data released by the DR Congo Ministry of Public Health on Friday showed. The figures suggest the response is falling behind the outbreak itself,
RSS