Nik Ripken offers a rather succinct but helpful summary of the situation many Chinese Christians either presently face or have faced in recent decades. I thought some people would find it helpful. Some of the claims may only be true in certain places or in a earlier day. Overall, it gives people a good sense for the Chinese context.
In The Insanity of God: A True Story of Faith Resurrected, Ripken writes,
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What I appreciated most was their description of life for believers in communist China. Several of the people I interviewed assured me that the communist government actually didn’t care what its citizens believed . They claimed that the government’s long and brutal opposition to religion had not been about faith , but about control . I knew, of course, about China’s “one- child policy.”
My new friends explained that the enforcement of that law through involuntary abortions was merely one of countless ways the government determined to control every aspect of an individual’s life. The government mandated where people could live and whether or not they could ever relocate to another part of the country. The government determined where children could go to school. School authorities determined if and where each student could continue his or her education. The government would decide each person’s career, where a person would work, and even what the salary would be.
Before young people could marry, they would have to get permission from their supervisor. Applying for a marriage license, they would wait for government approval. If a couple wanted to start a family, they were required to seek permission from authorities at their place of work and in the local government. All pregnancies had to be reported and were supposed to be pre-approved. Unexpected or unplanned pregnancies, even when it was a couple’s first, would sometimes be aborted. Once a woman had given birth to her one allotted baby, any subsequent pregnancies would be automatically terminated by an involuntary, government- ordered abortion. Many work places required regular pregnancy tests for all female employees of child- bearing age in order to catch unapproved pregnancies early. Women seeking government permission and paperwork to travel from one province of China to another would first be required to pay for a pregnancy test to make sure that they weren’t going somewhere to secretly give birth to an unapproved child. The personal cost for an elective pregnancy test could be more than one- month’s salary.
Any woman who somehow managed to escape the notice of the pregnancy police, or any family that refused to abide by the government’s one child policy , would pay a terrible price. Because the government issued only one child identity card per family, no additional child could ever have an official identity. As far as the government was concerned, that additional child did not exist. That child could never attend school and that child could never get a job.”
What do you think?
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