ARTICLES
December 1997 ARTICLES
LETTERS
Contents © 1997
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
Their Life Is Horrible
CATHOLICS SUFFER IN CHINESE LABOR CAMPS
By Victoria Freiheit
In his recent visit to the United States, Chinese President Jiang Zemin not only received full state honors from the White House, but protests from across the political spectrum. While President and Mrs. Clinton, along with leaders of the American business community, toasted Jiang at a state dinner, actors Richard Gere and Brad Pitt held a "stateless" dinner in protest of China's notorious human rights abuses.
When Jiang came to Los Angeles on November 2, he was again met by protests outside of the Beverly Hilton Hotel where a luncheon was held in his honor. The protesters included Amnesty International, the Chinese Rights Party, the Friends of Tibet and even the John Birch Society. Some members of the Society of St. Pius the X Society were also amongst the protesters. Mark Andrew Shoban, a member of the Society of St. Pius the X, came from Agoura to attend the demonstration. When questioned why he was participating in the demonstration, he stated, "because my family was killed by Communists in Lithuania in the 1940's. There are so many Catholics in China who cannot practice their faith, who are being persecuted, that we have to stand with them because they are part of the Body of Christ."
The Chinese Communist Party has imprisoned bishops, priests and nuns as well as ordinary layman for the mere "crime" of practicing the Catholic Faith. These the Communists place in the laogai, the Chinese system of forced labor camps--a source of cheap labor for Chinese industry. The Catholic Church has been banned in China since 1957, the year the Communist government set up its own state-run religion--the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association. Any sign of religious devotion meets with swift and brutal punishment. As recently as October of this year, Bishop Su Zhimin of the Hebei Province, a prominent leader of the underground Roman Catholic Church in China, was arrested after hiding for 17 months from the Public Security Bureau. Bishop Su had been previously arrested. In January 1994, the Chinese government arrested him after he met, in China, with U.S. Representative Christopher Smith (New Jersey, 4th district). In May 1996 he was again arrested, along with his auxiliary bishop, An Shuxin, as well as priests, religious and laymen. At the time of their arrest, the government had destroyed the shrine of Our Lady of China in Donglu. To date, Bishop Su remains in custody and his family and parishioners worry about his safety.
Another Chinese bishop, Cardinal Kung, suffered imprisonment in the laogai for over thirty years because of his loyalty to Rome. The Cardinal Kung Foundation, based in Stamford Connecticut, recounts how in 1985, while under house arrest, Cardinal Kung attended a banquet, hosted by the Chinese Communist Party in honor of Cardinal Sin of Manila. When the Communists forbade Cardinal Kung to speak with Cardinal Sin, the latter suggested that each of the attendees "sing a song to provide a little stimulation for an otherwise silent gathering." When Cardinal Kung's turn to sing came, he sang a few bars in Latin, Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam (You are Peter and upon this rock I will build my Church). Cardinal Sin understood the simple message that had been sent: despite imprisonment, immense suffering and pain, Cardinal Kung was still faithful to Peter. Unfortunately for Cardinal Kung, however, one of the ministers from the Chinese state religion understood the message. As a result, Cardinal Kung was sent back to the laogai. He was released again in 1985, and now, at the age of 96, resides in Stamford, Connecticut.
The Mission interviewed a Chinese Jesuit priest, now living in Los Gatos, California, who spent 33 years in the laogai. Fearful of retaliation against his family, he asked not to be identified. Father X said: "Please don't write my name, because the Communists will surely persecute my relatives in Shanghai. My nephew's house was torn down, and his family was forced to move to a remote suburb. It takes four hours to go to work and get back."
Father X was baptized while in high school, along with his brother, sisters and father. Father X described how, prior to the persecution, the Church in China had been "flourishing, especially before 1949 when the Communists took over mainland China. The young Catholics were wonderfully devoted; they had gone to Mass every morning and to adoration in the evening, before 1945. Because of the persecution, the Communists expelled all the foreign missionaries and Church leaders. The vocations were more numerous than they had ever been. I was arrested in 1955. The Communists charged me, for I rebuked the government because it expelled the Apostolic internuncio; I encouraged the members of the Legion of Mary to resist as counter revolutionaries; I honored the arrested priests as living martyrs; I proclaimed Communism to be a drug infecting young people and dissuaded young Catholics from joining Communist youth leagues."
Father X described the horrible treatment of prisoners in the laogai. "The life in the labor camps is horrible, the prisoners' food is bad and insufficient, just enough to maintain their work. During 1958 to 1962 millions of prisoners died of starvation. The prisoners were forced to work more than 10 hours a day. Lacking warm clothes, they were forced to work in freezing weather. Not only the prisoners but their families were discriminated against in wages and in life in society."
Father Matthias Lu, Ph.D, who is director of the St. Thomas Aquinas Center at St. Mary's College in Morga, California, is petitioning the United Nations Human Rights Committee to free Bishop Su. Father Lu's petition states that he has received word from "a nephew of Bishop Su, several priests, lay leaders and bishops from Beijing, Baoding and Shanghai who are living either in custody or in hiding. They maintain contacts with me through risky telephone, fax and notes smuggled out." The petition asks that the United Nations "send visitors and inspectors, as a kind of peace keeping force to visit Bishop Su, his priests and religious and lay leaders and all other people who are deprived of their freedom, as he is; and, vice versa to invite Bishop Su to come to the United Nations to speak for himself."
For more information on human rights abuses in China, contact: The Cardinal Kung Foundation, P.O. Box 8086, Ridgeway Center, Stamford, CT 06905, (203) 329-9712,Fax (203) 329-8415, website: www.cardinalkungfoundation.org, e-mail: jmkung@aol.com; The Laogai Research Foundation, P.O. Box 361375, Milpitas, CA 95036-1375; Freedom House, 1319 18th Street, NW, 2nd Floor, Washington, D.C. 20036, (202) 296-5106, fax (202) 296-9078. Books to read on the subject, include: Eighteen Layers of Hell (Cassell 1996) by Kate Saunders; and the following by Harry Wu: Troublemaker: One's Man's Crusade Against China's Cruelty (Times Books, 1996), Laogai--The Chinese Gulag (Harper, Collins Press, 1995); Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag (Wiley, 1994).