Tag Archives: Topic: Communism

Forum 18: China does not allow religious communities to run schools for children, even though regulations do not forbid the provision of religious education to minors. Nor is religious education provided in state schools. For students beyond school age, only state-approved religious groups affiliated with China’s five state-backed monopoly faiths are allowed to apply to set up institutions for the study of their faith or training of clergy, Forum 18 News Service notes. Restrictions are especially tight in Tibet and Xinjiang. The state limits the number of such institutions and their size. Establishing new colleges is cumbersome and long drawn out, even when successful. Their curricula must include “politics” and “patriotic” education, as defined by the state. The state also discourages religious activity on general university campuses. These restrictions reflect the authoritarian state’s desire to control religious groups, including by intervening in the training of their leaders and the level of education of their members.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Family planning agents are investigating China’s most famous film director for reportedly having 7 children with 4 women. If guilty of breaking China’s laws, Zhang Yimou could face $27 million in fines.

Express.co.uk: Fears that famine-stricken North Koreans are being forced to eat human flesh heightened earlier this year following claims a man was executed for murdering his two children for food.

Nina Shea at National Review: North Korea’s Kim dynasty considers religion a hindrance to the nation’s socialist evolution. For 50 years, its secret police has waged a brutal campaign to eradicate religious belief. It has nearly succeeded. But the numbers of Christian believers are now slowly rising (maybe even in the low hundreds of thousands) and they must be prepared to pay with their lives for their faith.

AP: Human rights groups are urging U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to raise the ill-treatment of dissidents and other rights concerns during a weekend visit to China expected to be dominated by talk of North Korea.

AP: Dozens of Chinese rights lawyers and citizens have flocked to an eastern city this week to protest an elementary school for preventing the 10-year-old daughter of an activist from returning to class.

CNSNews: Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng, testifying in front of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and a packed crowd Tuesday, held up a list of “corrupt officials” whom he said were responsible for “130,000 forced abortions” in China.

Washington Post: Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng appealed to Congress Tuesday to press the Obama administration to release what he said were high-level diplomatic agreements made with China when then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton negotiated his departure from China nearly …

Boston Globe: Speaking before a congressional panel Tuesday, Chen said his nephew has been threatened by Yinan County officials with life imprisonment if he appeals his three-year sentence for assault.

Reuters: Two retired senior Chinese officials are engaged in a battle with one another to sway Beijing’s new leadership over the future of the one-child policy, exposing divisions that have impeded progress in a crucial area of reform.

LifeSiteNews: A mother of two has died after a forced sterilization, which took place against a doctor’s orders, Women’s Rights in China reports.

Gospel Herald: Tens of thousands of Chinese were to be baptized Catholics on Easter Sunday in mainland China, the country with a quarter of the world’s population, while just 50 years ago the Communists had ordered the complete purge of any religions and the indoctrination of atheism in its citizens.

LifeSiteNews: Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) shows that Romania has one of the highest abortion rates in Europe with 480 abortions for every 1,000 live births—a figure that is double the official EU abortion average. In 1990, Romania’s ration of abortions to live births was a horrific three to one. Today, Romania’s abortion rate is second only to Russia’s in Europe.

LifeNews: The graphic photograph of a of an aborted 7-month boy is widely circulating among Chinese people on the Internet following a horrifying forced abortion that took place on Friday. The forced abortion took place in Chuzhou City, Anhui Province as a woman named Lü, a 33-year-old Chinese woman whose husband reported the case and released the photograph, was victimized.

Catholic Culture: For the second year in a row, Cuba has declared Good Friday a national holiday.

NY Times: So Ms. Hernández was more than a little tickled when she became the first transgender person to be elected to public office in Cuba, a country whose government once viewed homosexuality as a dangerous aberration and, in the 1960s, packed gay men off to labor camps.

AP: China pledged Wednesday to allow charities, industry associations and other nonprofit groups to play a greater role in society in an acknowledgement of the growing importance of independent organizations that the authoritarian government traditionally has treated with suspicion.

Baptist Press: Vietnam’s latest changes in enforcement of its highest law regarding religion clarify the country’s intent to especially control the spread of Christianity, according to an authority on Vietnamese Protestant Christianity, World Watch Monitor has reported.

Phayul.com: Around 200 Tibetans from all over Switzerland took part in a special solidarity prayer vigil in front of the United Nations office in Geneva yesterday.

Religion Clause Blog: Last year the Czech Republic passed a law on return of church property confiscated during the country’s Communist regime. Under the law, the government will return land worth 75 billion crowns and will pay additional compensation of 59 billion crowns over the next 30 years.

Kristen Hatten at LifeNews: The horror of such a place is difficult for us to imagine, but it is a reality, every day, for over one billion people. How? How could such a nightmarish Orwellian state exist in 2012, when every day we pride ourselves on moving forward and becoming more and more enlightened? The answer is simple: Communism.

World Net Daily: China’s crackdown on its thriving house-church movement is surging just months after it was reported attacks on Christians had subsided, according to a report from the human rights group China Aid.

Baptist Press: Of an estimated 200,000 prisoners in North Korea, 70,000 of them are Christians, Open Doors reported.

Pat Buchanan at Townhall: What is it that gives a party its legitimacy, its right to rule? What holds a nation together when its cradle faith, its founding ideology, has been abandoned by both elites and the people? That is China’s coming crisis.

AP: But while the Supreme Court struck down loyalty oaths that predicate public-sector employment on a lack of affiliation with a subversive group, it has upheld less-expansive pledges to defend the United States from its enemies and uphold the Constitution. Including those that also have anti-subversives oaths, at least 13 states have such laws on their books, including Florida, Tennessee and Arizona.

AP: The Czech government signed deals with representatives of 16 religious groups on Friday to pay them billions of dollars in compensation for property that the country’s former Communist regime seized from them.

Religion Clause Blog: According to yesterday’s London Daily Telegraph, in China, Christian “house church” activist Cao Nan has filed a lawsuit against the police in the city of Shenzhen to challenge the police decision to detain him for 12 days for meeting with other Christians to preach and sing hymns in Shenzhen’s Lizhi Park.

NBC: A 13-month-old child was fatally crushed by a car containing Chinese officials after they went to collect a fine from the parents for breaching the country’s one-child policy, according to Chinese state media.

AP: Chinese courts convicted eight Tibetans over accusations they incited others to self-immolate in the first such prosecutions to become publicly known . . .

The Sun: HUNGRY parents in North Korea have been caught eating their CHILDREN to avoid starvation, according to reports

Washington Post: The Tibetans of China had a difficult 2012, and so far 2013 is not looking much better. Tibetan self-immolations, in protest against Beijing’s increasingly harsh rule over the Himalayan region, are continuing apace. Since the new Communist Party leadership took power, Chinese authorities appear to have tightened their grip on Tibet, sending in security forces to cordon off areas of unrest and even confiscating thousands of satellite dishes.

AP: The family of an imprisoned Chinese rights lawyer was allowed to visit him for the first time in nearly 10 months, providing a confirmation that he was still alive, a human rights group reported.

AP: The workers demanded the scrapping of the ridiculously strict requirements stipulating that workers only have two minutes to go to the toilet and workers will be fined 50 yuan ($8) if they are late once and fired if they are late twice,” said the security guard, surnamed Feng.

The Guardian: Re-education through labour’ allows police to jail criminals without using courts and has targeted activists, claim critics.

One News Now: ChinaAid has released the secret Communist Party Central Committee document, which includes detailed instructions for a nationwide crackdown. Bob Fu tells OneNewsNow the purpose is to keep Christianity away from the brightest minds in China, who will eventually become professionals and government leaders.

Independent: Visit your parents. That’s an order. China’s national legislature amended its law on the elderly yesterday to require that adult children visit their aged parents “often” – or risk being sued by them.

Melanie Kirkpatrick at the Wall Street Journal: Public worship is dangerous. A ‘congregation’ might mean two people on a park bench, silently sharing their faith.

AP: This year’s Nobel literature winner Mo Yan, who has been criticized for his cozy relationship with China’s Communist Party, defended censorship Thursday as something as necessary as airport security checks.

LifeNews: The nephew of Chen Guangcheng has been sentenced to 39 months in prison for supposedly injuring a Chinese government agent who raided his house in the aftermath of Chen’s escape to the United States.

AP: The surge in self-immolations, along with an increase in large demonstrations, mark a new phase in the Tibetan protests.

WorldNetDaily: The leader of a Christian outreach in China says the recent power transition in the Communist government could mean good things for long-persecuted Christians there.

AP: Adela Hernandez, a biologically male Cuban who has lived as a female since childhood, served two years in prison in the 1980s for “dangerousness” after her own family denounced her sexuality. This month she made history by becoming the first known transgender person to hold public office in Cuba . . .

Washington Post: Google and many of its most popular subdomains, including Google e-mail, have been blocked by a “DNS poison” in China, according to Chinese Web monitoring site GreatFire.org, an extraordinary step in Web censorship even for the Chinese government.

Reuters: President Hu Jintao warned China’s incoming leaders on Thursday that corruption threatened the ruling Communist Party and the state, but said the party must stay in charge as it battles growing social unrest.

AP: The lower house of Parliament has overruled an upper house veto and gave a green light to a plan by the center-right government to pay billions of dollars in compensation for property seized by the former totalitarian Communist regime

AP on MyWay: She’s among many people attempting to bring local complaints directly to the central government in an age-old Chinese tradition that has continued during the Communist Party era. But police never make that easy, and this week, as an all-important leadership transition begins, a dragnet is aimed at keeping anyone perceived as a threat or a troublemaker out of Beijing.

AP: China blocked access to The New York Times website Friday after the paper published a lengthy article claiming the family of Premier Wen Jiabao has amassed assets worth $2.7 billion through a web of investments

AP: Human Rights First gave its 2012 Human Rights Award to Chen Guangcheng at its annual gala on Wednesday

MySanAntonio.com: The entire sign at the church reads, “VOTE FOR THE MORMON, NOT THE MUSLIM! THE CAPITALIST, NOT THE COMMUNIST!”

Boston Globe: People in China are increasingly worried about corruption, inequality and food safety, according to a survey released Tuesday that also found that about half of Chinese like American ideas about democracy . . . The Communist Party has said repeatedly that pervasive corruption threatens its hold on power.

ForeignPolicy.com: So it’s strange that less than a year after Havel’s death, communism in the Czech Republic is making a comeback.

Daniel Greenfield at Front Page Magazine: The ACLU now counts at least eight Muslims on its national executive staff alone. In fact, a Muslim runs the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, while another heads its National Security Project.

BBC video report here. “Figures from the latest census show China’s birth-rate has fallen way below the level necessary to keep the population stable. The policy is unpopular, and it is leading to serious imbalances.”

Catholic Culture: Cardinal Dominik Duka of Prague is pressing the government of the Czech Republic for a final decision on proposals to compensate the Church for the properties that were confiscated by the country’s Communist regime.

Hadley Arkes at National Review: For it’s not a matter of one word more or less, one or more mentions of God. The real heart of the issue is that most of the people in that hall, in the Democratic convention, really don’t accept the understanding of rights contained in the Declaration of Independence: The Declaration appealed first to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” as the very ground of our natural rights. The drafters declared that “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal,” and then immediately: that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” George Bush was not embarrassed to insist that these are “God-given rights,” as opposed to rights that we had merely given to ourselves. For if we had given them to ourselves, we could as readily take them back or remove them.

Telegraph: Thousands of protesters surrounded Hong Kong’s government headquarters on Monday over a plan to introduce a pro-China school curriculum that they describe as an attempt to brainwash students.

Catholic Culture: Communist officials compelled Catholics in a south-central Vietnamese village to remove the altar, tabernacle, cross, and Marian image from a Catholic chapel.

Wall Street Journal (via Google): Parents want their kids to attend Christian summer courses. Will the Party authorities allow them? . . . Beijing is always uneasy about religion, and the vague legality allows it to regulate religious education on a whim, all the while telling the international community that parents are free to raise their children in their faith.

NY Times: “This trial is the outcome of a political struggle,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a prominent defense lawyer, referring to powerful enemies of Mr. Bo, a brash up-and-coming politician who alienated many party luminaries. “Any trial to which the central party pays this much attention had no chance of being fair.”

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Abortion is free in Cuba and it’s estimated that half of the children conceived on that island nation are killed before birth . . . With grown children leaving for the U.S. to find work, Cuba’s elderly increasingly depend on government support.

LifeSiteNews: Seven years ago, Tang Leqiong was approached by officials in her home, taken to a hospital, and forced to abort her eight-month-old unborn child. Why? Because her permit had expired. Tang was registered as a member of the farm population, entitling her to have a second child after giving birth to a girl in 1996.

AP: The government says the move is motivated by health concerns, but others said Friday that it’s a risky campaign to secularize the Muslim minority that will likely backfire.

LifeNews: Dr Jackie Sheehan, senior fellow at the China Policy Institute and associate professor at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Nottingham in England appears to have the answer. In a new article she’s written in the South China Morning Post, Sheehan says “powerful financial and personal incentives” exist for local officials to ensure “forced abortions and sterilizations continue on mainland despite calls to reform family planning laws.

WorldNetDaily: According the Cuban government statistics, 60.2 percent of all pregnancies on the island end in abortion. This is the highest number of any nation in the Western Hemisphere. Other attempts at an empirical analysis of Cuban abortion show 130,000 live births with just less than 85,000 abortions in a typical year

CNSNews: More Communist Party members in the Peoples Republic of China are attending church, according to the U.S. State Department’s latest report on International Religious Freedom.

Wall Street Journal: It’s fair to say not too many people expected the same from Vietnam. Nevertheless, Vietnam’s Communist government is now considering whether to allow same-sex couples to marry or legally register and receive rights. If it does, the country would be the first in Asia to do so, the Associated Press reported.

Washington Times: “The curriculum only paints a rosy picture about the Communist Party… This is just an attempt to introduce the mainland agenda in Hong Kong schools,” she said.

AP: “In contemporary China, only socialism with Chinese characteristics can develop China, benefit people and revitalize the nation,” Xi said.

GroundReport.com: The Police in China have continued to intensify its persecution on the Christian community with the recent detention of Sunday School children and their teacher during a raid in China’s remote Xinjiang province.

Catholic Culture: Italian foreign minister Giulio Terzi has said that a drive to stop anti-Christian atrocities should be a top priority of world leaders.

AP: Yonhap News Agency says China arrested the activists while they were discussing ways to help North Korean defectors in China. Yonhap cited no sources.

Washington Times: A forthcoming report from the conservative organization Americans for Limited Government details how President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics sent her children to a politically left-wing Jewish summer camp with communist roots.

Catholic Culture: Bishop Thaddeus Ma Daqin, who has been held in custody in a Sheshan seminary since his ordination as auxiliary bishop of Shanghai, has posted a new entry on his blog—his first public statement of any kind since he dropped from sight on July 7.

Daily Caller: A new book due out Tuesday makes the case that Frank Marshall Davis, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, mentored Barack Obama when he lived in Hawaii.

AP: The government body that controls the Catholic church in China says it is investigating the selection of a bishop who cut his ties to the group as soon as he was ordained, in an embarrassment to Beijing that could deepen its rift with the Vatican.