I reported how I was tortured and raped in the Xinjiang camps. After my text was published, my parents and relatives who are still in China started being persecuted.
My name is Ulnur Bozhykhan. I spent almost a year in the political prisons of the Chinese Communist Party in East Turkestan (Ch. Xinjiang), which is my homeland.
Read more at “The CCP Is Taking Revenge on My Relatives”
Filed under chinese culture, workplace insights
Based on Xi Jinping’s speeches, officers will be trained to apply the principle that human rights are what the Party says they are.
Last week, on March 9, the Party Committee of the Ministry of Public Security and its Theoretical Learning Center Group met under the presidency of Deputy Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (one of the rising stars in Chinese nomenclature) and sent to public security offices all over China new directives for training and formation. These directives are important because they indicate which principles should be taught to law enforcement officers in China and should guide their daily work.
Read more at “New Training Directives Teach CCP’s Absolute Leadership Over Human Rights Work”
Filed under chinese culture, workplace insights
The heavily promoted book by Professor Li Shen compares a supposed early Chinese atheism, bourgeois atheism, and Marxist atheism as taught by the CCP.
In a previous article in this magazine, I examined the “scientific evidence” that God does not exist offered by Professor Li Shen in his book “The Principles of Scientific Atheism,” which continues to be heavily promoted in China as a major tool to revive atheist propaganda.
Read more at “The New Atheist Propaganda: Why Atheism is a Science”
Filed under chinese culture, workplace insights
With the Chinese Spring Festival behind us a new “Faith or Fiction” class has started March 1st with 312 participants who have signed up to master the twelve week video curriculum to answer the big questions of life “Why are we here? What is the meaning of life? What are reason and logic? What do we really know and how do we know that we know it?”
The curriculum is designed to take participants on a guided course to direct their thinking with regard to four fundamental issues: “truth, God, man, and the social order.” Along the way, the 12-week lesson builds a logical, systematic framework by which to organize and evaluate the various truth claims encountered during those sessions. The ultimate goal is not simply to gain knowledge, but to look upon the face of God and to be transformed in the process.
Also beginning March I resumed teaching business and finance lessons in English to Chinese MBA and PhD candidates online via Zoom. Dealing with the 13 hour time-difference I will teach two 40-minute early morning classes and another two 40-minute late afternoon classes Monday, Wednesday and Friday to 20 students. I am excited and look forward building personal relationships with those students, hopefully and prayerfully leading to fruitful discussion of fundamental Christian worldviews.
“And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Opponents must be gently instructed, in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.” (2 Timothy 2: 24-26)
Please pray as online Christian ministries begin to experience tighter government restrictions, pray for believers to have wisdom to know how to navigate the restrictions. Pray that they will find creative ways to proceed with evangelism and discipleship in spite of all that is taking place to restrict access to the gospel. Ask the Lord to make the good news of Jesus spread quickly and lodge deeply in the hearts of Chinese people.
Carla has several years to go before she can legally retire from her job as a civil servant. While a member of the communistic party, she is also a committed believer. Carla has refused higher-level roles at work to avoid compromising herself and her faith, but at the same time, she struggles working in an environment which is anti-God and anti-religion. She would like to quit, but even that would require permission. Pray that God will give Carla wisdom in taking the right steps.
Many churches currently are suffering from government’s interference. Previously, only house churches experienced difficulties, but now the international churches and even the government-approved churches are facing difficulties as well. Please pray for the Chinese churches and the team leaders in my city.
Filed under american culture, ministry updates
After the CCP ordered a crackdown on religious statues, many were modified in bizarre ways as this was the only alternative to destruction. Bitter Winter here collects several typical cases for our readers.
On May 23, 2018, the central United Front Work Department held a meeting aimed at cracking down on large open-air religious statues. At the meeting, the officials claimed this work as part of the political task to implement the central government’s religious policies. They called for every local government across the country to intensify management and control over large open-air religious statues, requiring them to “specify the responsibilities and make clear their work schedule” and “ensure the completion of the task before the specified date.”
Read more at “Art to Prevent Demolition: A National Catastrophe for Religious Statues”
Filed under chinese culture, workplace insights
The syncretic group has been repeatedly repressed, but never eradicated, during its almost five centuries of history. Now, it is persecuted again.
From November 2021, Zhejiang authorities are cracking down on temples of a Taoist syncretic sect that dates back to the 16th century, and goes as it is common in China under various names, including Huangtian Jiao and Huang Jijiao, Temples have been raided and closed, and devotees detained. The campaign of repression is still in progress. Media call the devotees simply “Taoist,” although theirs is an old syncretic order with Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian elements.
Read more at “Huangtian Jiao: Taoist Popular Sect Under Persecution”
Filed under chinese culture, workplace insights
It could be said that Moses’ first problem was that he “looked this way and that” before killing the Egyptian. If only he had looked up, he might have gained God’s perspective. It’s this way with all sin. We may look around to ensure no one is watching, but we forget that the Lord Jesus Christ knows all and is watching.
At the time, Moses already knew that God had called him to be the deliverer of Israel, and he thought people would recognize his call and honor his leadership. We learn this from Stephen’s speech to the Sanhedrin thousands of years later, when he said: “Moses thought that his own people would realize that God was using him to rescue them, but they did not” (Acts 7:25).
Read more at “The Grace of God is Sufficient”
Filed under chinese culture, workplace insights
You may never have heard of the one million Wa people of northern Myanmar (formerly Burma) and southwest China , but in this newsletter we would like to introduce you to some of our Wa brothers and sisters in Christ, and share how tens of thousands of them are receiving the Word of God in their own heart language for the first time, through our Asian Bible Fund.
Do you know that most missionaries, including us, have been confronted over the years by both heathens outside the Church and misguided people inside the Church, telling us that we should leave “peaceful, loving” tribal people like the Wa alone? “They don’t need Christianity,” we have been told. “It just messes up their beautiful, harmonious way of life.”
Read more at “Bibles for the Wa People”
Filed under chinese culture, workplace insights
Well-known as author and lecturer, he was sentenced to ten years in November 2021.
Human rights activists are denouncing on social media that a well-known Tibetan monk’s health is seriously deteriorating as a result of torture he is subjected to in Lhasa’s Qushui Prison.
Read more at “ Prominent Tibetan Monk Tortured in Jail”
Filed under chinese culture, workplace insights
The CCP uses Russian stories of Americans creating viruses in Ukraine to answer new authoritative claims that the COVID-19 virus was created in a Chinese lab.
In the last 48 hours, an avalanche of Russian and Chinese propaganda has hit social media and some electronic and print media where fellow travelers, if not useful idiots, work on behalf of Putin and Xi Jinping. The propaganda repeats obsessively that Russian troops have found evidence that in Ukraine there are laboratories controlled by the U.S. military manufacturing deadly viruses.
Read more at “China, Russia: Virus Came from Ukraine”
Filed under chinese culture, workplace insights
China - in His image 