By Jeff King for THE CHRISTIAN POST
Picture a regime so smug and dismissive of democracy that it brags about crushing lives and freedom. That’s China’s Communist Party (CCP) today, crowing on WeChat and state rags like Global Times about “smashing cults” — a fancy way of saying they’re bulldozing churches, jailing and torturing pastors, and strangling all the freedom of all citizens with a high-tech noose unlike anything the world has seen.
While their methods are new, their impulse remains the same. In 1989, Tiananmen Square ran red with the blood of dreamers like Bob Fu, a kid who dared defy the Communist Party’s iron fist. Today, he’s a Texan with a fire they couldn’t kill — and his fight screams a truth we’re sleepwalking past: China’s not just crushing its own, it’s exporting the noose to other countries.
Fu grew up in Shandong, force-fed the CCP line: the party’s your god, and dissent means death. But college lit a spark. He joined the Tiananmen protests, shouting for liberty until tanks turned his dream of a better China to ash on June 4, 1989. Hundreds — maybe thousands — died; Fu lived but was branded a criminal, and his world and spirit were crushed. “I’d reached the end,” he said, his voice heavy as he remembered the past. Then a smuggled book about a Chinese believer slipped through, and outlaw American missionaries whispered of a freedom no bullet could touch. Fu grabbed it — a lifeline in the dark.
He didn’t sit on it. By ’96, his Beijing apartment was a rebel church, prayers rising like smoke with the State looking to put out fires. The police arrested him and his pregnant wife Heidi for “illegal evangelism” and dodging the one-child law. They fled from Hong Kong to America with a baby and faith in tow. In 2002, Fu started China Aid in Texas, a voice for the silenced Church. China has tightened the screws. International Christian Concern (ICC) reports that the CCP is boasting about “intensified efforts” to shred house churches with a Ming Dynasty slur — “xie jiao” while a sprawling security system tracks and records every move. The Roys Report quotes Fu: “Even official (CCP-controlled) churches get hit for sticking to their Bibles.” This isn’t random — It’s a machine, cold and relentless.
