Different narratives lead to different decisions. They should be examined one by one. We start with the existence of a religious persecution in China.
By Massimo Introvigne, James T. Richardson, and Rosita Šorytė
Article 2 of 9. Read article 1.
In this and the following installments of this series, we will examine the ten issues one by one.
The first question discussed in the decisions is whether religious persecution in general exists in China. The answer should be obvious, and it is regarded as such in a large majority of decisions. Some quote, either directly or from COI that mention it, the distinction proposed by sociologist Yang Fenggang about three “markets” of religions in China: the “red market,” including the religious organizations approved and controlled by the government, such as the Three-Self Church for non-Catholic Christians; the “grey market” of the house churches and the independent temples and mosques, theoretically illegal but more or less tolerated, at least before Xi Jinping; and the “black market” of the xie jiao. The grey and even the red markets now suffer severe limitations too, but there is little doubt that the groups in the black market are persecuted.
A small number of court decisions, some of them in Italy and France, pick up a fight with most government-produced COI and scholarly studies of religion in China, and rely on information packages on “religious liberty” in China circulated by Chinese embassies, to claim that, if only they agree to respect the general laws, all religions are free to operate in China. This is obviously false, and such decisions go one step further and note that most COI published by governments are influenced by the United States, which have their own anti-Chinese agenda. As for scholars, particularly those who specialize in new religious movements are dismissed as “cult apologists,” based on standard anti-cult criticism, as happened in a French National Court for the Right of Asylum’s decision of August 28, 2019 (interestingly, signed by a judge who had been previously active in the French anti-cult movement).
The two arguments are connected. Two of us (Introvigne and Šorytė) serve respectively as editor-in-chief and deputy editor of “Bitter Winter,” which is often quoted in the most recent COI, and is a main source of the sections of China of the U.S. Department of State yearly reports. While this led several courts to quote in turn from “Bitter Winter” as a reliable source, those few judges who believed that the U.S. have a vested interested in depicting a dark but untrue picture of religious liberty in China countered that the Department of State spread information taken from a biased anti-Chinese magazine.
As mentioned earlier, these decisions are rare. However, lawyers we interviewed told us that “information packages” supplied by Chinese embassies play an important role in several countries, including Japan, where no CAG asylum applications have been accepted to date, and South Korea, where only one application has been accepted, in 2021.
Particularly in some early decisions, problems were also created by interviews where some CAG applicants kept referring to themselves simply as “Christians” rather than as “members of The Church of Almighty God.” In fact, this is a common internal jargon of CAG devotees, who often simply call each other “Christian,” but was, and to some extent remain, likely to create confusion with authorities not familiar with the CAG, who may object that Christianity per se is not persecuted in China. In some decisions, after the applicant had claimed to be “a Christian,” questions were asked about Christian doctrines not shared by the CAG. In one case in France, the applicant was asked to mention the names of the twelve Christian apostles, a question most Christians would also be unable to answer too. In reviewing an interview featuring the same question, the Administrative Court of Freiburg on February 13, 2020 noted that, by being able to mention “immediately” four out of the twelve apostles, the CAG refugee had proved to be better informed on Christianity than the average German citizen.
It should also be considered that further problems are added by the translation process (administrative authorities often employ underpaid and sometimes not very skilled translators), and by the fact that immigration commissions in several countries include police and border officers who are not necessarily familiar with religion.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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