Last month, two days before Christmas, members of a rural Christian congregation in eastern China welded pieces of metal into a cross and hoisted it onto the top of a worship hall to replace one that was forcibly removed in October. Within an hour, township officials and uniformed men barged onto the church ground and tore down the cross.
Worshippers in Wenzhou city, like many Christians in the eastern province of Zhejiang, had to celebrate Christmas under a roof without a cross. Provincial authorities have toppled crosses from more than 400 churches, and even razed some worship halls in a province-wide crackdown on building code violations. This came after churches in Wenzhou were told to turn off any spotlights shining on their crosses at night. A few months later, the congregations were ordered to remove the crosses or face forced demolitions.
Authorities in Wenzhou — known as China’s Jerusalem because it has half of the province’s 4,000 churches — have banned all Christmas celebrations or related activities in the city’s kindergartens and grade schools.
Estimates for the number of Christians in China range from the conservative official figure of 23 million to as many as 100 million by independent scholars, raising the possibility that Christians may rival in size the 85 million members of the ruling Communist Party.