A man stands in front of a church in Pingdingshan City, Henan Province.
House churches in China have long been restricted in their space to operate. According to one Christian, he was detained in an “educational conversion base” set up for Christians in Sichuan. He was held in a windowless room for nearly ten months, during which he was beaten and mentally tortured, and he even tried to end his Life by banging himself against a wall several times.
While the Xinjiang Education and Training Center’s detention of large numbers of minority Muslims has received worldwide attention, little is known about the so-called educational conversion bases set up by governments across China to convert house church believers. One Christian, Joseph Li (a pseudonym), who was released from a conversion base, recently told Radio Free Asia about his personal experiences while in detention. Joseph Li said that several years ago he was detained in a conversion base set up by the United Front Work Department and the State Security Bureau of a city in Sichuan: “The location was mobile, probably a basement somewhere. He was staffed across several government departments, as well as a working group of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee. They mainly target house church Christians.”
The “rehabilitation” of believers at the “conversion bases” for house church believers in mainland China is similar to that of correctional officers at the Xinjiang education camp. Joseph Lee said, “They threaten and intimidate you, verbally abuse you, and use very nasty, low-level methods, whether they are male or female United Front Work Department officials, or unidentified officials, they turn black and white, and they have to ask you to accept what they say, and if you don’t accept, they say you have a bad attitude and need to keep you in detention, and they beat people, usually in plain clothes, while the police pretend not to hear or see. also did not see.”
FILE PHOTO: a faded photo of Xi Jinping near a Christian poster outside a Family church in Nanyang, Henan province, June 1, 2018.
In 2018, Joseph Li was criminally detained by authorities while attending a local church, and was later sent to a “conversion base” for detention. He said most of the believers sent to the “conversion base” to receive “brainwashing” education were Christians who were released on bail while in criminal detention for evangelism or religious activities.
He recalled that Christians who could not be prosecuted by local security forces under the Criminal Law were sent to secret bases: “Those who were released on bail from the detention center used brainwashing methods. By covering your head and using triad methods, you are detained in the basement of a secret place, where every day there is an official police officer in another room, and two plainclothes people living with me, without any windows or ventilation system in the room, and without release Time. You can only eat two meals a day, and meals are delivered to the room.”
Black prison without daylight is prone to suicidal thoughts
Joseph Lee said the detainees are held in solitary confinement, no time limit until you confess: “brainwashing is no time limit, the longest time I do not know, but I was detained for eight or nine months. Inside, because there is no concept of time, you cannot see the sunlight. After a period of detention, people have suicidal thoughts, and I wanted to hit the wall and hurt myself. During the week of detention, it was worse than death. You couldn’t sleep at night. At that time, there were four people in my custody, and I was already dazed, trying to open my eyes, but I couldn’t. Five or four people dragged me by the hand, dragged me by the feet and dragged me on the floor, and injected me with some kind of drug, and later resuscitated me.”
Joseph Lee said that when he was released, for unknown reasons, his whole body swollen, weight gain of more than ten kilograms, and then gradually recovered. Looking back on the difficult time he spent in custody, Joseph Lee is still haunted by it.
According to another Christian, similar “conversion bases” are located in various provinces and cities, targeting not only Christians, but also members of the Catholic underground church and Falun Gong.
File photo: A collection of scripture songs from the Mass of the faithful is displayed under the pews of a Catholic church.
Catholic priest in Hebei disappears after arrest
Mr. Zhang, a lawyer in Hebei who has defended his rights against the authorities’ private “conversion centers,” told the station that there are Catholics in Hebei who have been detained to date: “In 2013, I was invited by the underground Catholics in Baoding, Hebei, where they have brainwashing classes similar to Falun Gong. On that occasion, I met several of their priests who told me about the situation in Baoding, and after the Religious Administration took their bishop and priests away directly, they were not sentenced, and they just disappeared. There are those who have been (missing) for ten years or so, and those who have been in prison for five or six years. There were a few who came Home after five or six years of imprisonment. It was only through their stories that they learned that those people were put into brainwashing classes and were brainwashed for a long time.”
Lawyer Zhang said that official personnel have been brainwashing believers for a long time, up to 10 years or more. The religious repression experienced by parishioners of the Catholic underground church in the Diocese of Baoding, Hebei, is just the tip of the iceberg of cases of religious repression in China.
As Bitter Winter reported last November, a recently released religious convert noted the brutality of the CCP’s methods of “converting” religious believers. The freed religious believer cited a variety of methods of “conversion,” ranging from common beatings to torture, such as making believers take cold showers in sub-zero temperatures and putting 20-pound buckets of water around their necks.
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