China: Pastor of state-sanctioned church, 20 others ‘detained’

A pastor and 20 other members of a state-sanctioned Christian church in China have been detained and their whereabouts are unknown, the pastor’s daughter and a rights group said Monday.

Communist authorities have frequently clashed with members of unofficial, or “house”, churches, with demolitions of houses of worship and beatings of parishioners not unknown.

But it is unusual for authorities to crack down on a state-sanctioned church such as Zhang Shaojie’s Nanle Church, which is part of China’s government-run National Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the official name for the approved Protestant church.

Zhang, pastor of the church in central China’s Henan province, was arrested by nearly a dozen police officers soon after arriving at his office at the church on Saturday, his daughter Zhang Yueyue told AFP.

“It’s been 48 hours, and we still don’t know where our father is,” said the 27-year-old daughter. “The government has started to arrest people, so my younger sister and I are running away.”

The US-based Christian advocacy group ChinaAid said that in addition to Zhang, at least 20 other members of the Protestant church had been detained, and police were stationed outside the building on Sunday to prevent members from going inside to worship.

“Some of them were arrested from their home, some from the church,” Jack Sun, an employee of ChinaAid, told AFP. “All the other Christians of that church are very worried about them.”

Police in Nanle did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and no explanation was immediately available as to why the church might have been targeted.

The Chinese government estimates that there are more than 23 million Christians in the country, with most concentrated in the prosperous and densely populated areas along the eastern coast and Yangtze River.