Since April this year, incidents of "cross destruction" have been popping up all over the province of Zhejiang. Calling them "illegal constructions," authorities gather around churches, block off entryways and proceed to remove the cross's from church facades and even interiors. Some of the incidents have resulted in violence, however this most recent event just left believers and church-goers distraught and perturbed.
On Wednesday night, approximately 1,000 armed police were sent to Hangzhou's Guluo (Drum Tower) church, first built by American Presbyterians in 1885, to destroy its cross despite parishioners' attempts to protect it.
According to a local Christian, at around 4:00pm that same day many ordinary policeman assembled nearby the church, as though monitoring it. Many young Christians, realizing what was going on, flocked to the church in order to protect it. Alongside young believers, more than 100 other people, including clergymen and priests, went into the church to pray.
Around 9:00pm, armed police and riot prevention squads arrived at the church, blocking off the entrance and nearby roads. They proceeded to send out workers who worked into the early hours of the morning tearing open the roof of the church and ripping out the cross from inside. One Christian commented, "it is like the police just want to think we are terrorists."
Lawyers present on the scene attempted to protect locals' rights. One man, surnamed Zhou, revealed that two months earlier authorities had accused the church of erecting the cross against regulations, ordering it to be taken down immediately. Disagreeing, no action was taken at the time but since then nearly 200 believers have been gathering at the church daily and more than 100 began to live inside it in attempts to stop authorities from tearing down the cross.
This is not the first time this kind of incident has occurred. Over 300 other churches in the area have been treated in the same way. At the end of last month, violent clashes ensued between police and protesters when they tried to pull down the cross of Jiu'en church in Wenzhou. Two days later, when a river running through Wenzhou's Xinmeizhou villiage turned blood red some suspected it was a attempt to scare the local government into ending their campaign against the local Christians by reenacting an Old Testament-style plague.
Pushback against the government reached their peak in early august when a Wenzhou hacker covered a television station in anti-communist messages on PLA Day. Blocking screens for hours, the messages included anti-CCP slogans and iconic images of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
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