A prominent Chinese church leader has been arrested for the second time and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
ChristianToday.com reports that Hu Shigen, a leader of a large
underground church in China, was previously arrested and imprisoned for
16 years after being accused of sharing information about the crackdown
on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Although Hu was released in 2008, he is again being accused by the
Chinese government, this time for “damaging national security and
harming social stability.”
The Chinese government continues to increase its crackdown on
Christianity. Government authorities have demolished hundreds of
churches and taken down their crosses. In addition, nearly 300 human
rights lawyers and other critics of the Communist regime have been
arrested.
Hu pleaded guilty to the charges levelled against him, but human rights
advocates say that such confessions are usually coerced.
In speaking of human rights lawyer Wang Yu’s confession, Jerome Cohen, an expert on Chinese law at New York University, wrote,
"To say that her statement was 'probably' the product of coercion is
silly since she has been held in an immensely coercive environment for
over a year.”
Hu’s case is similar.
"These 'confessions' are reminiscent of the 'brainwashing' era of the
1950s for which the new China became infamous,” Cohen continued.
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