Olympian Persecution Coverup

With increased frequency, the Chinese government is persecuting house churches and banishing foreign Christians from the country, Baptist Press reports. The increased harrassment is presumably to squelch voices who might draw attention to the plight of religious minorities in the nation surrounding the Beijing Olympics. "We seem to be seeing a crackdown ahead of the Olympics. Whether that's to send a message to the church to lay low or whether it is to make sure that anybody who might cause international embarrassment is taken care of ahead of time, I don't know," Todd Nettleton, a spokesman for Voice of the Martyrs, told BP. "But we do see an increase in the level of arrests, the level of house church services being raided... We also have seen a number of foreigners who are Christians who... have been denied a new visa and told that they had to leave the country. So it's happening both amongst the house churches of native Chinese people as well as foreign Christians who are living and working in China." Only about 20 percent of China's Christians are part of the official approved church (Three-Self Patriotic Movement or Catholicism) while the other 80 percent go to unregistered or unofficial churches.

• JJ Commentary: China hopes to show the world its “new” softer face, but persecution and pollution speak otherwise