November 25, 2004 New York Times
By JOSEPH KAHN

HUAIDE, China - Kuang Yuexia and her husband, Cai Defu,
considered themselves good Christians. They read the Bible
every night before bed. When their children misbehaved,
they dealt with them calmly. They did not curse or tell
lies.

But when Zhang Chengli, a neighbor, began hounding them
last year to leave their underground religious sect and
join his, it seemed like a test of satanic intensity. He
scaled the wall of their garden, ambushed them in the
fields and roused them after midnight with frantic calls to
convert before Jesus arrived for his Second Coming and sent
them to hell.

Ms. Kuang poured dirty water on Mr. Zhang's head. Mr. Cai
punched him. Yet Mr. Zhang persisted for months until the
couple's sect intervened and stopped his proselytizing for
good.

Mr. Zhang's body - eyes, ears and nose ripped from his face
- was found by a roadside 300 miles from this rural town in
Jilin Province, in northeastern China. The police arrested
Mr. Cai and fellow sect members. One of them died in police
custody during what fellow inmates described as a torture
session.

China's growing material wealth has eluded the countryside,
home to two-thirds of its population. But there is a bull
market in sects and cults competing for souls. That has
alarmed the authorities, who seem uncertain whether the
spread of religion or its systematic repression does more
to turn peasants against Communist rule.

The demise of Communist ideology has left a void, and it is
being filled by religion. The country today has more
church-going Protestants than Europe, according to several
foreign estimates. Buddhism has become popular among the
social elite. Beijing college students wait hours for a pew
during Christmas services in the capital's 100 packed
churches.

But it is the rural underclass that is most desperate for
salvation. The rural economy has grown relatively slowly.
Corruption and a collapse in state-sponsored medical care
and social services are felt acutely. But
government-sanctioned churches operate mainly in cities,
where they can be closely monitored, and priests and
ministers by law can preach only to those who come to them.

The authorities do not ban religious activity in the
countryside. But they have made it so difficult for
established churches to operate there that many rural
Chinese have turned to underground, often heterodox
religious movements.

Charismatic sect leaders denounce state-sanctioned
churches. They promise healing in a part of the country
where the state has all but abandoned responsibility for
public health. They also promise deliverance from the
coming apocalypse, and demand money, loyalty and strict
secrecy from their members.

Three Grades of Servants, a banned Christian sect that
claims several million followers, made inroads in Huaide
and other northern towns beginning nearly a decade ago. It
lured peasants like Yu Xiaoping, as well as her neighbor,
Ms. Kuang, away from state-authorized churches. Its
underground network provided spiritual and social services
to isolated villages.

But it also attracted competition from Eastern Lightning,
its archrival, which sought to convert Ms. Yu, Ms. Kuang
and others. The two sects clashed violently. Both became
targets of a police crackdown.

Xu Shuangfu, the itinerant founder of Three Grades of
Servants, who says he has divine powers, was arrested last
summer along with scores of associates. Mr. Xu was
suspected of having ordered the execution of religious
enemies, police officers said.

Yet such efforts rarely stop the spread of underground
churches and sects, which derive legitimacy from government
pressure.

"Beijing cannot tolerate religious groups that are not
directly under its control," says Susanna Chen, a
researcher in Taiwan who has studied the rural sects. "But
for every group they repress, there are two to replace it.
And the new ones are often more dangerous than those that
came before."

The Comfort of Baptism Huaide is in the heart of China's
breadbasket. Corn grows 10 feet tall on treeless plains
that surround rust-belt factories and tidy brick villages,
stretching east to the North Korean border.

After the autumn harvest, the fields have been stripped of
all but a foliage of corn leaves and the town settles into
a languorous winter rhythm. But the placid surface hides
Huaide's spiritual turmoil.

Yu Xiaoping, a farmer and shop attendant here, grew up an
atheist. Her father was a Communist Party member and a
elementary school administrator who frowned on religion,
especially when he discovered that his sister attended
church. But he died of stomach cancer a decade ago, leaving
a small plot of land, a tiny pension and a dying ideology.

Ms. Yu got a part-time job in the local farmers market.
She, her sister or her baby niece slept
shoulder-to-shoulder with her mother on the family kang, or
platform bed, in their two-room home. She felt pinched for
cash and confined.

One winter day in 1995 her aunt invited her to attend
services in Gongzhuling, about 40 miles away, the closest
state-authorized Protestant church. Ms. Yu agreed on a
whim. She was surprised to find the simple beige-and-white
assembly hall packed with 700 congregants, praying and
singing in one voice. Ms. Yu returned the next week, this
time taking the bus alone. On her third trip, she was
baptized.

Ms. Yu is now 36 years old, petite, rosy-cheeked and prone
to giggle. But she talks about having a purpose in life
imparted by God.

"Until the day I found God, I felt like I was wandering
aimlessly," she said. "Suddenly I felt clear of mind and
free of guilt and sin."

Huaide did not have its own church. But soon Ms. Yu
received invitations from new friends to attend private
services. Villagers discussed the Bible. Sometimes a
visiting minister delivered a sermon.

Many visiting ministers criticized the government-licensed
church Ms. Yu had attended. They questioned its mandate
that parishioners must be at least 18 years old, arguing
that God intended children to hear the Gospel. The state's
requirement that church members register offended her, as
did the stipulation that Communist Party officials, like
her late father, forswear Christianity.

"Religion must be based on your heart, not on such rules,"
she said.

One day a visiting minister - Ms. Yu says she remembers him
clearly for his southern accent - delivered a scathing
criticism of state-backed churches. He said they emphasized
outdated, literal readings of the Bible instead of
interpreting how scripture should inform today's world. He
urged her to consider an alternative that he said brought
Jesus' teaching alive: Three Grades of Servants.

The Appeal of a SectXu Shuangfu, who the authorities say
was born Xu Wenkou, is a religious entrepreneur. Now in his
60's, he founded Three Grades of Servants in Henan Province
in the late 1980's and oversaw its growth despite serving
time in custody.

The sect's hierarchy is based on what Mr. Xu argued is the
theme of a trinity that runs through scripture, including
three servants of God (Moses, Aaron and Pashur, the
ancestor of a priestly family) in the Old Testament, and
three friends of Jesus (Martha, Mary and Lazarus) in the
New Testament. Mr. Xu occupies the top grade and maintains
that he, as Moses did, talks to God.

The group is millenarian. Mr. Xu, followers say, predicted
that Jesus would return to earth and eliminate nonbelievers
in 1989, then again in 1993. When this did not happen, Mr.
Xu explained that even God misjudged how long Abraham's
descendants would stay in Egypt. He did not set a third
date for the Second Coming.

Though he failed to divine the future, Mr. Xu did reach
deeply into the lives of his peasant followers. The sect
played a guiding role in Ms. Yu's life not unlike the way
the Communist Party, in its heyday of molding people
according to Maoist and Marxist doctrine, shaped her
father's life.

Ms. Yu reported to a "fellow worker" in Three Grades of
Servants, a woman who went by the code name Xing Zhi, or
Fortunate Aspirations. Xing Zhi coordinated prayer
sessions, collected donations and taught Ms. Yu what to
wear, what to eat, when to wake up in the morning. She even
matched Ms. Yu with another of her young charges, Zhang
Qinghai. Ms. Yu and Mr. Zhang read the Bible together,
discussed their goals and fell in love. They married a
decade ago, six months after meeting.

"You are not required to marry within the group," Ms. Yu
said. "But Xing Zhi said if you find someone you love who
is also in the group, then that is the ideal."

Like Ms. Yu, Kuang Yuexia and her husband, Cai Defu, had
their first religious experience at a state-authorized
church. But the distance and the demands of raising two
girls and a boy made their visits infrequent.

Then in 1995, Mr. Cai developed a brain tumor. He underwent
an operation that forced the family to borrow $1,500 and
left his speech impaired. Doctors recommended further
procedures. But they could afford no more medical bills and
he recuperated at home, slowly.

Three Grades of Servants sent a local organizer, Chen
Zhihua, to read the Bible and sing hymns with Ms. Kuang and
the bedridden Mr. Cai. Sect members helped Ms. Kuang tend
her four acres of corn during her husband's illness.

Ms. Kuang, 46, talks in nervous soliloquies that often give
way to tears when she discusses religion. She said Three
Grade of Servants became a defining force in her life.

"I loved the songs and the discipline," she recalled. "I
used to get angry with the children before they taught me
how to change my personality. I learned that you must
eliminate hate from your mind."

She said the teachings improved her husband's health. The
sect preached calm when facing trial, and Mr. Cai learned
to control the flow of blood to his brain, she said,
reducing the hemorrhaging that had occurred when he became
stressed. He resumed working in the fields.

"Enhancing our understanding of the Bible achieved results
that expensive medicine could not achieve," Ms. Kuang said.

A few years ago Ms. Yu and Ms. Kuang received a summons to
attend a service at the home of Ms. Chen, the local
organizer, and discovered that the "big servant" himself,
Xu Shuangfu, had arrived to deliver a sermon. Everyone kept
silent in his presence.

Ms. Kuang remembers better how he looked than what he said.
He had round cheeks but very white skin and a beatific
smile, making him appear part Chinese and part Western.

"He looked like Jesus," she said.

On the Margins Since
the early days of economic reforms in the 1980's, China has
eased restrictions on religious activity, especially in the
cities.

But registration requirements and periodic harassment limit
growth, as does a chronic shortage of clerics. The five
officially recognized religions - Buddhism, Taoism, Islam,
Catholicism and Protestantism - cannot promote themselves
or expand easily. The goal seems to be to prevent any from
acquiring clout to rival the Communist Party.

The losers are marginalized people who need spiritual
support the most, like laid-off workers and rural migrants
in cities and peasants in the countryside. They get little
benefit from churches that cannot, by law, reach out to
them.

One movement that took advantage of this gap was Falun
Gong, which espouses an idiosyncratic mix of traditional
Chinese qigong exercises and meditation. Its millions of
loyal followers resisted stubbornly, though peacefully,
when the government crushed it in 1999.

Christian sects form and mutate in the countryside, vying
to attract the same disadvantaged classes.

"Cults are thriving among those the government has
abandoned," says Kang Xiaoguang, a political scientist at
Qinghua University in Beijing. "They provide social
services the government no longer does. They give people a
sense of belonging," he said.

There are the Shouters and the Spirit Church, the Disciples
Association and White Sun, the Holistic Church and the
Crying Faction. Many are apocalyptic. A few are strongly
anti-Communist. Three Grades of Servants and Eastern
Lightning are among the largest, each claiming membership
in the millions.

Their identities may be less important than their
profusion. They erupt suddenly, shocking authorities with
their secrecy, financial wherewithal, tight-knit
organization and, occasionally, their willingness to use
force.

For the Communist Party, this is uncomfortably reminiscent
of China's past. Millenarian sects have been harbingers of
dynastic change since the Yellow Turbans contributed to the
fall of the Han Dynasty at the end of the second century.
As recently as the 19th century, the Taiping and Boxer
rebellions weakened the Qing Dynasty and fostered the
social turmoil that eventually helped the Communists
themselves to take power.

Earlier this year, the government ordered the agency
established to combat Falun Gong, called the 610 Office, to
pursue a crackdown against rural cults.

"The threat posed by Falun Gong has been superseded by
organizations in the countryside that are vying with the
party for people's hearts," a document posted by the 610
Office says. "Some are even the spearhead of a movement to
seize power from the Communist Party."

The Religious BattleThe 610 Office lists Eastern Lightning
as a top target. The group was founded in 1990 by a woman,
surnamed Deng, who claims that she is the returned Jesus
Christ. It recruits mainly from other religious groups and
often uses tactics that include spying, kidnapping and
brainwashing, according to two people who say they were
forcibly held by the group.

Authorities banned Eastern Lightning several years ago. But
it has expanded to become by some foreign estimates the
largest underground religious group in China.

In Huaide, as in other northeastern hotspots, Eastern
Lightning set its sights on the main local religious force:
Three Grades of Servants. In early 2003, Eastern Lightning
recruited a few members in Huaide. They in turn were given
conversion quotas and an urgent timetable: to save as many
souls as possible before the female Jesus wiped out
nonbelievers.

Ms. Yu and her husband were approached by two former
members of their own sect who had converted. They were
given a 1,000-page customized Bible and hymn book, bound in
yellow. Eastern Lightning followers returned frequently to
discuss the contents and persuade them to convert.

"If you didn't say yes to one person, they would just send
another, like messengers from the Devil," Ms. Yu said.

Zhang Chengli, a local farmer and Eastern Lightning
operative, headed the team to convert Ms. Kuang and Mr.
Cai. According to Ms. Kuang, he followed them to their home
and in the fields. His message was blunt.

"He told us that if we joined Lightning, then God would
protect us," Ms. Kuang said. "But if we didn't join, we
would die."

After midnight one night he stood outside their bedroom
with a bullhorn. He yelled through the window, "Convert or
die!" Ms. Kuang said.

Another day he clipped the wings of a pigeon and tossed it
into their vegetable garden. The bird hopped around until
Ms. Kuang captured it and brought it into her pantry,
thinking it might make a meal. When she inspected it, she
found a note glued to its belly. It read, "Those who cannot
see the light will die."

To get rid of Mr. Zhang, Ms. Kuang dumped household
wastewater on his head. Mr. Cai, ignoring his own sect's
teachings on remaining unruffled, punched Mr. Zhang and
smashed his bicycle tires with a metal pipe.

When Mr. Zhang persisted, they considered alerting the
police. But they were themselves part of an underground
Christian group. And they decided it was morally wrong.

"However bad he was," Ms. Kuang said, "I could not report
another Christian to the police."

A Lethal Solution Three Grades of Servants had been
fighting defections in several northeastern provinces. So
when Xing Zhi, the chief coordinator for the sect in
Huaide, heard about Mr. Zhang's campaign, she took decisive
measures.

She told Mr. Cai to notify her the next time Mr. Zhang came
calling, Ms. Kuang said. Ms. Yu's husband was deployed in a
stakeout. When Mr. Zhang pedaled by, he was intercepted,
gagged with tape and stuffed into the back of a white van,
which sped away, according to local residents who saw the
abduction.

Assassins sliced away Mr. Zhang's facial features before
discarding his corpse. That turned out be a calling card of
Three Grades of Servants, which has been linked to several
grisly murders. The police were able to identify him only
because he was carrying a report card from his son's
school, Huaide Elementary, in a back pocket. They began a
crackdown.

In an evening raid, Ms. Yu and her husband; Ms. Kuang and
Mr. Cai; and Ms. Chen, their neighbor and fellow sect
member, were whisked to Jilin provincial police
headquarters. Ms. Kuang was so nervous she threw up in the
back seat.

Ms. Yu and Ms. Kuang said that they were shackled to metal
chairs and interrogated through the night in adjacent
rooms. In the early hours, both women recalled hearing Ms.
Chen scream and moan in pain.

When dawn broke, the police abruptly suspended their
inquest and dismissed Ms. Yu and Ms. Kuang with orders to
say nothing about their detention. Shortly thereafter, the
women learned that Ms. Chen had died in custody. The police
told Ms. Chen's family that she had suffered a "sudden
heart attack."

Nearly a year after they were detained, their husbands
remain in custody, though they have yet to be charged with
a crime. Xing Zhi, the sect's promoter, was also arrested.

The founder of the sect, Xu Shuangfu, was apprehended this
summer after a long manhunt. Christian activist groups
abroad led a campaign to protest the arrest, citing it as
evidence of harsh reprisals against house churches. China's
Public Security Bureau said in a written statement that Mr.
Xu was charged with ordering murders and leading an
"illegal cult."

Ms. Kuang now lives alone in Huaide. Her children have
moved away to find jobs in the city. She says she lives in
fear of retaliation, either by Eastern Lightning or the
police.

Recently she spotted two police officers entering her yard,
presumably to resume their interrogation. She said she was
so afraid of another round of grilling that she drank a
bottle of rat poison in front of them. She was taken to the
hospital to have her stomach pumped.

Ms. Yu still lives with her mother and sister. A charcoal
grill her husband used to sell barbecued meat on the street
is rusting by their door, filled with rainwater and sludge.

The police confiscated her Bible. But she still prays often
for her husband's release. The violence in her village only
confirmed her faith in Xu Shuangfu. She said he predicted
all along that evil authorities and devilish sects would
compete for influence at the crucial juncture.

"This is exactly what happens," she said, "when the world
is coming to an end."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/25/international/asia/25china.html?ex=1102405761&ei=1&en=04781e53db4804e0

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