This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR. The book is “Made in China” by Amelia Pang.
The churches in China are the state. The state is in all the churches.
Churches in China are political institutions. Churches in China reject foreign funding and foreign missionaries. Most are part of the government run program which promotes self-governance, self-support and self-propagation.
Independent churches are seen as centers for dissent. Falun Gong, started in 1992 was at first supported by the Chinese Government. This lasted until 1996 when Falun Gong left the state’s qigong society. Falun Gong had grown to 70-million followers and this represented a threat.
Suddenly, state-run news started labeling Falun Gong as a “cult,” “dangerous” and “evil.” If you were a member you were suspect. Friends, acquaintances, relatives, spouses are all at risk in China if any one of them was under suspicion or arrested.
In 2015 Sun Yi began a collaboration with a Chinese Canadian filmmaker, Leon Lee, to document China’s forced labor system. Much of this would later be in “Letter from Masanjia,” by Leon Lee.
Falun Gong increased its activities during the later 1990s with modest goals, legalize the group. But the continued persecution led to Falun Gong and the fight for democracy in China to become fully entangled.
Falun Gong, Pang says, is the most organized group in China apart from the party.
President Xi Jinping has shown no sign of letting up. If anything, he has doubled down including a phone app called Xi Jinping Thought, a set of daily exercises in indoctrination which are required and monitored via cell phones.
When Sun Yi was in prison, his wife, May, was arrested. Even though May was not a Falun Gong practitioner, like her husband, police arrested her and her brother. They were taken away in handcuffs. At first May thought she would be released quickly. This was a mistake. She was willing to criticize Falun Gong.
May even signed two forms, a repentance for helping a Falun Gong Practitioner (her husband) and she promised allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party. Then they asked her to name a name and address of a secret practitioner of Falun Gong.
Sun Yi had shielded her by keeping the names of other Falun Gong from her, but May did know the name of one person, an old woman. For two weeks of interrogations the police beat May, until, in the end she named the old woman. Then they let her out – as they disappeared the old woman into a prison camp.
A guilty May returned home to her destroyed apartment, destroyed by the police who pulled apart everything in the apartment looking for anything they could use to incriminate her. She did still have her job.
Sun Yi’s study had also been disrupted by the police. She could not bear to go in, so she shut the door and did not enter again for years.
Then, with pressure from her family she decided to divorce Sun Yi. She wrote him a poignant note to let him know. She told Sun about the raid, that her health was not good, that she lived in fear, as did her brother and her parents.
“So,” she wrote, “since you can’t change your beliefs, we should break up.” June 3, 2008
Reading this, Sun understood. He had not meant to cause pain to others.
Even so, the divorce notification became his most precious piece of paper. Pang writes, “Sun folded and unfolded the fraying paper several times a day to look at her handwriting.” At one point he repaired the paper with adhesive tape in the workshop.
It was tangible. May’s letter was the closest physical connection to her that Sun had left. Letters in prison are a treasured physical connection with the outside, sometimes regardless of subject.
“It’s almost as good as a love letter,” Sun Yi said.
This is Mike Strong, in Hays, for HPPR Radio Readers Book Club.
