Posted on 12/30/2001 8:58:28 AM PST by TLBSHOW
BEIJING (AP)
A court in China sentenced the leader of a banned Christian sect to death Sunday, a human rights group said.
The founder of the South China Church, Gong Shengliang, was convicted by the Jingmen City Intermediate Court on charges including "using a cult to undermine the enforcement of the law," the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. The church is banned by the government as cult.
Gong's niece Li Ying, also a church leader, was given a death sentence suspended for two years, the center said. Such sentences are usually commuted to life in prison.
The center said the pair were among 17 church organizers sentenced by the court in Hubei province, in eastern China about 600 miles from Beijing. The others received prison sentences ranging from two years to life.
Gong established the church as a splinter sect of another Christian group, the Total Scope Church, the center said. Such groups typically espouse a fundamentalist, evangelical brand of Christianity and operate in defiance of laws requiring Protestants to worship only in the state-controlled nondenominational church.
The church grew over a decade and has 50,000 members spread through some 10 provinces in eastern and central China, the center said. China's Bureau of State Security arrested Gong and the others in April after labeling the church a cult, part of an ongoing campaign against the better-known Falun Gong spiritual sect and other groups seen as challenging the Communist Party's political monopoly.
At a secret trial on Dec. 18, Gong was also convicted of complicity in rape and injuring 14 people during church rituals, the center said. Li was convicted of conspiring with Gong in the church and causing intentional injury it said.
Phone calls to the court went unanswered.
The charges would be the most serious handed down to the leaders of groups labeled by Beijing as cults since the current crackdown began in July 1999. Leaders of Falun Gong were given prison sentences of up to 18 years.
Court in liberal Calipornia sentences leaders of Christian sect to death.
What a coincidence that this ruling comes just a day after Bush signed PNTR into law...Way to go Bush.
Coincidence? I think not.
Thats the point I was getting at..there is no Coincidence. This is standard procedure for the Chicoms. Everytime they get what they want for the bozo's in D.C. They have a massive crackdown on their own citizens and their basic rights. Apparently nobody in D.C. has caught on to the pattern yet.
Our policy is to enable the Chinese governing regime. That regime does not tolerate freedom of religion. It killed 50 million of its own citizens between 1949 and 1969. It instituted a population control program in 1980 which has cost the lives of an additional 50+ million girl babies. They execute between 5 and 10 thousand people a year so that they can make money from the body parts. They treat their own people just like slaves. Children have been taken from their parents and forced to work 7 days a week for 20 cents an hour in factories to produce for the American shopping mall where the products are sold at a fantastically high price compared to the pitiful wages paid to the factory worker.
We Americans are hypocrites in that we will condemn Henry Ford for investing in nazi germany during the 1930's, but we will not criticize our collective corporate managerial class today for investing overwhelmingly in China today.
I dont support the actions by the US gvt. in Waco but I wouldnt go so far as to call David Koresh a "Christian".
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