Bob Fu

Born and raised in Shandong province, Xiqiu “Bob” Fu was a leader of the student democracy movement that ended in the Tian'anmen Square Massacre of June 4, 1989. At that time he was attending People’s University in Beijing. Fu was converted to Christianity by an American English professor, and by 1992, was the pastor of a house church of 30 students. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife, Cai Bochun (Heidi), started an illegal bible school in a shuttered factory. In May of 1996, secret police discovered the school, and they were imprisoned.

They were released two months later, whereupon Fu was fired from his job as an English teacher at the Beijing School for the Communist Party, and Heidi lost her acceptance to study for her master’s degree. Heidi was pregnant at the time, but apparently had not received approval from her work unit for pregnancy. Without said approval, she could receive no medical help and would be forced to abort her baby, even at full term.

These circumstances drew them to Hong Kong at the end of 1996, where they posed as tourists. Abandoning their group, they applied repeatedly for visas to America. Their case became publicized, and President Clinton directly intervened on their behalf with the Chinese authorities. They finally arrived on U.S. soil just a few days before the British turned over Hong Kong to Beijing.

Bob Fu’s focus is religious persecution of Christians in China, and in 2002, he founded China Aid Association to draw international attention to China’s gross human rights violations against "house-church Christians", those worshiping in non-governmentally sanctioned settings. “In addition to collecting documents and materials related to Chinese law and government policy toward religion in China, CAA issues press releases on cases of religious persecution in China and carries out other advocacy on behalf of persecuted religious believers in China. It also provides humanitarian relief to persecuted members of underground Protestant churches in China. Although CAA’s connections inside China are primarily with Christians, the organization supports the broad principle of freedom of religion for all believers in China and aspires to conduct activities which protect the civil rights of believers from all religions”. Nearly 80 percent of the CAA’s annual budget goes directly to China to help the persecuted believers.

His organization is well-organized and is able to respond to persecution crises inside of China rapidly. “China Aid investigators are dispatched on short notice to the scenes of persecution to conduct direct interviews with victims and family members. With collaboration from local church leaders and members, these monitors gather information including photos, video and audio interviews. All information is verified by secondary sources before being transmitted to CAA headquarters”. How CAA is able to respond so expediently is not clear, but once on the scene the organization is then able to “deliver emergency funds, and in time, contact appropriate media sources, notify Western governments and NGOs, and if necessary, initiate direct letter-writing campaigns, urging release of the prisoner(s)”. Clearly, this requires some risk on the part of the investigators, and how they are able to avoid persecution themselves is uncertain to Ant Farm at this time.

CAA’s main focus is with unregistered Protestant churches in China, those not part of the governmentally sanctioned TSPM. (Ant Farm provides this historical background on the subject of TSPM selectively culled for the reader from Wikipedia).

The Three-Self Patriotic Movement, or the Three-Self Church consists of three principles, which are: self-governance, self-support (i.e., financial independence from foreigners) and self-propagation (i.e., indigenous missionary work). The origins of this movement were begun by Western missionaries in the mid 1800’s who recognized that only through this approach could Christianity be propagated successfully in China. They were drafted formally during an 1892 conference in Shanghai of Protestant Christian missions. In 1951, in the wake of the revolution, a Cantonese Christian named Y.T. Wu (1893–1979) re-initiated the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which promoted the same strategy of “self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation”, but was updated in order to completely remove foreign influences from the Chinese churches, and to assure the communist government that the churches would be patriotic to the newly-established People's Republic of China. The movement began formally in 1954 and allowed the government to infiltrate, subvert, and control much of organized Christianity.

From 1966 to 1976, during the Cultural Revolution, the expression of religious life in China was effectively banned, including even the TSPM. The growth of the Chinese House Church movement during this period was a result of all Chinese Christian worship being driven underground for fear of persecution. To counter this growing trend of "unregistered meetings", in 1979 the government officially restored the TSPM after thirteen years of non-existence, and in 1980 the CCC (China Christian Council)was formed. The TSPM is not a denomination, and denominational distinctions do not exist within the organization. Pastors are trained at one of only thirteen officially sanctioned seminaries which are Marxist-oriented and teach liberal theology.

The attempt to bring house-church Christians into the fold of "registered" meeting places has met with mixed results. One area of disagreement has been the restriction that the government places on preaching and teaching certain doctrines which are deemed to be inappropriate. Some examples of teaching that are not offered at the TSPM meetings include: references to the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead. However, restrictions are not always harshly enforced, and many pastors within the TSPM have the freedom to exposit Christian teachings more fully.

The TSPM and CCC are viewed with suspicion and distrust by some Christians both within and outside China. Some claim the TSPM to be a tool of the CCP to control and regulate the expression of Christianity. As a result, there are groups that refuse to deal with the TSPM or CCC, and there exists a large unregistered House Church movement in China with some claiming that it serves the large majority of Protestant Christians in China.There has also been allegations of regular and systematic persecution against Christians associated with the House Church movement and other unregistered Christian organizations in China. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Self_Patriotic_Movement).

Fu’s group states that as of 1993, there were 7 million members of the TSPM with 11 million affiliated, as opposed to an estimated 18 million and 47 million "unregistered" Protestant Christians respectively.

Ant Farm will be detailing the subject of religious persecution in China in later postings. Bob Fu's Chinaaid.org is probably the premier site on the web for understanding and keeping abreast of this subject.

Bob Fu has testified before many organizations, including the House International Relations Committee, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Bob Fu is a PhD candidate of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is also visiting professor at Oklahoma Wesleyan University and editor-in-chief of Chinese Law and Religion Monitor Journal. Bob and Heidi have three children, Daniel, Tracy and Melissa.

Credit to http://chinaaid.org/ for biographical material on Bob Fu.