十字架の道｜キリスト教ドキュメンタリー映画「中国宗教迫害記 (The Way of the Cross | Christian Documentary Movie "Chronicles of Religious Persecution in China")

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During the last days,
God has once again become flesh in the East—China.
In 1991, Almighty God, Christ of the last days,
formally took up His ministry.
Since then, Almighty God has expressed millions of words
and carried out the work of judgment beginning from the house of God.
God's sheep hear His voice.
The people of various sects and denominations
who loved the truth and yearned for God's appearance,
have recognized that Almighty God's words are the truth,
and that this is the voice of God.
They believed that Almighty God was the return of the Lord Jesus,
and one by one they came before Almighty God.
The appearance and work of Almighty God sparked panic in the CCP.
The CCP issued numerous secret documents
and mobilized the armed police and army
to maniacally oppress and eradicate the Church.
The whole of mainland China rained blood,
dark clouds descended,
and there was universal outrage and indignation.
Today, the Christians of all the house churches,
particularly those of The Church of Almighty God,
are experiencing even more brutal and bloody persecution by the CCP government.
These Christians' bloodshed and loss of life
are like a song of victory over the forces of Satan,
and tell the grisly tale of Chinese Christians' persecution.
It is the beginning of 2017, in a city in Anhui Province.
Zhou Jun and his older sister
have ushered in yet another sorrowful and desolate New Year.
Their family has just held a funeral,
and all its members are shrouded in anguish due to their mother's death.
While sorting through her belongings,
Zhou Jun comes across a sculpture of a little lamb
carved by his father, Zhou Haijiang, twenty years previously.
This evokes painful memories for him.
Zhou Haijiang was a Christian who loved the truth.
In 1991, he had accepted Almighty God's work of the last days.
It was April 29, 1997.
Zhou Haijiang's home was as tranquil and warm as always,
and his wife, Li Wenxiu, was in the middle of making dinner.
Suddenly, their son-in-law and his father showed up,
interrupting the peaceful evening.
They brought with them some urgent news:
A brother, while preaching the gospel, had been arrested by the CCP police.
His family had been holding on to some money for safekeeping for the church,
and the police would soon arrive to search his home.
In order to prevent the church's property from being confiscated,
Zhou Haijiang and others decided to go there that same evening to move it.
Three people hurried out the door.
While watching her husband's figure disappear into the distance,
Li Wenxiu couldn't help but feel a bit anxious.
It was 2:00 in the morning,
and the church's property had finally been transferred safely,
and Zhou Haijiang and the two others had begun to feel somewhat at ease.
The Chinese Communist Party
had been oppressing and persecuting house churches,
and had been especially hell-bent on seizing Christians of The Church of Almighty God.
Locations all over mainland China
had been enveloped by a gloomy, terrifying atmosphere.
Despite not finding any proof of wrongdoing on them,
the police nevertheless forcibly took them to the police station,
where they were separately interrogated overnight.
Meanwhile, Li Wenxiu waited on pins and needles for her husband to return home,
and the ineffable panic and distress gripping her heart
filled her with a sense of ominous foreboding.
With the CCP government arresting Christians left and right,
her husband's failure to return before midnight worried her to no end.
While she waited with apprehension,
the night seemed to drag on and on.
The following day,
Li Wenxiu went from place to place in search of news of her husband
before she learned that he had been arrested.
At the police station,
Zhou Haijiang had been detained in a dark room
with only a single, small window-hole in it.
Seeing that his face had been beaten to a pulp,
Zhou Haijiang's relative felt bitter resentment against the violent police officers.
It was the afternoon of May 1.
Li Wenxiu had hurried over to the local police station.
The sight of the cuts and bruises on her husband's face and his crippled leg
made her feel as though a knife was being twisted in her heart.
Even though her husband was so close, just a few feet away from her,
the CCP police cruelly barred them from contact with each other,
and all they could do was gaze at one another from afar.
Her husband had always been very strong,
but now tears were falling down his face.
Seeing him like this broke Li Wenxiu's heart.
As evening approached,
Li Wenxiu returned to the police station to bring her husband some dinner,
but was told by the police that Zhou Haijiang had been transferred.
Having no way of knowing the whereabouts of her husband,
another wave of helplessness and worry surged through her.
On May 2, 1997, while still anxious about his father,
Zhou Jun heard some dreadful news.
The information brought by the village secretary
struck like a thunderbolt,
plunging the Zhou family from apprehension into extreme grief.
After hearing this,
the entire family felt a mixture of grief, indignation, and intense shock
to the point they could not accept what the policeman had said.
They knew
that physically, Zhou Haijiang had always been quite healthy,
and that he had always been a man of extraordinary cheer and strong character.
During the Cultural Revolution,
Zhou Haijiang had been tremendously humiliated,
and had been arrested a few times and beaten more than once
because of his belief in God.
Even so, he had never once considered suicide.
So how could he possibly have taken the coward's way out this time,
after being detained for a mere three days?
Astonished by the news,
the Zhou family left immediately and rushed over to the crematorium.
However, the employees there had received strict instructions from the CCP
that no one was allowed to see Zhou Haijiang's remains.
The members of the Zhou family were filled with righteous indignation,
but were utterly helpless.
They had no choice but to go everywhere they could
to try and pull some strings.
Finally, shortly before the cremation was to take place,
they were able to have one final look at their beloved Zhou Haijiang.
At the morgue, the Zhou family saw that
the deceased Zhou Haijiang was wearing nothing but a pair of underpants.
His entire body was covered in splotches of black and blue bruises,
his face twisted and contorted,
and his eyes were staring wide open, eyeballs protruding.
His mouth was half open,
with his hands balled tightly into fists.
It was quite obvious that he'd suffered greatly and put up a struggle when he died.
Zhou Haijiang's voice and smile were still imprinted in his family members' minds,
but in this moment,
faced with the spectacle of his cruel death,
they all felt heartbroken and inconsolable.
Going by the numerous bruises all over Zhou Haijiang's body,
it was not difficult to imagine
what kind of torment and mutilation he had been subjected to while still alive.
The Zhou family felt even more certain
that Zhou Haijiang had been cruelly tortured to death.
They even discovered, under Zhou Haijiang's Adam's apple,
a deep, ring-like mark around his neck;
the skin in the vicinity of this mark had been broken,
and there were obvious signs of bleeding.
There were also significant traces of blood on the stretcher.
The CCP police kept insisting that Zhou Haijiang died by suicide,
but this barbaric, circular contusion just below his Adam's apple
revealed the truth.
The Zhou family suddenly realized
why the CCP police had wanted to cremate his body without notifying them about it:
They had been trying to burn the evidence to cover up the truth!
The Zhou family now saw how cruel and vicious the CCP police were,
as well as their wanton disregard for human life.
The grief and indignation they had buried within themselves with great difficulty
finally erupted,
and they agreed to take the matter to court and ask for an explanation.
Afraid of this incident getting out of hand,
the CCP police sent the village secretary back over
to try to entice the Zhou family with money.
The CCP police promised to give them compensation
if they agreed to settle the matter out of court.
They also hinted that if they filed a lawsuit, they'd never win.
From beginning to end,
the Zhou family were unable to accept the deal.
Zhou Haijiang, who was only 43 years of age, was brutally murdered
simply because of his belief in Almighty God
and his unwillingness to bow down to the CCP,
and his refusal to hand over the church's money or reveal its leaders' whereabouts.
Now, however,
the CCP hoped to bribe their way out of a murder case
by giving the family some money.
The Zhous, strongly opposed to the settling, grew determined to sue.
Seeing that their bribe was not going to work,
the CCP changed tactics.
This overt threat against the Zhou family
meant that if they insisted on taking the matter to court, they might be killed.
Although the Zhous did not give in,
the intimidation delivered by this middleman from the CCP
made them live in fear and on edge,
and they got in the habit of locking all the doors to the house as soon as night fell.
The incident of Zhou Haijiang's beating by the police caused a local sensation.
Under pressure from the public,
the court was forced to sentence a certain Auxiliary Police Officer Wang,
who confessed to interrogating Zhou Haijiang under torture to extort a confession,
to three years' imprisonment.
However, the sentence was actually served outside of prison,
so it was nothing more than a formality.
The CCP's despicable shamelessness infuriated the Zhou family,
but they could do nothing about it;
they knew full well
that the real murderers had not been brought to justice,
but how could ordinary people demand justice
in the face of such an organized cover-up by the CCP?
Their hands tied,
the Zhous had no choice but to settle the matter privately.
After Zhou Haijiang's death,
the CCP's harm to the Zhou family continued.
Having lost the backbone of the family,
Li Wenxiu was grief-stricken
but still had to shoulder the heavy burdens of life's responsibilities.
Due to the CCP's surveillance,
the brothers and sisters in her church dared to come and lend a hand only occasionally;
and after helping out a few times, her relatives stopped coming.
The burdensome farm work pressing down on her shoulders
caused Li Wenxiu, who was already quite frail and thin, to grow even more haggard.
The thing that made her suffer the most was,
every time she thought of her husband,
she recalled the horrible appearance of his body
after he had been persecuted to death by the CCP,
and she also blamed herself for not appealing her husband's case for him.
Crying so much gave her an infection,
and her eyes oozed pus;
she even lost sight in one of them.
Her husband's tragic death was also a shock to her mental state.
Previously cheerful and extroverted,
ever since the incident she grew depressed,
staring lifelessly all day long in complete silence.
Sometimes, upon seeing conflict occur among her family members,
she fell into hysterics.
As a result of the intimidation from the CCP,
if her son was out of sight for a while,
Li Wenxiu would get flustered and search everywhere for him,
terrified that something bad had happened to her son.
Seeing his mother so frequently melancholy and despondent,
Zhou Jun also felt extremely depressed.
He used to be very outgoing and cheerful,
but because he could not get justice for his father's cruel demise,
he often felt tormented and helpless,
and was becoming more and more antisocial and prone to low self-esteem.
In early June, the wind rippled endlessly through the wheat,
transforming the field into a golden ocean,
but Zhou Jun couldn't feel a shred of joy over the harvest.
The scorching sun beat down on the land,
and the rising hot air caused him to sweat profusely.
The field seemed too vast to ever finish cutting.
Exhausted, he felt even more dispirited.
He glanced all around;
apart from him, others both young and old
were working in the wheat field with their families.
An intense wave of loneliness and sadness again washed over him.
Without a father, a son had no one to rely on.
Immediately after setting foot into adulthood,
Zhou Jun had become the primary source of manpower for his family,
and the arduous farm work was so oppressive he could hardly breathe.
Presently, he began to miss his deceased father even more,
and this time the pain and grief were particularly heart-wrenching.
Nevertheless, he must push through,
because at home his mom and grandpa would need looking after.
The year Zhou Haijiang died,
his elderly father was nearly in his seventies.
He had been an early widower,
and now had to see his son die before his time.
The excruciating pain of these events was almost unbearable for him.
In the middle of the night,
he could often be heard sobbing.
The inability to shake the image of his son's tragic death from his mind
left him in such anguish that he had no will to live.
One day, a few years later,
Zhou Haijiang's elderly father waited until the rest of the family was asleep,
then drank some insecticide, ending his own life of pain.
After the suicide,
the Zhous were again plunged into the depths of suffering.
Li Wenxiu's fragile nerves caused her behavior to become more and more abnormal.
In private, the neighbors sighed about her predicament.
"Such a good, upright household was destroyed by the Communist Party!"
For the Zhou family,
no matter how many years passed,
the pain brought by Zhou Haijiang's tragic death
could never be erased.
One day in 2011, on their way to a plaza,
Zhou Jun and his wife suddenly heard a song.
… you lift me up. Your shoulders, my seat.
When it's freezing cold,
you keep me close against your breast.
When there's wind and rain,
you keep me safe, you protect our family.
You have always given me best,
yet you don't speak a word.
You have never asked me to repay,
you always give us your all.
All the years made your hair grow lighter,
they have taken their toll.
Every memory etches your cheek.
Now we've all flown far away,
yet you're still waiting here in silence.
I will never forget you standing all alone.
Oh, father, dear father!
You have given me so much of your life,
yet I did not cherish all you gave.
Oh father, dear father!
I implore you, do not leave me.
Wanna be by your side always.
Oh father, dear father!
I implore you, do not leave me.
Be by my side forever more.
As the tune drew to an end,
it evoked deep memories in Zhou Jun,
and he abruptly thought of what his father looked like when he was murdered,
and about the fact that he was never able to appeal his father's case.
Suddenly overwhelmed with emotion,
Zhou Jun broke down crying right there in the middle of the street.
And just like that,
no matter how hard his wife tried to console him,
a man in his thirties squatted down on the ground,
weeping with his head in his hands.
In this moment, he finally had nothing to worry about,
and was able to vent years of repressed pain and grievance over the loss of his father …
His father has already been gone for more than twenty years,
yet every time Zhou Jun remembers these past events,
he still feels gripped by pain.
Were it not for the persecution of Christians by the CCP,
and had his father and mother not died,
they would have been such a happy family.
Now, however,
the wrongful case of his father being persecuted to death by the CCP
has still not been righted,
and the murderers are still at large.
After the death of his parents and grandfather,
the CCP government has even gone so far
as to start the rumor that the Zhou family has gone to ruin
because they believed in Almighty God.
However, to Zhou Jun and his family,
it is obvious that the culprit in this dire tragedy
is none other than the Chinese Communist Party!
March 9, 2013, a county in Henan Province.
The sky, densely filled with clouds, is dreary and oppressive.
Sad wails of grief chime through the air.
Marching in solemn steps,
the members of a funeral procession advance slowly forward.
The sudden departure of their relative
has left each of them anguished, aggrieved, and indignant.
The mother in the portrait shows a slight smile.
But never again will she hear the calls of her children …
This mother, who died before her time, was called Yang Huizhi.
She was from Henan Province.
She was a devout Christian
who had believed in Almighty God for ten years.
At the beginning of 2013,
Yang Huizhi was secretly arrested by the CCP government
and was interrogated under torture.
Because she stood by her belief and did not betray God,
because she did not make any confessions to the CCP,
they persecuted her to death.
White wreaths speak of the gatherers' grief,
tears of pain can't cover the anger in their hearts.
People can't understand:
What law does one break by believing in God in China?
Why is the CCP government so vicious and cruel toward those who believe in God?!
What happened to Yang Huizhi on the final days of her life?
January 4, 2013, a city in Henan Province.
Beneath dark clouds, the air has an oppressive feel to it,
as if a great storm is coming.
On this day, Yang Huizhi arrived early
to meet with her two sisters in their meeting place.
At this point, not far from the building,
over ten people were closely watching everything that was happening.
The three sisters chatted with each other,
unaware of the peril that awaited them.
Their sudden arrest had caught Yang Huizhi and the other two sisters by surprise.
Though they had heard about many brothers and sisters
being arrested by the CCP government,
they were still petrified to come face-to-face
with the thuggish members of the CCP police.
A group of policemen led by Officer Yu were ransacking the house,
searching every corner.
The house was immediately turned upside down.
Yang Huizhi and the others were furious to see how lawless the police were.
To believe in God is to walk the right path of life.
It is just and proper.
Yet the CCP government throws up every obstacle it can to restrict people's faith.
They treat Christians as the enemy,
and rabidly arrest and persecute them.
As they were taken away by the police,
Yang Huizhi and her two sisters kept praying to God.
No matter how brutally they were abused by the CCP,
they would stand firm in their testimony to God.
Without producing any form of identification,
at around 9 p.m. that evening,
the police took Yang Huizhi and her two sisters to the Public Security Bureau,
and began to interrogate them on shifts around the clock.
By the middle of the night,
the torture had left Zhang Li, who had been arrested with Yang Huizhi, close to death.
She frequently heard the screams of Yang Huizhi
as she was interrogated next door.
The police alternated between threats and incentives,
but the three sisters gave them no information about the Church.
To try to find out the church's leaders and the whereabouts of its funds,
the police extended the torture to Yang Huizhi and Zhang Li.
After arresting them,
the police did not take them into custody at a detention center.
Instead, they were given a private tribunal and secretly imprisoned.
Yang Huizhi and Zhang Li were filled with dread.
An inexplicable fear surged in their hearts.
Where were the CCP police taking them?
On January 6, 2013,
Yang Huizhi and Zhang Li were secretly taken to a hotel,
after which they never saw each other again.
With the hotel's ordinary appearance,
no one would ever have suspected the grisly torture chamber hidden within.
Those who are escorted by the police to this place
have entered living hell.
Various bloodstained implements were laid out in the interrogation room.
In the dim light, they inspired terror.
On the floor, fresh crimson drips overlaid dried stains,
giving off the smell of blood.
The sound of vicious beatings and piercing screams never ceased.
The hellishly horrifying atmosphere
made the hair on the back of your neck stand up.
Yang Huizhi had died an unjust death.
We've no way of knowing the details of her death.
Yet when the Christians who were detained with her at that time
recall their dark experiences,
they still feel like a nightmare.
Zhang Li says that
during the secret interrogation,
over ten male police officers took turns in torturing her.
Their favorite method was slapping her about the face until she bled.
Each hard slap brought a burning pain.
The beating left her face red and swollen.
It even loosened some of her teeth and left her dizzy,
her ears ringing.
As long as she didn't reply,
the police would think of ways to abuse her.
They knew a lot of torture techniques.
Even chopsticks became torture implements against Christians.
They kicked her fiercely with their hard leather shoes,
venting the cruelty and brutality of the CCP police.
The excruciating pain of the handcuffs cutting deep into her flesh
made her want to die.
The torture was increasingly intense.
Her fragile figure was tied to a steel pole that kept on rotating.
Feeling woozy,
Zhang Li felt as if her hands and feet had been broken.
The relentless torture made her wail in pain.
But the CCP police took no notice.
They didn't have the slightest compassion.
They were bloodthirsty, like demons in the underworld.
They derived pleasure from tormenting and abusing people …
In addition, another Christian called Wang Fang was also tortured.
The police didn't let her sleep at night,
punching and kicking her as soon as she closed her eyes.
As a result of extreme fatigue and terror,
Wang Fang lost her wits and fell into a trance.
The police not only mutilated her flesh,
but also destroyed her mind.
They forcibly stripped Wang Fang's clothes
and insulted her with extremely obscene language.
In this way,
human dignity was ruthlessly ravaged and trampled upon
under the leery grins of the fiendish CCP police!
More cruelly, they didn't let her use the toilet,
forcing her to urinate over herself
and then they made her lick up her bodily waste.
The CCP police's interrogation of Christians is barbaric.
Their level of depravity and viciousness is heinous.
According to accounts by these Christians,
their time with the CCP police was like being in hell.
Each day the police tortured them
to discover the whereabouts of the church's leaders and its money.
Not only were they subjected to all manner of torture and abuse,
but they also had to suffer the police officers' insults.
They practically tore people apart …
Such was the savage torture suffered by the Christians who survived.
Can you imagine what Yang Huizhi suffered?
21 days after the secret interrogation,
the police failed
to gain any information about The Church of Almighty God from Yang Huizhi.
On January 25,
all out of ideas, they sent her to the detention center.
During her 18 days there,
Yang Huizhi's physical condition deteriorated until she couldn't even walk.
Only when the police saw that Yang Huizhi was about to die
did they send her to the hospital.
At 5 o'clock in the morning of February 12,
Zhengzhou was cloaked by darkness, and the weather was unusually cold.
The night was pitch black before the dawn.
On this night, Yang Huizhi, who was only 46 years old,
came to the end of her life.
It had been over a month
from when she was arrested to when the abuse cost her her life,
throughout which her family hadn't had any news of her.
They were only notified by the local police station the second day after her death.
They said that Yang Huizhi had died suddenly from a heart attack.
After hearing the news,
her family was overcome with shock and grief.
They knew that Yang Huizhi had never suffered heart problems.
How could she have had a heart attack?
And why did she die in a detention center?
They felt there was something very odd about her sudden death.
They immediately contacted a lawyer
and their party of seven hurried to Zhengzhou.
At the morgue,
they saw how Yang Huizhi,
who was once so healthy and loved to talk and smile,
had become a frozen corpse.
They were consumed by grief and indignation.
The doctor said that
when she was sent to the hospital
she was foaming at the mouth, delirious, and incontinent.
The police officer standing to one side immediately tried to cover this up,
saying that the doctor was new and knew nothing.
Seeing that the police were deliberately trying
to cover up the circumstances surrounding Yang Huizhi's death,
her family grew even more suspicious.
They demanded to see Yang Huizhi's death report.
Although high blood pressure, heart disease, cerebral infarction,
and other diseases were written on the report,
these were followed by question marks.
The diagnosis was death caused by multiple organ failure.
The diagnosis confirmed the family's suspicions:
The CCP police's claim that Yang Huizhi had died from a heart attack
was their attempt to cover up the truth and avoid guilt.
But why did Yang Huizhi suffer multiple organ failure after being arrested?
She had never had heart disease or high blood pressure.
So what was the cause of her death?
To find evidence,
her family asked for the interrogation records.
The police staunchly objected.
They only released the daily surveillance video of the detention center.
The police knew very well that they'd find no evidence in the video footage,
because Yang Huizhi had no visible signs of torture.
In the surveillance video,
Yang Huizhi looked extremely frail and had trouble walking.
She wasn't even able to take care of her basic physical needs.
Watching the video, her family were overcome with grief;
they burst out crying.
They knew that the murderer was the CCP government,
yet they had no way of getting hold of any evidence regarding her death.
They asked why Yang Huizhi had been arrested,
and what the results of the case were.
Officer Bai, who was responsible for the case,
only said she had been arrested because she believed in Almighty God,
and he declined to provide any further information.
To cover up their wrongdoing and quickly close the case,
the police called together officials of the local county committee and county government,
and the company leaders of Yang's relatives
to coax and coerce her family.
Daunted by the threats from the CCP police,
Yang Huizhi's family were forced to concede.
They didn't dare try to take things further.
Henan Province is one of the regions in China
that has suffered most severely from religious persecution.
Today, this stretch of yellow earth
buried yet another Christian persecuted to death by the CCP.
The CCP, this horde of demons that made God its enemy,
has abused and killed countless Christians.
There are thousands more Christians like Yang Huizhi
who have been cruelly persecuted
because they truly believe in God and walk the right path of life …