WHY IS THE ULTIMATE BLUE STATE SUCH A CESSPIT OF RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION? Chinese authorities demolish well-known evangelical church:
Authorities in northern China’s coal country this week demolished a well-known Christian mega-church, underscoring long-standing tensions between religious groups and the officially atheistic Communist Party.
Witnesses and overseas activists say paramilitary People’s Armed Police forces used excavators and dynamite on Tuesday to destroy the Golden Lampstand Church in the city of Linfen in Shanxi province.
ChinaAid, a U.S.-based Christian advocacy group, said local authorities planted explosives in an underground worship hall to demolish the building, which was built with nearly $3 million in contributions from local worshippers in one of China’s poorest regions.
The church, with a congregation of more than 50,000, has long clashed with the government. Hundreds of police and hired thugs smashed the church and seized Bibles in an earlier crackdown in 2009 that ended with church leaders receiving long prison sentences.
Elsewhere in totalitarian China, “A Visa-Free Zone Welcomes Your Wallet. But Maybe Not Your Beard,” the New York Times reports:
Except for men with long beards and women wearing veils or jewelry with a crescent moon motif, just about anyone can enter Chinese territory — at least a few miles of it — across a frontier marked only by two thin stripes of paint daubed across the road.
The stripes — one red, one light blue — demarcate the border between China’s restive region of Xinjiang in the far west of the country and Kazakhstan, a Central Asian neighbor.
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The unusually relaxed border at what the Chinese call Horgos and the Kazakhs Khorgos is all the more remarkable because it marks the entrance to a tense Chinese region that has been struggling for decades to contain a low-grade but persistent insurgency by militants from a minority Chinese Muslim ethnic group, the Uighurs.
Posters written in Russian, a language most Kazakhs can understand, make clear that the area is not entirely at peace. They offer a “friendly” warning that bushy beards and Islamic clothing are not welcome in China and include photos of prohibited dress and jewelry. An American diplomat with a hipster-style beard who tried to visit recently got stopped by the People’s Armed Police and was let in only after Mr. Ivanov convinced the Chinese that he was not a potential terrorist.
Now who’s being naïve, Xi?
(Presumably, all of the above is Thomas Friedman approved, of course.)