Leaders of government-sanctioned Protestant churches in China said Oct. 22 that "there are no underground churches in China" and dismissed reports of harassed Christians in the communist nation.
Officials from the China Christian Council and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement also agreed with Beijing labeling the Falun Gong movement an "evil cult" that must be stopped.
"The Chinese government is doing a better and better job of ensuring freedom of religious belief," the Rev. Cao Shengjie, president of the China Christian Council, said at a news conference at the Chinese Embassy.
"If the government had not implemented this policy, the Christian church in China could not have had this development."
Cao dismissed reports of a thriving but persecuted underground church that human rights groups say has been harassed by Chinese officials. Instead, she said there are "only a limited number" of churches that have not registered with the government.
"In the final analysis, a church is a church and there can be no underground or above ground between them," Presbyter Ji Jianhong, chairman of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, said through a translator provided by the embassy.
U.S. officials disagree. Last May, Secretary of State Colin Powell named China a "country of particular concern" for its religious freedom policies, and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom reported "widespread and serious abuses of the right to freedom of religion and belief in China."
Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom at Freedom House, a human rights watchdog group, estimated at least 25 million people belong to the underground churches, and "it could be double or triple that."
"They are wrong on both counts," Marshall said. "There is an underground church and it is persecuted."
Much of the concern by human rights groups has focused on the government's crackdown on the Falun Gong movement, which it labeled an "evil cult" that aims to subvert the government.
Cao said, "Falun Gong has nothing to do with the question of religious belief. It is an evil cult that has committed many crimes against the Chinese people."
Cao's Shanghai-headquartered conference was established in 1980 as one of five religious groups that operate with the approval of the communist government.
Together with the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, the two groups represent 16 million Protestant Christians who shun denominational structures and labels.
Neither group counts an estimated 4 million underground Catholics as members. The Vatican has not had diplomatic relations with China since 1951 and has not recognized an illicit patriotic Catholic Church established in 1957.
Both Cao and Ji said Western churches must not try to establish missionary outposts in China. Both groups operate under the principle that the Chinese church must be self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating.