China’s New Crackdown on Christians: WSJ

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Jillian Kay Melchior, China’s New Crackdown on Christians; Xi Jinping attacks the ‘patriotic’ church, that has been co-existed with the government. Wall Street Journal, Feb 5, 2016 (an occasional column with the heading Houses of Worship”)/
http://www.wsj.com/articles/chin ... ristians-1454631838

Note:
(a) "Nearly seven years after Warren Bird visited the biggest Protestant church in China, he’s still deeply moved as he recalls its pastor, 'Joseph' Gu Yuese 顾约瑟, preaching that morning from Psalms. * * * Mr Bird, an American researcher and expert on global megachurches. * * * Mr Gu’s sermon in Chongyi Church [杭州]崇一堂 on that Sunday morning in August 2009"

Biography. Warren Bird, undated
http://warrenbird.com/biography
("Warren Bird’s PhD is from Fordham University in sociology of religion. He is a graduate of Wheaton College and Wheaton Graduate School, Wheaton, Ill [Illinois] (BA, MA) and Alliance Theological Seminary, Nyack, NY (M.Div.)")
(b) "Zhejiang’s combination of faith and patriotism has underpinned Mr Gu’s pastoral career. Until January, he held leadership roles on two of the bureaucratic organizations overseeing state-sanctioned Christianity in China, the Three-Self Patriotic Movement 三自爱国运动 and the China Christian Council 中国基督教协会."
(c) “Since then [2014], the government has forcibly demolished more than 1,800 crosses across Zhejiang. In one particularly gruesome incident, police beat believers with electric batons after they gathered to protest the removal of a cross at Wenzhou Salvation Church [温州市平阳县]救恩堂 [July 21, 2014]. One man suffered a cracked skull. More than 95% of the torn-down crosses belonged to state-sanctioned churches, which had painstakingly registered with the government in an attempt to operate in accordance with official policy.  'There was no compromise, no discussion—it’s an order, and you have to do it,' observes Fenggang Yang 杨 凤岗, director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University."