In October 2019 President Xi Jinping, defiantly declared that No force could stop China's rise!
Speaking at the start of grand parade marking 70 years since the founding of the Peoples Republic, Xi called for the complete unification of the country. Xi delivered the remarks at the site where late Communist Party patriarch Mao Zedong proclaimed the nation’s founding on October 1, 1949.
China has arguably the worst human rights record of any nation in the world and they are responsible for not only many dehumanising behaviours toward their own people, but even genocide on an industrial scale. Recent evidence of "forced organ harvesting" from Chinese prisoners, including Falun Gong and Uighur Muslims has been uncovered. The report indicated that this practice has been committed for years... on a “significant scale.” Whist China has said that the practice has been outlawed, replaced with a system of voluntary donations.
The report, published on November 14 in the BMC Medical Ethics journal, has refuted this, alleging that those claims of reform are being supported by the “systematic falsification and manipulation of official organ transplant datasets in China.
China also has the unenviable number one standing as the worst polluters in the world, and their distain of best world practice, on so many levels is well known, until now, their rise has appeared unhampered.
Yet, over the last weeks the world is watching in horror as Coronavirus has shifted China’s influence in drastic and unparalleled ways! It is fairly clear that China will take quite some rebuilding to re-establish their pre-eminence.
History tells us about a Titanic crew member is reported to have said to embarking passenger, Mrs. Sylvia Caldwell, “God himself could not sink this ship!”
Whilst this statement has taken on legendary proportions – The RMS Titanic, billed as unsinkable, sinks into the icy waters of the North Atlantic after hitting an iceberg on its maiden voyage, killing 1,517 people. the fact remains that there was a sense of arrogance about how that ship was built to not even put enough life rafts on board - believing that it indeed was unsinkable!
Scripture tells us Pride goes before destruction, and an arrogant spirit before a fall.
Could this dreaded virus that is shaping to be a world altering event, be a harbinger of their new, albeit unwanted, position in the planet!
That indeed President Xi and his nation will tumble from their place of world dominance and unparalleled world ascendancy and in so doing open the door to real and lasting reform?
Paradoxically, on February 1st 2020, new restrictions on all forms of religious activity came into force throughout the nation of China – right in the midst of the worst outbreak of coronavirus that is presently killing around 100 people per day and infecting thousands more.
The “Control Measures for Religious Groups,” as the 41 new rules are called, deal with everything from the holding of rites and rituals, to the selection of leaders and annual meetings, to the hiring of staff and the handling of funds. All of these must be reported — in advance, no less — to the comrades at the “Religious Affairs” office for their approval.
Catholic churches torn down or denuded of their crosses and statues. Images of the Madonna and Child replaced with pictures of “People’s Leader” Xi Jinping. Signs posted outside evangelical churches forbidding anyone under the age of 18 from entering. The Ten Commandments painted over with quotes from Xi!
But it’s not just Christians. In China’s Far West, over a million Muslims languish in concentration camps — Beijing cutely calls them “vocational training centres” — while mosques are being torn down, religious signs removed and ancient cemeteries levelled.
Elsewhere in China, Buddhist temples are being turned into shrines celebrating Xi Jinping, China’s President for Life. His picture adorns the walls, his recorded voice booms out of the loudspeakers, and it is his “Thought” — not Buddha’s — that the monks are now required to meditate upon.
Not even the Taoists, China’s ancient folk religion, have escaped this new Cultural Revolution. Temples that have stood for over 1,000 years have been closed and ancient statues smashed, all on the orders of “Religious Affairs” officials.
Yet in the midst of this persecution China has witnessed a religious revival especially over the past four decades, in particular with a significant increase in Christian believers. The number of Chinese Protestants has grown by an average of 10 percent annually since 1979.
Tens of millions of Chinese now identify as Christians, and the number is rapidly escalating. By some estimates, China is on track to have the world’s largest population of Christians by 2030!
President Xi Jinping perhaps thinks that he will establish his image and his likeness forever, yet God will always have the final word!
Could it be that we are watching the dawning a new epoch that will shift the power and influence of this great nation and even pull down one of the last great bastions of socialism. We can only hope!
Source material - Steven W. Mosher - President of the Population Research Institute