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VOM Letter-Writing Campaign Helps Bring Chinese Christian Prisoner Home

by Allie Martin and Jenni Parker
October 7, 2005

(AgapePress) - Zhang Yi-Nan, a leader in the Chinese house church movement who was arrested in 2003 in connection with his Christian activities, has been released after spending two years in a labor camp.

Communist Chinese authorities released Zhang last week from the Ping Ding Shan City Bailou Labor Camp in Henan Province, China. The Christian prisoner had been taken into custody in September of 2003 and charged with subverting the Chinese government and socialist order.

But, even after he had completed two years of laojiao, or 're-education through labor,' Zhang was not immediately allowed to go home.

According to a report from Voice of the Martyrs (VOM), a ministry to persecuted Christians worldwide, Zhang was escorted from the labor camp by ten policement; but instead of taking him home, he was first taken to the Lushan County Police Station, where he was 'instructed' about what he should not say or do following his release. Reportedly, police told the ex-detainee that he was 'very defiant' for not admitting his 'mistakes' -- i.e., choosing to follow Christ and belonging to an unregistered house church rather than China's official state church.

Zhang was finally allowed to go home with his wife and son. Upon arriving home, one of the first things he did was to watch a video documentary called The Cross: Jesus in China. The humble Christian leader later remarked that, compared with what other Chinese Christians have gone through, his own suffering was nothing. 'I am just so privileged to taste a little bit of the Lord's cross,' he said.

Todd Nettleton, a spokesman with VOM, believes the strong response of fellow Christians who participated in a letter writing campaign on Zhang's behalf probably played a significant role in his release. Nettleton says the labor camp detainee was featured on PrisonerAlert.com, a website the ministry has set up, through which people can write to Christians in prison around the world.

'About 2,700 people went on the website, looked at Brother Zhang's profile, and then composed a letter to him,' the VOM representative says. 'The website also translates the letters into the language of the prisoner, so his letters were in Chinese."

VOM is still trying to determine exactly what happened to those letters once they were sent, whether they actually got to Zhang, 'or if they simply got to the prison and let the authorities there at the prison know that this was a man who the world knew about and [that people] were watching how he was treated,' Nettleton says.

'Either way,' the ministry spokesman adds, 'it's a definite benefit to our Christian brothers and sisters who are in prison for their faith." He believes the letters sent on Zhang's behalf definitely influenced the Chinese government and helped to secure the house church leader's release, and that similar campaigns have helped win the release and even to save the lives of other Christian prisoners.

Nettleton notes that Zhang expects China's Public Security Bureau to follow him and monitor his activities, but the ex-prisoner says he is not bitter toward his captors. Instead, he is grateful to God and to those who prayed for him and wrote letters on his behalf.

'Because of your prayers and God's mercy,' Zhang says, 'I could come out of the prison without any resentment or hatred toward the Chinese authorities. In fact, I have more compassion for those who do not know the love of God.'

Nettleton echoes the released prisoner's thanks to the letter writers and praises God for sustaining this faithful servant of the church during two difficult years in the labor camp. Zhang was a writer and church historian who, before being arrested, had interviewed countless Chinese Christians, documenting their stories of suffering and persecution and God's faithfulness throughout.

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