Lithuanians were recently shocked by video footage of a Chinese tourist throwing away a small pro-Hong Kong cross at the country’s Hill of Crosses site with a triumphal exclamation: “We have done a good thing today! Our motherland is great!” Other crosses with prayers for Hong Kong were found defaced. One, originally inscribed with the prayer intention of a Lithuanian family, had been overwritten, in Mandarin, with the following sentiment: “Hope all cockroaches soon rest in peace. Hope Hong Kong can return to peace.”
The storm in the media and blogosphere went on for a week. Police began a criminal investigation based on the article in the criminal code which proscribes “desecration of graves and other memorials”. Foreign affairs minister Linas Linkevičius condemned the “shameful, disgraceful act of vandalism”, intimating that stronger official reaction would be forthcoming if the acts of vandalism were found to have been instigated by the embassy of the People’s Republic of China – as some suggested.
Now, one might ask, what’s a cross or two among hundreds of thousands? Because the Hill of Crosses, on the outskirts of Šiauliai, Lithuania’s fourth largest city, is bursting with crosses. Pilgrims are encouraged to enshrine their prayer intentions by leaving a cross on the site. These range from tiny crosses which visitors leave by the hundreds every day all the way up to the giant cross left by the most illustrious visitor to the site, St John Paul II.
The Polish pope came in 1993, in the first papal visit to Lithuania, following the break-up of the Soviet Union. The Hill of Crosses was chosen as an epitome of Lithuania’s struggle for religious freedom. During the Soviet occupation in the 20th century (as well as under Tsarist rule in the 19th), crosses would be placed on the hill as a sign of defiance, fusing religious hope and yearning for freedom. Authorities would regularly destroy and remove the crosses, often using bulldozers. And the crosses would spring up again, sometimes as early as the next morning, embedded into the fresh bulldozer tracks under the cover of darkness. The fragile wooden crosses proved more durable than the terrifying totalitarian regime.
Thus the gesture of the tourist from communist China evoked those Soviet attempts to erase the site. This contemptuous act spoke not only of disregard for other people’s property, but, more importantly, of an aggressive disregard of other countries’ values and laws.
The episode revealed the utter contempt in which religion is held by the Chinese communist regime. The tiny wooden cross thrown away on camera by the tourist is emblematic of all the crosses pulled down from church steeples in China; of churches, mosques, and Buddhist houses of prayer torn down or expropriated; of rosaries, crosses, and Bibles confiscated by the communist authorities; of Uyghur Muslims thrown into concentration camps; of practitioners of forbidden religions incarcerated, tortured and harvested for organs. The little cross is a symbol of the cross that millions of the believers in China have to bear. And it testifies to the war against faith which China wages – and which shows no signs of abating.
In fact, the opposite: on December 30, Chinese authorities announced the promulgation of new “administrative measures for religious groups” which will come into effect soon. The new rules subject all religious organisations to total state administrative control. Even the mission of religious organisations is defined as spreading communist ideology, rather than religious faith. Article 17 of the new measures states that “Religious organisations shall spread the principles and policies of the Chinese Communist Party as well as national laws, regulations and rules, to religious staff and religious citizens.” Bitter Winter, a website documenting religious persecution in China, concludes: “[C]learly the crackdown on religion continues, and the legal framework is going from bad to worse.”
And yet, as soon as the news about desecrated Hong Kong crosses broke, the next day a new cross was erected on the Hill of Crosses, with a message supporting Hong Kong democracy, in just the way that crosses used to reappear overnight in the Soviet years.
Chinese communists studied the case of Lithuania – the first state to break away from the Soviet Union, thus contributing to the latter’s demise – and noted the role of the religious freedom movement which formed the backbone of opposition to the Soviet totalitarian regime in the 1970s and 80s. The authorities are determined not to let this happen in China – hence the mounting persecution of religion.
And yet it is freedom of conscience, which no political regime is able to subjugate completely, that might yet prove the stumbling block for the totalitarian regime’s ambitions. And that is why the hundreds of millions of China’s believers need our support.
This is where the unambiguous stance and moral clarity from our own Church, free of equivocations and compromises, is urgently needed. “What hurts the victim most is not the cruelty of the oppressor but the silence of the bystander,” as the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel famously said.
And we members of the same Church cannot even claim to be bystanders.
Dr Mantas Adomėnas is a Lithuanian MP
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