Tens of thousands of articles accused The Church of Almighty God of a murder that was committed by a different religious group.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 1 of 6.
Ten years ago, in 2014, what will become one of the most famous “cult crimes” of the century was perpetrated in a McDonald’s diner in China. A young woman was killed by missionaries of a religious movement she had refused to listen to. Immediately, Chinese propaganda attributed the crime to the largest and most persecuted Christian new religious movement in China, The Church of Almighty God (CAG). This version of the facts was uncritically repeated by some Western correspondents in Beijing, which caused enormous problems and suffering for the CAG members, not only in China but throughout the world. Ten years thereafter, we know it was one of the largest Chinese fake news operations. The CAG was not responsible for the murder. The crime really happened, but had been perpetrated by a different new religious movement.
To this very day, some Western sources credit Emily Dunn, an Australian scholar who wrote the first pioneer scholarly book on the CAG, or me for having clarified that the McDonald’s murder was perpetrated by a group different from the CAG. In fact, this is not true. The homework making Dunn’s and my own research possible was done and published in 2014 by “Beijing News,” a daily newspaper with a certain reputation of independence whose publisher is the Beijing Municipal Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Well before me or Dunn, Beijing News had published both a full story of the group responsible for the murder, based on the investigative work of its journalists Xiao Hui and Zhang Yongsheng, and the key part of the trial’s transcripts. Based on their investigation and the transcripts, Xiao and Hui explained to their readers that actually the perpetrators of the crime claimed that, unlike their group, the CAG “was a cult,” and applauded the government’s repression of it.
Well before the expression “fake news” became fashionable, scholars of religion noticed how rumors were spread against “bad” religions and made credible by both their reiteration and their endorsement by supposedly authoritative sources. As early as 1960, the later American historian David Brion Davis studied how what we would today call fake news was spread in the nineteenth century against Catholicism and other minority religions in the United States. The same phenomenon was noticed with respect to “cults” during the 20th-century “cult wars,” when scholars of new religious movements crossed swords with militant opponents of the “cults.”
In all these cases, however, the fake news about religions labeled “heresies” or “cults” was spread by private entrepreneurs: secular antireligious activists or anti-cultists, or rival religionists. In recent years we have witnessed the spread of fake news about religious movements organized, in a much more systematic way, not by private but by public actors. In 2017, for example, the Jehovah’s Witnesses were “liquidated” and banned in Russia. The Putin administration was obviously annoyed by the almost unanimous condemnation of this move by international organizations, Western states, academics, and leading NGOs in Russia and abroad. One of the results of this situation was a flourishing of blogs, groups, and social network pages accusing the Jehovah’s Witnesses of a great variety of wrongdoings, most of them ostensibly managed by people presenting themselves as former Witnesses. No doubt, several of these websites were genuine expressions of the anger of disgruntled former members. However, their simultaneous appearances in different countries in the weeks after the Russian liquidation decision may not have been entirely coincidental.
China has deployed a similarly massive action to justify its persecution of movements on its lists of xie jiao (“movements spreading heterodox teachings,” sometimes less correctly translated as “evil cults”). In recent years, Chinese propaganda supporting the anti-xie-jiao campaigns has focused on the CAG. In June 2017, for example, the CAG leaked to a number of scholars (including the present author) a document allegedly transcribing the content of a teleconference of June 16, 2014, wherein officers of the Chinese Central Office for the Prevention and Handling of Cults (also referred to as Central Office 610) discussed the CAG. They recommended, “Firmly grasp the typical case of ‘May 28 McDonald’s Murder’ in one hand to expose the reactionary nature, deceptive tricks and serious threats of the cult . . . [and] vigorously promote foreign projects [of propaganda].” A crime committed in 2014 by a religious group different from the CAG was transformed by Chinese propaganda into a CAG crime through a massive operation of fake news spread both at home and internationally.
For whatever reason, these operations found a particularly receptive audience in British media, including the most prestigious ones. After the 2014 McDonald’s case, both the BBC and The Telegraph reported on the CAG through their correspondents in Beijing, who used documents supplied by the Chinese authorities and already published by Chinese official media. These reports were particularly uncritical and blindly followed Chinese propaganda. Unfortunately, they were quoted in the following years by some immigration authorities and courts denying refugee status to members of the CAG who had escaped abroad.
The Telegraph’s correspondent was perhaps the only Western journalist who accepted at face value a twenty-two-page document circulated by the Chinese authorities, accusing CAG authorities in New York of instructing their followers in China to kill CCP members, explaining, “If they murder Communist party members, ‘the spirit of the Great Red Dragon will no longer possess them.’”
The language, the theology, and the style of the document are not typical of the CAG, and even Chinese government media have not accused members of the CAG of any such murder. By doing some homework, even a nonspecialized journalist should have recognized the document as a vulgar forgery fabricated by Chinese propaganda agents. Yet, when I published my book on the CAG with Oxford University Press, I counted some twenty thousand media pages in different languages connecting the CAG with the McDonald’s murder. Obviously this particular fake news campaign had been fairly successful.
One of the reasons Chinese propaganda about the CAG went unchallenged for many years was that few, if any, scholars had paid any attention to the church. An Australian PhD student, Emily Dunn, published two short pioneer articles in 2008, followed by her dissertation in 2010, which was the basis for a book published in 2015. Meanwhile, in 2011, a master’s thesis on the CAG was produced by a student at Shandong University, but it was largely a compilation of police and anti-cult sources (Fang Youwei, “從入會至癡迷— 對基督教異端”全能神”教成員卷入的社會學研究” [From Conversion to Fanaticism—The Sociological Research on Members Involved in the Christian Heresy “Almighty God”]).
Dunn’s role as the first non-Chinese scholar who studied the CAG should be acknowledged. However, she admitted that she relied only on internet sources (some primary and posted by the CAG, others from obviously biased Chinese media) and on her interviews in China of Chinese police officers and others hostile to the CAG. She did not interview a single member of the CAG, and in fact reported that she went to New York looking for the local community but had the wrong address and was not able to find it. This happened in 2013, while later in New York, South Korea, Spain and elsewhere the communities of the CAG acquired very visible religious buildings that were more difficult to miss. In fact, several English-speaking CAG members I interviewed had read Dunn’s 2015 book and some of her articles and vocally expressed their disagreement with her presentation of the church.
In subsequent years, American and European scholars of new religious movements, some of them veterans of the “cult wars” and familiar with the dynamics of anti-cult propaganda, started studying the CAG from a different angle and lecturing on their findings at international conferences.
In 2017, five Western scholars who had become familiar with the CAG, including the undersigned, were invited to two conferences, in Zhengzhou and Hong Kong, on (or, rather, against) the CAG, by the Chinese Anti-Xie-Jiao Association, which has direct ties with the CCP. Chinese government-controlled media claimed that the Western scholars were finally persuaded that the position of the Chinese authorities was justified, but in fact we went to China with the goal of raising doubts about the government’s view.
