[img]https://www.sermonindex.net/images/forum/2004/may/featured_news.gif[/img]An Internet writer who posted articles online supporting China's unofficial Christian church has been released after serving a one-year jail term, a fellow activist and a family member said Tuesday.Computer technician Zhang Shengqi was detained in November 2003 and sentenced to one year in prison last summer after being convicted of leaking state secrets.He recently returned to his home in eastern China's Shandong province, said Yin Weihong, a veteran Chinese democracy activist in the southeastern city of Wenzhou.A family member at Zhang's home, contacted by phone, confirmed he was back but said he had gone out.Zhang and two fellow activists were accused of helping spread information on the Internet about a 2003 crackdown in the eastern city of Hangzhou on independent churches whose followers worship outside the Communist Party-controlled official Protestant church.Liu Fenggang, Zhang and a third activist, Xu Yonghai, also were found guilty of passing on information to an overseas magazine about a court case involving another member of the independent church.
_________________SI Moderator - Greg Gordon
[img]https://www.sermonindex.net/images/forum/2004/may/featured_news.gif[/img][b]Chinese Christian testifies of torture[/b]A member of a Chinese underground church says she escaped from the communist country after suffering torture and six years in a labor camp where she made Christmas lights and rugs.Liu Xianzhi said police tortured her, in 2001, into falsely testifying that the pastor of the South China Church, Gong Shengliang, "raped" her, according to the China Aid Association of Midland, Texas."When I hear dogs barking, loud knocking on the door, the sound of police sirens, or I see men who are not wearing shirts [like my interrogators], I have an overwhelming sense of fear," she said.Liu is one of 8,903 members of the South China Church arrested for their religious beliefs, including Gong, who is serving a life sentence in prison based on multiple confessions allegedly obtained through torture.Liu, 34, will speak of her experiences tomorrow afternoon at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., that will include congressmen and human-rights advocates.