Zhejiang High school students must say they are atheist
Students in two schools were forced to rewrite a questionnaire until they said they had “No religion”.
Hong Kong (AsiaNews) – Some 300 students in two high schools in Zhejiang province were asked to fill out a form stating that they did not follow a religion, World Watch Monitor reports citing “a trusted local source”.
AsiaNews had already reported that between the end of September and early October China’s State Council had sent inspectors to "guide, boycott and prevent" the spread of religion among students and teachers.
According to the local source in Zhejiang, students were asked to fill out a form. In the first school, many of the 200 students wrote that they were "Christians".
They were then asked to rewrite the questionnaire to say that they had "No religion". Anyone who still wrote "Christian" had to fill out the questionnaire again and again until they wrote the "right" answer.
In another school, with 100 students, the class prefect forced students to rewrite the questionnaire to indicate that they had "No religion".
Zhejiang is full of unofficial Protestant communities and Christians represent up to 10 per cent of the population.
For this reason, in 2014 a campaign was launched across the province to curb the visibility of Christians by destroying crosses and religious buildings and crushing underground communities.
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