ChinaAid president Bob Fu was awarded the “Wilberforce Award” last month by The Colson Center for a Christian Worldview.
After being jailed by the Communist Party for hosting house church services, Fu fled with wife Heidi through Hong Kong in 1997. But he never forgot the persecuted Church he left behind, and today Texas-based ChinaAid and its network of pastors and underground churches relay first-hand accounts of arrests and beatings by the CCP.
“Over the years, the Lord has built up a network for us inside China on the ground,” Fu tells One News Now, “that we are able to receive credible information, entrusted by those persecuted brothers and sisters, to report what's going on.”
One account, which can be read here, describes how Sichuan Province police continually harass Christian leader Hao Ruiru. He lost his supermarket job due to his faith, then lost his apartment, too, when police forced the landlord to kick him out. He was then beaten by neighbors, with police watching, when he attempted to rent another apartment.
The Wall Street Journal has said Fu’s ministry is considered the most influential network of “human-rights activists, underground Christians, and freedom fighters” in China, Colson Center points out.
Fu’s biography is itself deserving of a feature film. As a college student, he escaped with his life during the Tiananmen Square massacre and was forever changed after an American professor shared the gospel with him. He then operated an underground church, and then a secretive Bible school, and then fled China with Heidi after she learned she was pregnant.
Fu's ongoing fight for China's underground church is likely why, in recent months, the devious Chinese Communist Party has harassed Fu and his ministry in Midland, Texas. For weeks protesters financed by a Chinese billionaire marched claiming, ironically, that Fu is a CCP agent.
Local authorities in Midland also protected Fu and his family after they received death threats.
