Pastor John Cao

Pastor Cao undertook the first of his China/Myanmar crossings to visit Myanmar’s Kachin people, a persecuted Christian minority, in 2012. According to Christianity Today, Jamie Powell, Pastor Cao’s American wife, explained that during this visit Pastor Cao

“was shocked by the poverty he saw: Children without clothes, high child mortality rates, and a makeshift school with a pigpen adjacent to the classroom.”

Prior to his 2012 visit to Myanmar, Pastor Cao had established two schools in China. Cao reported that this had been a source of friction with the Chinese government, which he tried to allay by turning the schools over to the government to own and operate. Since 2012, through multiple visits from China to Myanmar, Pastor Cao established sixteen schools that serve more than 2,000 impoverished local minority children. During this time, Pastor Cao crossed the border from China into Myanmar without restriction. Then on March 5, 2017, Pastor Cao was arrested and charged with “organizing illegal crossings of national borders.

“This charge is normally used to prosecute human traffickers,” Voice of the Martyrs representative Hyun Sook Foley says. “Clearly Pastor Cao is not a human trafficker. He is, however, well-known for his work with the Chinese house church, and most people aware of the case point to this as the reason for his imprisonment and the delay in the court hearing his appeal.” 

Representative Foley adds that Voice of the Martyrs Korea and their partners have seen a consistent increase in persecution during the holiday season.

“Persecuting governments like China count on Christians being too occupied with their own private Christmas celebrations to pay attention to injustices committed against their brothers and sisters,” Representative Foley explains. “One of the best ways to remember the birth of Christ, then, is to remember those who are suffering for Christ during this season.”

Foley reports that the most effective way for Christians in other countries to help prisoners like Pastor Cao is to send letters to the prison.

“Sometimes prison officials let prisoners see the letters, but sometimes they don’t,” Representative Foley says. “But either way, prison officials and political authorities always take note and proceed more carefully when letters pour into a prison on behalf of a prisoner.”

For this reason, Representative Foley is requesting Korean Christians to send Pastor Cao a Christmas letter this week. She says, “Pastor Cao can read English, so you can either write a letter to him in English, Chinese, or you can copy either the English or Korean message written below.” Representative Foley is hoping to see more than a thousand letters sent by Korean Christians before Pastor Cao’s appeal is heard on January 22.