An international campaign has begun on behalf of five...

An international campaign has begun on behalf of five leaders of a defiant evangelical Christian group who were given death sentences in December 2001 under China's 1999 anti-cult law.
Rights groups abroad cite the death sentences, the first under that law, as evidence of a harsh, continuing crackdown on unauthorized worship.
The five are leaders of the South China Church, an underground group that claims 50,000 followers in several provinces of central China. They were convicted in secret trials on what appeared to be dubious charges of rape, assault and sabotaging national security.
"The South China Church is well organized and very evangelistic, very aggressive about sharing the 'Good News,' " said Xiqiu Fu, executive director of the Committee for Investigation of Persecution of Religion in China, a rights monitoring group in the United States. "I think this is why the government feels so threatened by it."
In New York, Fu's group and others provided new evidence of the current crackdown, releasing a report with copies of what are described as secret Chinese government documents, provided by discontented security officials.
The documents, which scholars said appeared to be genuine, outline campaigns to crush 14 Christian or Buddhist groups that have been labelled cults since 1995, and they include exhortations to provincial and local officials to increase their efforts to infiltrate and destroy such organizations.