DNA

• Godwoman’ swindled millions by promising ‘miracle cures’ using sanctified mineral water  

Hong Kong, Nov 24: A 50-plus-year-old peasant woman from southern China, who claims she is Jesus Christ’s younger sister, has been arrested for bilking poor, superstitious Chinese people of millions of yuan by promising miraculous cures for terminal illnesses — using ‘sanctified’ mineral water.

The bizarre ‘Jesus freak’ story, which could have come straight out of a Carl Hiaasen satire (or from small-town India), is only the latest manifestation of religious cults that operate at the subterranean level in an atmosphere of spiritual and moral vacuum in nominally communist China. 

The self-proclaimed godwoman surnamed Zhou, who had christened herself ‘Little Angel’, was arrested earlier this month from a mansion in Zhongshan in Guangdong province in southern China. The Southern Metropolitan Daily reported that at the time of her arrest, Zhou was seated beneath a cross and a sign that said ‘The Greatest Miracle Healer Under Heaven’ and was conducting a ‘healing ritual’ to cure cancer patients with ‘holy water’.  

Investigations by Zhongshan police, who had received complaints of fraud last month, revealed that Zhou had charged up to 2,00,000 yuan (about Rs 10 lakh) promising cures for terminal illnesses, including cancer, in no more than 20 days. As part of the healing regimen, patients were required to drink mineral water that had been sanctified by her prayers to God, “her father”. 

Over several years of her ‘faith healing’ practice, Zhou had swindled countless victims of millions of yuan, and owned four mansions. Many of her victims were poor peasants, and as a concession, they were allowed to pay her in installments over years — on the promise that the cure would come about when the entire amount was paid! Several others had signed over their property to the ‘Little Angel’ in the hope of finding a miraculous cure. 

Zhou told the Southern Metropolis Daily after her arrest that for a patient to be cured, he must have “total faith” — and one way of expressing faith was to give money to her. Zhou says she has never been to school, and was a banana plantation farmer for over 20 years. “I’ve known since I was young that I had the healing touch,” Zhou says. “God is my father and Jesus Christ is my elder brother, and I was sent to earth to cure people of their diseases, in the same way that God sends many angels.” She goes on to describe Christ as “resembling an ordinary foreigner, only more handsome.”

This isn’t the first time a cult has sprung up around a claimed reincarnation — or a sibling — of Jesus Christ. In the mid-19th century, a messianic Hakka Chinese leader named Hong Xiuquan proclaimed himself “the younger brother of Jesus” and established the “Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping”.

Under his leadership, a band of Bible-thumping army conquered nearly a third of China. In recent times, an underground Christian sect calling itself ‘Lightning from the East’ has won a large number of converts on the belief that Jesus had returned to earth in the form of a 30-year-old Chinese woman!