PRC expands crackdown on religion throughout country
Joseph Hammond
Reports from international media and human rights organizations strongly indicate that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is extending the pattern of religious repression it has imposed on Muslim Uighurs to members of other faiths elsewhere in the country.
“China has declared war on faith,” Dede Laugesen, executive director of Save the Persecuted Christians, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization, told FORUM. “They are razing house churches, taking pastors to prison and intimidating congregations.”
Laugesen pointed to the PRC’s treatment of Tibetan Buddhists and members of the Falun Gong religion as examples. New regulations regarding China’s interaction with the Catholic Church barred the church from selecting Catholic bishops in China, which is an apparent violation of a previous agreement between the PRC and the Vatican. (Pictured: Chinese Catholics pray during a Christmas Mass in December 2020 in Beijing.)
The U.S. Department of State in January 2021 labeled as genocide the PRC’s treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Millions of Uighurs have been imprisoned, and strict controls have been enforced on how they can worship.
“The Chinese government is rewriting the Quran, but it is also rewriting the Bible to make it compatible with Chinese communist atheist ideology,” said Rushan Abbas, executive director of Campaign for Uyghurs. “China is waging a war not only on Islam, but all religions and also restricting the rights and freedoms of Catholics, Protestant Christians and Buddhist groups in all parts of China.”
The U.S. government has made religious freedom a key aspect of its interactions with the PRC. At an event organized by the U.S. Institute of Peace in January 2021, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said the U.S. must be “prepared to act, as well to impose costs, for what China is doing in Xinjiang, what it’s doing in Hong Kong, for the bellicosity and threats it is projecting towards Taiwan.”
A report sent to Congress in February 2021 by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representatives expressed the administration’s concern that Beijing’s crackdown on religious freedom was expanding.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration “will also make it a top priority to address the widespread human rights abuses of the Chinese government’s forced labor program that targets the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and elsewhere in the country,” the report stated.
The crackdown is designed in part to support Chinese Communist Party goals in the Xinjiang region, which was formerly known as East Turkestan. The PRC has transformed the area into a police state where freedom of movement and speech are restricted, Tahir Imin, a Uighur activist and former political prisoner in China, told FORUM. “During this process, China developed and tested AI [artificial intelligence] techs of surveillance, monitor and control and expanded it to other parts of [China]. I believe they will use it to collect the data of more people around the world.”
Joseph Hammond is a FORUM contributor who reports from the Indo-Pacific region.
IMAGE CREDIT: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
