Jailing Muslims, burning Bibles, and forcing monks to wave the national flag: How Xi Jinping is attacking religion in China

• China has been increasingly cracking down on Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists.
• Authorities are subjecting Muslims to an unprecedented amount of surveillance, shutting down Christian churches, and forcing monks to pledge allegiance to the state.
• The officially atheist Chinese Communist Party disapproves of all kinds of grassroots organizations as they are seen to undermine its grip on power.

By Alexandra Ma
Chinese authorities have subjected the majority-Muslim Uighur ethnic group, which is based in East Turkestan, to an unprecedented amount of surveillance. Here a mural in Yarkland, East Turkestan, in 2012 says: "Stability is a blessing, Instability is a calamity."

China is waging an unprecedented war on religions.
Over the past year alone, China has detained Muslims because of their faith, forced Buddhists to pledge allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party, and coerced Christian churches to take down their crosses or shut down.

The sinicization of religion
The Party, which is officially atheist, has for decades attempted to control religious organizations to maintain its dominance.
Its State Administration for Religious Affairs, set up in 1951, allows five religious organizations to exist under the state's control: a Party-sanctioned form of Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism.
The state controls these groups' personnel, publications, and finances. 

Technically, citizens are free to practise religion freely, as long as their sect is officially sanctioned by the government.
Party officials in 2015 introduced the term "sinicization" into official government lexicon, in which they called on Muslim, Buddhist, and Christian leaders to fuse their religions with Chinese socialist thought.
Roderic Wye, a former first secretary in the British Embassy in Beijing, told Business Insider: "The party has always had trouble with religion one way or another, because often religious activity tends to imply some sort of organization. Once there are organizations, the party is very keen to control them."
But under the dictatorship of Xi Jinping, the government's crackdown appears to have increased at an alarming scale.

Read more: Planting spies, paying people to post on social media, and pretending the news doesn't exist: This is how China tries to distract people from human rights abuses

Many Muslims in East Turkestan said they were arrested for showing distinct markers of Islam. Here, Uighur men pray before a meal in Turpan, East Turkestan, in September 2016.

'They want to cut off Islam at the roots'
In the western region of East Turkestan, the home of the majority-Muslim Uighur ethnic minority, authorities have installed a massive police state and imprisoned up to 1 million Uighurs.
Detainees were arrested for showing distinct markers of Islam, like wearing a veil or growing a long beard.
The majority-Muslim Hui people, who are scattered around China, also fear that the government will extend its crackdown to them.
In the northern city of Yinchuan, home to the largest concentration of Hui Muslims in the country, authorities have banned the daily call to prayer because it apparently created noise pollution, the South China Morning Post reported.
One unnamed imam in Linxia, central China, also told Agence France-Presse in July: "They want to secularize Muslims, to cut off Islam at the roots. These days, children are not allowed to believe in religion: Only in communism and the party."

Read more: China is locking up its Muslim minorities, and pushing Islamophobia to get Europe to do it too
China has also been cracking down on "underground" Catholic churches, such as this one in Jiexi, photographed in March 2018.

Monitored services, censored sermons
The crackdown extends beyond Islam.
Authorities have also targeted Christians outside the state-sanctioned Catholic and Protestant associations by burning Bibles, shutting down churches, and ordering people to renounce their faith, the Associated Press reported.
Churches allowed to remain open have to install facial-recognition cameras in the building, or risk getting shut down. 

Party officials censor and add state propaganda to pastors' sermons, Bob Fu, who runs the US rights group ChinaAid, told France24.
In September, authorities in China and the Vatican signed an agreement in which Francis officially recognized seven Beijing-appointed bishops, who had been excommunicated because they weren't approved by the Holy See. 

The deal ceded power from the Holy See to the Communist Party.
The loyalties of China's approximately 10 million Catholics are split between the Vatican and the state-supervised Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. 

China has about 100 million Protestants, the Financial Times reported.

Read more: China is burning bibles and making Christians renounce their faith to ensure total loyalty to the Communist Party
Two monks wait before the customary flag-lowering ceremony at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in May 2012.

Monks raising the flag
Buddhism and Taoism — which has historically deeper roots in East Asia — is not exempt either.
China restricts religious operations in Tibet, and spiritual leader the Dalai Lama remains in exile. Activists say the state monitors the daily activities of Tibetan monasteries, limits believers' travel and communications, and has routinely detained monks on terrorism charges— not dissimilar from the situation in East Turkestan.
Earlier this year, China's famous Shaolin Temple — an ancient Buddhist monastery believed to be the birth place of kung fu — raised the Chinese national flag for the first time in its 1,500-year history as part of a government campaign to demonstrate its patriotism.

Read more: China's Communist party violently cracks down on a new group — student communists
Monks at the Shaolin Temple raise the Chinese national flag to mark National Day in October 2018. The ceremony marked the second time, since August that the Chinese flag was raised in the temple's 1,500-year history.

'No other source of moral or social authority is tolerated'
The Communist Party, keen to maintain its sole grip on power, disapproves of all kinds of grassroots organizations as they are seen to undermine it and disrupt internal stability.
Wye, the former British Embassy official, said China's keenness to exert control over religions is also to limit foreign influence.
"There's always been a concern the Chinese state has had about the extent of foreign influence over religion and the way foreign forces might use to manipulate societal thought," Wye, now an associate fellow at Chatham House, told Business Insider.
"This is part of the wider 'China dream' that Xi Jinping has, to make China big and strong again," he added.
"Whatever political and social development China will take in the future, it is to be decided and promulgated by the Chinese Communist Party, and no other source of moral or social authority is tolerated."

China's crimes against humanity

China Must End Its Campaign of Religious Persecution

By SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY Concentration Camps Construction is Booming in East Turkestan

The United States was founded on the premise that all individuals are created equal, with certain unalienable rights. 

Throughout our history, Americans have fought and died for these rights. 

They are ingrained in the fabric of our society and regularly debated, whether in coffee shops on Main Street or the halls of Congress.
Those fundamental rights and freedoms are part of our national identity, but that’s not the case in other parts of the world. 

That’s why for more than a century, the United States has been a vocal supporter, not just rhetorically but financially, as well, of global humanitarian efforts.
Over the past two decades, religious persecution in China has become a larger and more pressing issue. 

The Department of State’s annual International Religious Freedom report has included the People’s Republic of China as a particularly concerning offender since 1999.
Disturbing reports have surfaced out of China of late detailing the imprisonment of Christian pastors, Bible burning, and demolishing of Christian churches. 

The Chinese government has rounded up more than one million Uighur and Kazakh Muslims into concentration camps. 

The state has long suppressed the freedom of Tibetan Buddhists, as well as those who practice Falun Gong.
The Chinese government has removed crosses from 1,200 to 1,700 Christian churches as of a 2016 New York Times report, and has instructed police officers to stop citizens from entering their places of worship. 

There have been violent confrontations between government authorities and worshipers, and communist leaders have implemented restrictions prohibiting children 18 years old and younger from participating in religiously-focused education.
A piece published in Forbes earlier this year describes how Chinese authorities have bulldozed homes belonging to Uighur Muslims, collected passports to restrict travel and collected Uighur DNA and fingerprints in order to track its own citizens.
Communist leaders in China try to explain away these abuses by reiterating their commitment to preserving the Chinese culture, a practice known as sinicization. 

Approximately 100 million people in China belong to religious groups that are outside what the Chinese government deems acceptable. 

That’s approximately 100 million people who are subject to persecution by communist leaders in China, and even those that practice an officially sanctioned religion have not been spared harassment. That persecution stems from religious differences and has spread to other areas of daily life, including the restriction of social media.
The United States doesn’t have the singular authority to stop the religious persecution occurring in China, but it can apply significant pressure to Chinese leaders by linking the need for religious freedom to the economic and political aspects of our bilateral relationship that are important to China. As China’s largest trading partner, the United States is in a powerful position to influence Chinese leaders and stand up for human rights. 

Fighting for religious liberty should be a central part of the United States’ relationship with China. Senator David Perdue and I, with a bipartisan group of senators, recently introduced a resolution condemning violence against religious minorities in China and reaffirming America’s commitment to promote religious freedom and tolerance around the world. 

It also calls on China to uphold its Constitution and urges the President and his administration to take actions to promote religious freedom through the International Religious Freedom Act of 1988, the Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act, and the Global Magnitsky Act.
No matter where they live, everyone should be able to freely express their religious beliefs. 

The United States has been a beacon of freedom since before its founding. 

We must continue that tradition by doing what we can to promote human rights and freedoms both here and around the globe.

China is burning bibles and making Christians renounce their faith to ensure total loyalty to the Communist Party

• Chinese officials are cracking down on Christians on an unprecedented scale
• They have been burning bibles, shutting down churches, and ordering people to renounce their faith
• The government wants to make sure everyone is loyal to the atheist Communist Party before anything else.
• Chinese law requires religious followers to worship only in registered congregations, but millions of people are in underground churches that defy government restrictions.
• All of China's officially recognized religions have been affected by the crackdown. About 1 million Uighurs of the Muslim faith are detained in political or re-education camps.

By Christopher Bodeen

BEIJING — China's government is ratcheting up a crackdown on Christian congregations in Beijing and several provinces, destroying crosses, burning bibles, shutting churches and ordering followers to sign papers renouncing their faith, according to pastors and a group that monitors religion in China.
The campaign corresponds with a drive to "Sinicize" religion by demanding loyalty to the officially atheist Communist Party and eliminating any challenge to its power over people's lives.
Bob Fu of the U.S.-based group China Aid said over the weekend that the closure of churches in central Henan province and a prominent house church in Beijing in recent weeks represents a "significant escalation" of the crackdown.
"The international community should be alarmed and outraged for this blatant violation of freedom of religion and belief," he wrote in an email.
Under Xi Jinping, China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, religious believers are seeing their freedoms shrink dramatically even as the country undergoes a religious revival. 

Experts and activists say that as he consolidates his power, Xi is waging the most severe systematic suppression of Christianity in the country since religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1982.
Fu also provided video footage of what appeared to be piles of burning bibles and forms stating that the signatories had renounced their Christian faith. 

He said that marked the first time since Mao's radical 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution that Christians had been compelled to make such declarations, under pain of expulsion from school and the loss of welfare benefits.
A Christian pastor in the Henan city of Nanyang said crosses, bibles and furniture were burned during a raid on his church on Sept. 5.
The pastor, who asked not to be identified by name to avoid repercussions from authorities, said several people entered the church just as it opened its doors at 5 a.m. and began removing items.
He said the church had been in discussions with local authorities who demanded it "reform" itself, but no agreement had been reached or official documents released.
Chinese law requires religious believers to worship only in congregations registered with the authorities, but many millions belong to so-called underground or house churches that defy government restrictions.
A local official reached by phone at the Nanyang city government disputed the account, saying officials respected religious freedom. 

The man declined to give his name, as is common with Chinese bureaucrats, while a person answering phones at the local religious affairs bureau said they were "not clear" about the matter.
The Zion church in Beijing, pictured here in May 2018, was closed by 60 government workers on Sunday.

In Beijing, the Zion church was shut on Sunday by around 60 government workers who arrived at 4:30 p.m. accompanied by buses, police cars and fire trucks, the church's pastor, Ezra Jin Mingri, said Monday. 

Zion is known as the largest house church in Beijing, with six branches.
The officials declared the gatherings illegal and sealed off church properties, Jin said, after already freezing the pastor's personal assets in an apparent attempt to force him to comply with their demands.
"Churches will continue to develop. Blocking the sites will only intensify conflicts," Jin told The Associated Press by phone.
A notice posted Sunday on the website of the Chaoyang district government in Beijing said the Zion Church had been closed because it failed to register with the government.
An underground Catholic church in Jiexi county, China, in March.

All of China's officially recognized religions appear to have been affected by the crackdown. In the most extreme example, an estimated 1 million Uighurs and other members of Muslim minority groups in the country's northwest have been arbitrarily detained in indoctrination camps where they are forced to denounce Islam and profess loyalty to the Communist Party.
The government says it is taking necessary measures to eliminate extremism, but denies setting up the camps.
China has an estimated 38 million Protestants, and experts have predicted that the country will have the world's largest Christian population in a few decades.

China's crimes against humanity

Two Canadian lawyers take Chinese organ-harvesting claims to Australia 

By Rod Mcguirk

David Kilgour, former prosecutor and Canadian secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific, and David Matas, human rights lawyer

Two Canadian lawyers came to Australia’s Parliament House on Monday to persuade lawmakers to pass a motion urging China to immediately end the practice of organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
David Kilgour, a former prosecutor and Canadian secretary of state for the Asia-Pacific, and David Matas, a human rights lawyer, have published evidence they say shows that China performs an estimated 60,000 to 100,000 transplants a year, with organs primarily taken from Falun Gong practitioners, Muslim Uighurs, Tibetan Buddhists and Christians.
China says it performed 10,057 organ transplants last year and has not harvested organs of executed prisoners since January 2015.
The U.S. House of Representative passed a resolution in June calling on the State Department to report annually to Congress on the implementation of an existing law barring visas to Chinese and other nationals engaged in coercive organ transplantation. 

The resolution also condemns persecution of Falun Gong, a spiritual group China calls a cult and has outlawed.

The European Parliament passed a similar declaration in July calling for an independent investigation of “persistent, credible reports on systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience” in China.
Kilgour said the Australian government was reluctant to accept evidence of large-scale, forced organ harvesting in China. 

Kilgour blamed Australia’s close economic ties with China, its largest trading partner.
“The greatest amount of skepticism seems to be in Australia,” Kilgour said.
Kilgour and Matas first published a report on organ harvesting in China in 2006, which became the basis of their 2009 book “Bloody Harvest. The Killing of Falun Gong for their Organs.”
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade First Assistant Secretary Graham Fletcher told a Senate committee last month that he had doubts about the credibility of Falun Gong reports of forced organ harvesting.
Amnesty International’s Australian spokeswoman Caroline Shepherd said the London-based organization had not done its own research into organ harvesting in China and supported United Nations’ calls for an independent investigation of such allegations.
The Australian Health Department said at least 53 Australians travelled to China for organ transplants between 2001 and 2014.
Matas said it was not possible for such a large organ-transplant industry to thrive without the support of the Communist Party.
“This is an institutionalized, party-driven scheme, with an institutionalized cover up,” Matas said.
Around 200 Falun Gong practitioners demonstrated outside Parliament House against forced organ harvesting on Monday as Matas and Kilgour addressed a meeting of lawmakers from several political parties.

China's horrifying religious oppression ‘most tyrannical’ in 40 years

China is repeatedly breaking its own laws as it continues to persecute Christians in one of the most tyrannical years for the regime

By Katie Mansfield

Xi Jinping’s Chinese Communist Party have launched a major crackdown on religion in recent weeks in an attempt to oppress religious freedom and exercise control.
The despotic regime has banned Christians from praying, singing hymns, removed crosses from buildings and arrested people for attending worship.
In a scathing report, charity China Aid noted there has been an increase in persecution.
The Chinese Government Persecution of Christians and Churches in China report found there has been a 4.74 increase in persecution in 2016 compared to last year.
With the number of abuses cases, unjust arrest and persecuted individuals on the up.
The charity said: “Persecution campaigns made 2016 one of the most tyrannical years since the Cultural Revolution.”

Echoing the revolution, which aimed to purge capitalist elements from the communist regime, Xi Jinping has overseen a year of chaos for China’s Christians.
The report found China is not only breaching its own laws but also international human rights.
The report said: “The cross demolition movement, which began in 2014 as part of a beautification campaign known as Three Rectifications and One Demolition, continued in Zhejiang province during 2016.
"Although official rhetoric claims the operation intends to address ‘illegal structures,’ it specifically discriminated against Christian churches and imposed strictures on the crosses that adorned the exterior of their buildings. In 2016, the number of crosses demolished surpassed 1,800.

“In addition to previous restrictions on religious activity, Henan province published a work plan devising to bring 'illegal' Catholic and Protestant churches in line with the Party’s ideologies.
"According to the official document, the authorities plan to manage church meetings and force the congregations to eradicate all religious symbols and become more socialist.
“This campaign echoes the new political trend set out in a proposed revision of the Regulations on Religious Affairs, which was introduced by the State Council earlier this month.
“The revision introduces tighter control on peaceful religious activities, such as punishing house church meetings by imprisoning Christians or heavily fining the church leaders, forbidding religious adherents from attending conferences or trainings abroad, and barring minors from receiving religious education.

“These measures violate China’s own Constitution, which guarantees religious liberty and condemns discriminating against religious and non-religious citizens and breaches the country’s pledges to adhere to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child.”
Christians have also been placed under surveillance, house churches disbanded and there have been reports of torture taking place in prison.
As previously reported by Express.co.uk pastor Yang Hua’s lawyers say he has been repeatedly tortured in prison with proseection lawyers threatening to kill him.

China Aid says international governments must now hold the regime to account and have presented the report to the European Parliament.
The report said: “China continuously violates its own laws and international statutes safeguarding religious freedom in favor of promoting a socialist agenda, forcing religious devotees to choose between certain persecution and disregarding their deeply-held beliefs.
"Additionally, it prosecutes lawyers who attempt to defend the rights of religious practitioners, completely disregarding the rule of law. International governments must persuade China to free those it unjustly holds behind bars.”