The world must stand against China’s war on religion

By Chris Smith

Muslim protesters outside China's embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia, on Dec. 21. 

Mihrigul Tursun said she pleaded with God to end her life as her Chinese jailers increased the electrical currents coursing through her body. 

Tursun, a Muslim Uighur whose escape led her to the United States in September, broke down weeping at a Nov. 28 congressional hearing as she recounted her experience in one of China’s infamous political “ re-education centers. ”
It is an appalling story but one that is all too familiar as existential threats to religious freedom rise in Xi Jinping’s China. 

The world can’t ignore what’s happening there. 

We must all stand up and oppose these human rights violations.
The ruling Chinese Communist Party has undertaken the most comprehensive attempt to manipulate and control — or destroy — religious communities since Mao Zedong made the eradication of religion a goal of his disastrous Cultural Revolution half a century ago. 

Now Xi, apparently fearing the power of independent religious belief as a challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy, is trying to radically transform religion into the party’s servant, employing a draconian policy known as sinicization.
Under sinicization, all religions and believers must comport with and aggressively promote communist ideology — or else.
To drive home the point, religious believers of every persuasion are harassed, arrested, jailed or tortured. 

Only the compliant are left relatively unscathed.
Bibles are burned, churches destroyed, crosses set ablaze atop church steeples and now, under Xi, religious leaders are required to install facial-recognition cameras in their places of worship. 

New regulations expand restrictions on religious expression online and prohibit those under age 18 from attending services.
Government officials are also rewriting religious texts — including the Bible — that remove content unwanted by the atheist Communist Party, and have launched a five-year sinicization plan for Chinese Protestant Christians.
These efforts have taken a staggering human toll. 

In recent months, more than 1 million Uighurs and other Muslims in the East Turkestan colony have been detained, tortured and forced to renounce their faith. 

The U.S. government is investigating recent reports that ethnic minorities in internment camps are being forced to produce goods bound for the United States.
Yet, despite this anti-religion campaign, the Vatican has shown a disturbing lack of alarm concerning these threats and, instead, appears to be seeking a form of accommodation. 

In September, Vatican officials signed a “provisional agreement” that essentially ceded to the Chinese government the power to choose — subject to papal review — every candidate for bishop in China, which has an estimated 10 million to 12 million Catholics.
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, a retired bishop of Hong Kong, in September called the deal “a complete surrender” by the Vatican and an “incredible betrayal” of the faith.
At a congressional hearing I chaired in September, Tom Farr, president of the Religious Freedom Institute, testified that the government-controlled body charged with carrying out the policy, the Catholic Patriotic Association, had drafted an implementation document containing the following passage: “The Church will regard promotion and education on core values of socialism as a basic requirement for adhering to the Sinicization of Catholicism. It will guide clerics and Catholics to foster and maintain correct views on history and the nation.”
One can hope that Beijing has made concessions to the church that have yet to be revealed. 

Initial reports are less than promising. 

Since the agreement was reached, underground priests have been detained, Marian shrines destroyed, pilgrimage sites closed, youth programs shuttered, and priests required to attend reeducation sessions in at least one province.
The Vatican should reconsider its arrangement with the Chinese government. 

But what can be done more generally in response to Xi’s war on religion? 

The United States and several European countries have condemned it, but any nation that values freedom of religion should unite in denouncing China’s treatment of Muslim Uighurs, Christians, Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners. 

In particular, Muslim-majority countries, strangely muted regarding the persecution of Muslim Uighurs, must protest these abuses even at the risk of endangering the benefits from China’s “Belt and Road”infrastructure projects.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and I have urged the Trump administration to use Global Magnitsky Act sanctions to target Chinese officials responsible for egregious human rights abuses. 

We have sought expanded export controls for police surveillance products and sanctions against businesses profiting from the forced labor or detention of Uighurs. 

We have also introduced the bipartisan Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2018 to provide the administration with new tools to comprehensively address the abuse.
The United States must lead the way in letting the Chinese Communist Party know that taking a hammer and sickle to the cross and enslaving more than 1 million Uighurs in an effort to erase their religion and culture are destructive, shameful acts that will not be tolerated by the community of nations.

The Vatican's crypto-communist

Why the Pope Is Genuflecting to China
By Yi-Zheng Lian 

Catholics praying in Beijing on Jan. 30, two days before new repressive regulations of religion went into force in China. 

On Feb. 1, the same day that new repressive regulations of religion went into force in China, the Vatican took a deep bow before Beijing. 

After long resisting, it finally agreed to recognize several hack bishops designated by the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.), even sidelining two of its own long-serving appointees for the occasion.
Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun, the outspoken, blogging, 86-year-old retired archbishop of Hong Kong, had recently flown to Vatican City to personally plead the case of the two bishops to the pope himself. 

How nettlesome. 

He was shoved off, and has since been called an “obstacle” to a deal between the Vatican and Beijing.
The reasons the Holy See is caving to the atheist Communist government are not entirely transparent, but it appears to be hoping for a historic thaw. 

Diplomatic ties were severed in 1951, not long after the Communists came to power in China, and relations have since been testy at best.
Catholics in China are thought to number between 9 million and 12 million today, with about half of them adhering to underground congregations loyal to the pope in Rome and refusing to recognize a state-sanctioned version of the Church called the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association or, more informally, the “patriotic church.”
One major conflict between the two governments has been the method for appointing bishops: Traditionally a prerogative of the papacy, Beijing has steadily tried to usurp it in China. 

The deal that the Vatican currently seems to be seeking would likely formalize some joint vetting procedure.
The Vatican justifies its conciliatory stance toward Beijing as an attempt to overcome the schism that has divided the Catholic community in China for nearly seven decades — as “a balm of mercy,” it has said, for the pain caused by the barriers that have prevented Chinese Catholics “from living in communion with each other and with the Pope.”
Rapprochement could also give the pope, nominally at least, ultimate authority over all the Catholics in China — a standing, however symbolic, that may well matter to a Vatican that is losing ground to other Christian denominations among Chinese converts.
The total population of Christians in China has grown considerably, from about 4 million in 1949 to perhaps as many as 100 million today. 

In relative terms, however, Catholics are falling behind. 

By some estimates, whereas Catholics in China outnumbered Protestants by 3 to 1 in 1949, today Protestants outnumber Catholics by 5 to 1.
A major explanation for the increasing differential is that the Roman Catholic Church wields not only religious and moral authority, but also political and diplomatic power.
The Catholic Church has a relatively unified command structure, a well-defined ideology and a disciplined organizational backbone. 

It has global reach and mass appeal, commands great loyalty and has long demonstrated the ability to survive and expand, all on the merits of peaceful soft power. 

In each of these ways, it rivals, perhaps even bests, the C.C.P.
And so, naturally, the C.C.P. sees Chinese Catholics’ allegiance to the pope as a direct challenge to their allegiance to the party. 

Vatican City is also, still, among the 20 states, all small, that recognize Taiwan diplomatically.
Many Protestant churches, although deemed suspect as well, are on better terms with the C.C.P. 

After a visit to Beijing in 1983, the archbishop of Canterbury gushed about liberalization in China and reportedly praised the emergence of “a church with Chinese characteristics.”
Like his predecessor, the current Anglican archbishop overseeing Hong Kong and Macau is a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a body including luminaries that supposedly advises the C.C.P. but often promotes the party’s interests informally or clandestinely. Both men have tended to support Beijing’s restrictive reading of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and opposed the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014.
Representatives of other faiths have gone further. 

A vice president of the Buddhist Association of China called Xi Jinping’s speech to the Chinese Communist Party’s 19th Congress last fall, “the Buddhist sutra of the current age.” 

Buddhists in China — who are variously said to number between more than 100 million to more than 240 million — have been treated with a relatively light hand by the party, at least if they are not of the Tibetan kind.
Yet even if brown-nosing seems to pay off, the Vatican’s appeasement of the Chinese government would have great downsides, for itself and for the rest of the world.
By recognizing China’s so-called "patriotic" church, the Vatican could harm the wholesomeness of Catholic teachings in the country. 

Sermons given in government-sanctioned churches have been known to exclude passages of the Bible deemed politically subversive (like the story of Daniel) or to include Communist Party propaganda.
Millions of faithful Catholics in China might also soon feel abandoned, perhaps even betrayed, after having suffered decades of oppression. 

Worse, the government, emboldened by the deal, could well come down even harder on them. 

In fact, the religious regulations that recently came into effect include much stiffer fines on underground churches and penalties for public-school teachers who give Sunday-school lessons on their own time.
And then, rapprochement might augur the Vatican’s readiness to eventually stop recognizing Taipei and instead recognize Beijing as truly representing China. 

Such a shift would alter the delicate balance of power across the Taiwan Strait, as well as harm Taiwan’s vibrant democracy. 

It would also confer legitimacy — and with the pope’s imprimatur! — on authoritarian regimes throughout the world that crack down on churches and sects.
The Catholic Church already has a checkered record dealing with fascist or totalitarian states. 

Pope Pius XII was criticized for betraying the Jews of Europe during World War II: Hewing to what he described as a position of neutrality between the Nazis and the Allies, he never denounced Hitler’s Final Solution. 

After Soviet forces violently repressed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, the Vatican sidelined the outspoken anticommunist Archbishop József Mindszenty in favor of a deal with the new puppet regime.
The Vatican’s eagerness to play catch-up in China today may do it no favors either.
Beijing doesn’t have much of a reputation for honoring commitments. 

Just look at its application of the “one country, two systems” arrangement it promised Hong Kong, which was supposed to guarantee the city a large degree of autonomy until 2047.
Even under the deal the Vatican seems to want, the Chinese government could eventually come to control the Catholic Church in China — by, say, simply delaying nominating anyone for bishop or repeatedly rejecting candidates presented by the Vatican until all the bishops previously ordained by the pope have retired or died out. 

Bishops ordain priests and so without bishops, in time there could be no priests, or very few, and Catholicism in China would have died a silent death.
Four decades ago, when a destitute China was emerging from deep Maoism, Western companies got tipsy at the mere notion of selling deodorant to two billion Chinese armpits. 

Now that average Chinese have much more disposable income, major international corporations are willing to hand over proprietary technology, stoically endure violent xenophobic outbursts and take on members of the Chinese Communist Party as senior managers rather than risk losing out on the business prospects.
No one, it seems, can resist the lure of the great market of China, for deodorants, cars — or congregants. 

Not even the Vatican.