China’s Orwellian War on Religion

Concentration camps, electronic surveillance and persecution are used to repress millions of people of faith.
By Nicholas Kristof

Police patrolling near the Id Kah Mosque in the old town of Kashgar in China’s East Turkestan colony.

Let’s be blunt: China is accumulating a record of Orwellian savagery toward religious people.
At times under Communist Party rule, repression of faith has eased, but now it is unmistakably worsening. 

China is engaging in internment, monitoring or persecution of Muslims, Christians and Buddhists on a scale almost unparalleled by a major nation in three-quarters of a century.
Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch argues that China under Xi Jinping “poses a threat to global freedoms unseen since the end of World War II.”
China’s roundup of Muslims in concentration camps appears to be the largest such internment of people on the basis of religion since the collection of Jews for the Holocaust. 

Most estimates are that about one million Muslims have been detained in China’s East Turkestan region, although the actual number may be closer to three million.
Muslims are being ordered to eat pork or drink alcohol, against their religious principles.

China has also offered “free health checks” that are used to get fingerprints, photos and DNA samples from Muslims for a surveillance database.
While China hasn’t established concentration camps for Christians, it has harassed congregations, closed or destroyed churches, in some areas barred children from attending services and last year detained Christians about 100,000 times, according to China Aid, a religious watchdog group (if one person was detained five times over the year, that would count as five detentions).
China installed monitoring cameras in churches, including on the pulpit aimed at the congregation. 

With China’s facial recognition software, that would enable security authorities to identify who shows up at services.
The country is also experimenting with even more Orwellian technology, including the Ministry of Public Security’s mass surveillance system and a “Social Credit System” that can create a blacklist for those who don’t pay debts or who cheat on taxes, break traffic rules or attend an unofficial church.
Blacklisted individuals can be barred from buying plane or train tickets: Although the system is still being tested in different ways at the local level, last year it barred people 17.5 million times from purchasing air tickets, the government reported. 

It could also be used to deny people promotions or assign a ring tone to their phone warning callers that they are untrustworthy.
The system isn’t focused on religious people, and some argue that it isn’t as menacing as it is sometimes portrayed, but it’s easy to see how the Social Credit System could punish faith communities — especially if it is integrated with a mass surveillance network. 

The East Turkestan mass surveillance system explicitly targets people who collect money for a mosque “with enthusiasm.”
Through it all, Chinese people of faith have shown enormous courage. 

One Catholic bishop, James Su Zhimin, 87, has been detained by China since he led a religious procession in 1996. 

Counting previous detentions, he has spent a total of four decades in prisons and labor camps.
The paradox is that for half a century before the Communist revolution in 1949, Western missionaries traveled around China, operated schools and orphanages and had negligible impact on the country — yet these days missionaries are banned, ministers are persecuted and Christianity has grown prodigiously. 

There are many tens of millions of Christians, mostly Protestants, with some estimates as high as 100 million.
Some are part of officially recognized churches that pledge loyalty to the government, but most are part of the underground church that has been the main target of the crackdown.
Tibetan Buddhists have likewise suffered brutally. 

Most extraordinary is the fate of the Panchen Lama, the No. 2 figure in Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama.
The previous Panchen Lama died in early 1989. 

Following tradition, Tibetans in 1995 chose a 6-year-old boy as the next incarnation of the Panchen Lama. 

Shortly afterward, the Chinese authorities kidnapped the boy and his family, and they haven’t been seen since. 

In his place, the Chinese helped pick a different person as a rival Panchen Lama. (When the Dalai Lama dies, something similar may happen, so at that point there would be two Dalai Lamas and two Panchen Lamas.)
The true Panchen Lama, once the world’s youngest political prisoner, has now apparently been detained for 24 years, along with his entire family, through reformist Chinese leaders and repressive ones.
We can’t transform China, but we can apply levers like targeted sanctions on individuals and companies participating in abuses of freedom — plus we can certainly do more to speak up for prisoners of conscience of all faiths. 

It’s as important to push for their freedom as to seek more soybean exports.

Free Tibet

Tibet Reciprocity Act Passes in the US Congress
By Richard Finney

The Potala Palace, former residence of Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, is shown in a file photo.

In a strong show of bipartisan support, the U.S. Congress on Dec. 11 passed legislation demanding access to Tibet for American journalists and diplomats now routinely denied entry by Chinese authorities to the Beijing-ruled Himalayan region.
The Reciprocal Access to Tibet Act of 2018 will require the U.S. Secretary of State, within 90 days of the bill being signed into law, to identify Chinese officials responsible for excluding U.S. citizens from China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, and then ban them from entering the United States.
The bill had earlier passed in September in the U.S. House of Representatives, and then went to the Senate for approval.
The legislation is based on the diplomatic principle of reciprocity, in which “countries should provide equal rights to one another’s citizens,” the Washington D.C.-based International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) said in a Dec. 11 statement welcoming passage of the bill.
Travel by Americans in Tibet is now highly restricted, though “Chinese citizens, journalists from state-sponsored propaganda outlets and bureaucrats of the Chinese Communist Party travel freely throughout the US and lobby the American government on Tibetan issues,” ICT said.
A formerly independent nation, Tibet was taken over by and incorporated into China by force nearly 70 years ago, following which Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers fled into exile in India.
Chinese authorities now maintain a tight grip on the region, restricting Tibetans’ political activities and peaceful expression of ethnic and religious identities, and subjecting Tibetans to persecution, torture, imprisonment, and extrajudicial killings.
“China’s repression in Tibet includes keeping out those who can shine a light on its human rights abuses against the Tibetan people,” Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), one of the bill’s sponsors in the Senate, said in a statement.
“We should not accept a double standard where Chinese officials can freely visit the United States while at the same blocking our diplomats, journalists and Tibetan-Americans from visiting Tibet.”
“I look forward to President Trump signing this bill into law that will help restore some measure of reciprocity to America’s relationship with China,” Rubio said.

China Has Chosen Cultural Genocide in East Turkestan—For Now

It’s expensive to destroy a people without killing them, but Beijing is willing to pay the price.
BY KATE CRONIN-FURMAN
A Chinese flag flies over a local mosque closed by authorities as an ethnic Uighur woman sells bread at her bakery in Kashgar, East Turkestan, on June 28, 2017. 

The news out of East Turkestan, China’s western region, this summer has been a steady stream of Orwellian horrors. 

A million people held against their will in political reeducation camps. 

Intelligence officials assigned as “adopted” members of civilian families. 

Checkpoints on every corner and mandatory spyware installed on every device.
The targets of this police state are China’s Muslim Uighur minority, whose loyalties the central government has long distrusted for both nationalist and religious reasons. 

An already uneasy relationship deteriorated further in 2009, when Uighur protests led to violent riots and a retaliatory crackdown. 

Hundreds died in the clashes or were disappeared by security forces in their aftermath. 

Since then, a handful of violent attacks outside of East Turkestan itself have served to justify increasingly heavy restrictions on the group’s rights and freedoms.
The Uighur are a problem for China, and perhaps an intractable one. 

They are reluctant subjects of the Chinese state, they sit on the route most key to Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, and increasing oppression has so far only prompted further resistance.
But as far as we know, China isn’t massacring the Uighurs. This is not to say that the repression hasn’t been violent. 

It has. 

Members of the security forces are committing torture and extrajudicial killings with impunity. 

But there is not yet evidence that China is systematically employing lethal violence in an effort to physically eradicate the Uighur minority. 

Why not?
It’s certainly not out of any reluctance to use deadly force. 

Restrictions have escalated alarmingly in recent months, with the authorities treating Islam as a contagious ideological disease whose sufferers must be quarantined. 

The vast network of concentration camps has more than doubled in size since the beginning of 2018, and people no longer emerge from them after a few days or weeks. 

Now, they disappear for months or what may become years. 

Uighurs living abroad report that their relatives back home don’t answer their calls anymore. 

They don’t know if their loved ones have cut off overseas contact to avoid arousing suspicion or if they’ve vanished into the camps like so many others.
While the official language around Uighurs still portrays them as "happy" subjects of the state, the rhetoric of “terrorists” and “separatists” has become increasingly dehumanizing—and all-encompassing. 

Any Uighur, especially a young man, can be imagined as an extremist who must be eliminated. 

In China’s tightly controlled online environment, hate speech against Islam and Uighurs goes almost unchecked by the authorities. 

In practice, it’s now extremely hard for Uighurs to live outside of East Turkestan; Han Chinese have received detention time merely for renting rooms to Uighurs outside of the region—while their renters have been sent to the camps in East Turkestan.
By any measure, China is committing crimes against humanity in its treatment of the Uighurs.
Specifically: the offenses of arbitrary imprisonment and persecution, both of which qualify as crimes against humanity “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population.” 

Former detainees have also described torture inside the camps. 

This, too, is crimes against humanity as it’s widespread or systematic—as a recent Human Rights Watch report indicates is the case.
The Uighur community says the abuse goes further. 

They allege that China is committing a cultural genocide. 

Cultural genocide means the elimination of a group’s identity, through measures such as forcibly transferring children away from their families, restricting the use of a national language, banning cultural activities, or destroying schools, religious institutions, or memory sites. 

Unlike “physical” genocide, it doesn’t have to be violent. 

Uighurs point to the forced separation of families, the targeting of scholars and other community leaders for detention and “reeducation,” the bans on Uighur language instruction in schools, the razing of mosques, and the onerous restrictions on signifiers of cultural identity such as hair, dress, and baby names as evidence that China is trying to eradicate the Uighur identity.
Cultural genocide is not a defined crime in international law. 

Although it was discussed at length during the drafting of the 1948 Genocide Convention, the distinction between physical and cultural genocide did not make it into the final document. 

Of the actions that might qualify as cultural genocide, only the forcible transfer of children is criminalized.
In practice, this absence hasn’t been such a problem. 

The type of acts that qualify as cultural genocide generally occur alongside, or as a precursor to, mass violence. 

Nonviolent actions undertaken in pursuit of the destruction of cultural identity therefore often serve as the evidence of intent necessary for a mass slaughter to qualify as genocide. 

For example, the devastating violence unleashed against the Rohingya by Myanmar’s military has been accompanied by clear efforts to eliminate Rohingya cultural institutions and leaders, and it follows decades of restrictions on members of the group’s ability to marry, procreate, or seek education freely. 

What on their own might look like atrocities committed as part of a particularly brutal counterinsurgency campaign begin to look like genocide when considered in the context of a long history of efforts to eradicate the group’s identity.
And yet, so far China hasn’t resorted to mass killings. 

That’s puzzling. 

Asking why a government isn’t carrying out a slaughter might seem perverse, but this is persecution on an astronomical scale. 

With repressive violence being employed against a vulnerable and reviled minority on such a widespread and systematic basis, the absence of mass death is an anomaly. 

And it’s especially surprising given how much more complicated, costly, and difficult it is to destroy a people without killing them.



The operation China is running requires a massive intelligence network that can monitor every Uighur home in China and reach members of the diaspora abroad, biometric technology to identify and track them, the construction of a huge system of camps to house them, and personnel to enforce their detention and oversee their “reeducation.”
Eliminating a people always requires a high level of organization and resources. 

While accounts in popular media may portray this type of violence as irrational, successful genocides are highly rational, and rationalized. 

This is not chaotic violence; it’s characterized by orderliness and control. 

The emblematic cases of the last century, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, are both notable for the extremely clear and routinized organizational hierarchies responsible for conducting mass murder. 

The Nazis’ notoriously rigid command-and-control structure enabled the smooth operation of a system that transported 11 million people to their deaths. 

Likewise, in Rwanda, the instigators of the genocide exploited the country’s sophisticated top-down bureaucratic apparatus to ensure that orders to kill from the top were carried out at the local level.
This is what is required to undertake the physical destruction of a group: a tightly controlled organizational structure whose members can effectively identify and overpower large numbers of victims, and who can be relied upon to carry out even the most morally repugnant commands.
Yet destroying a group’s culture without eliminating its members is an even taller order than mass murder. 

The need to continuously monitor the population imposes a significant—and extremely expensive—additional surveillance burden.
East Turkestan’s finances appear to already be straining under the pressure, with local governments reporting serious debt problems. 

An incarcerated population potentially unrestricted in size (rather than one whose members are killed to make room for more inmates) creates a consistent demand for more manpower; in 2016 alone, the region advertised for more security personnel than from 2008 to 2012 combined, according to researcher Adrian Zenz. 

And the fact that the task has no clear endpoint means the system must be maintained indefinitely.
Yet there are clear benefits to perpetrators to pursuing a policy of cultural, rather than physical, genocide. 

Yes, it’s more difficult and costly, but it’s also easier to conceal and obfuscate. 

There are no mass graves, no tell-tale miasma of death and decay. 

Arbitrary detention and incidental torture can much more easily be excused as overzealous counterterrorism efforts than mass murder. 

And even when the protestations of legitimate state purpose ring wholly false (as they must in the case of China’s ruthless treatment of the Uighurs), a limited international attention span and a never-ending supply of atrocities means that systematic repression unaccompanied by a high death toll simply incurs fewer reputational costs than a bloodbath. 

Given these international dynamics, it makes sense that a high-capacity actor like China might pursue this strategy.
The extraordinarily high levels of capacity and control required to implement a policy of cultural genocide explain why we so infrequently observe this type of repression in the absence of cataclysmic violence. 

Despite its high costs in absolute terms, lethal violence is the cheaper and easier path to the destruction of a group. 

It is no coincidence that the pace of the Holocaust’s butchery accelerated as Nazi Germany faced increased strain on its resources and capacity. 

Likewise, Myanmar’s recent shift from the maintenance of an apartheid state to an all-out onslaught on the Rohingya suggests a change of strategy in reaction to the inability to effectively employ less violent means to obliterate the group’s identity.
These precedents set off alarm bells about how things might play out in East Turkestan. 

China’s actions reveal a clear intent to eradicate the perceived threat that Uighur identity poses to state security. 

It is currently employing the highest-cost strategy available in pursuit of this aim. 

If this proves too difficult, it is more likely that it will default to an easier approach than abandon its goals—with fatal consequences.

Guerrillas for God

How Hong Kong’s Pastors Are Delivering the Message to China’s Christians

By LAIGNEE BARRON / HONG KONG

An altar server holds a text during a celebration of the Feast of the Ascension at the "underground" Zhongxin Bridge Catholic Church in Tianjin, China on May 24, 2015.

Rev. C. has nearly finished his latest book, a compilation of daily devotions for pastors in China. 

To get his manuscript from Hong Kong into the hands of his students on the Chinese mainland he’ll have to — well, for his safety that can’t be published. 

Neither can his name, since he agreed to speak to TIME on condition of anonymity. 

So let’s just say this slight and soft-spoken Protestant has spent years giving Chinese authorities the slip to deliver his spiritual message to Chinese Christians.
Rev. C. is convinced that Christianity alone can shake the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) indomitable grip. 

He’s willing to go jail for this conviction. 

In fact, he already has.
“It’s a blessing to go to prison,” he says, “to suffer for Jesus.”
He’s not alone. 

While Hong Kong’s pastors are not allowed to proselytize, sermonize or establish churches in mainland China without official permission, many defy these prohibitions to cultivate a network of underground “house churches” in homes and workplaces.
Hong Kong has historically served as the springboard for evangelizing on the mainland. 

But as Xi Jinping kicks off a renewed crackdown to bring Christianity under state control by instituting new religious regulations, pastors in Hong Kong — since 1997 a semi-autonomous Chinese territory — are finding themselves in the crosshairs.
“The Communist Party of China is afraid of this thing. They want to control the Christians,” says Rev. C.

Christianity, he says, has grown too big in the eyes of Beijing, which has historic reason to fear the politicization of religion.
One hundred and sixty-eight years after Christian-inspired rebels nearly brought China’s Qing Dynasty to its knees in the Taiping Rebellion, communist China looks set to host the largest population of Christians in the world by 2030 — a development that is no small source of anxiety for the officially atheist country’s authoritarian leaders.

The Gateway Into China
Proselytizing may be forbidden on the mainland, but step off Hong Kong’s iconic Star Ferry and into the audio and visual assault of ticket touts, digital billboards, souvenir hawkers and street acrobats and you’ll find Christians come to spread the gospel. 

As selfie-stick wielding masses jostle in front of the city’s harbor and glass skyline, leaflets attesting to Jesus’ love and eternal redemption are pressed into the hands of mainland tourists.
Hong Kong, with its greater freedoms and religious liberties, has played a vital role in oxygenating the growth of Christianity on the mainland.
Unlike in many parts of the West where Christianity is waning, a religious gold rush has swept through China since the Cultural Revolution and its fierce suppression of religion ended in 1976. Scholars estimate there are now as many as 80 to 100 million Christians, compared to 89.5 million communist party members. 

As more and more Chinese seek a spiritual alternative to political repression, Christianity continues to gain ground, increasing by an estimated 10% per year.
While Christianity is undoubtedly thriving in mainland China, faith is permitted only in official, “patriotic” churches; unregistered houses of worship may be prolific, but they are also subject to periodic crackdowns. 

According to Christian advocacy group China Aid’s most recent statistics, 1,800 house church leaders were detained in 2016.

Celebrating Easter in China Where Faith Is Curtailed

Parishioners clutch fir branches in place of palm fonds as they pray at an underground Palm Sunday service run by dissident Catholic Priest Dong Baolu in the yard of a house in Youtong village, Shijiazhuang, China, March 20, 2016. 

For these underground congregations — which are illegal, if often ignored — the Hong Kong Christian establishment offers a vital lifeline, supplying everything from monetary support, to Bibles, to blacklisted Christian literature, to training and assistance founding new churches. 

The gospel is smuggled over the border in every format imaginable: broadcast on pirate radio waves and disseminated through USB flash drives.
“They need our help because we are in the freer world and they are not,” says Hong Kong’s retired Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen.
For evangelicals eager to sustain this fount of converts, Hong Kong serves as “the stepping stone into mainland China,” says Rev. Wu Chi-wai, general secretary of the Hong Kong Church Renewal Movement.
More than 60% of Hong Kong’s churches engage in work on the mainland, illicit or otherwise, including preaching and theological training, according to the Church Renewal Movement’s most recent, 2014 survey. 

They do so armed with Bibles, sermons, and, if the work is not officially sanctioned, an arsenal of disguises and convoluted transportation plans to counter omnipresent state surveillance.
Such business can be risky, resulting in anything from police harassment to deportation or detention in “re-education” centers. 

But as Rev. C. says, “Many church leaders believe that if you have not yet been to prison you are not committed enough in your faith.”
While China’s faithful have rapidly multiplied in number, they lack experienced leadership and qualified pastors. 

So Hong Kong has become a central hub for short-term theological intensives, distance Bible seminaries and networking conventions.
“Hong Kong’s role is to help them become a self-propagating, self-administrating establishment,” says another Hong Kong missionary, who, like Rev. C., could not be named for safety reasons.
But the future of this relationship is threatened by a revision of the 2005 religious regulations which came into force last month. 

The 77 vaguely worded provisions indicate the government’s priorities as it doubles down on extralegal worship amid a broader push to cement party-state authority.
For the first time, religious exchanges with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau have become a target. 

China’s house churches were previously barred from “foreign affiliations,” but now any religiously motivated trips abroad must be vetted by Beijing.
“According to the new regulations, believers from mainland China are forbidden to attend unauthorized overseas religious conferences or training, or serious penalties will be imposed. Hong Kong is part of the overseas areas,” says Bob Fu, president and founder of China Aid.
Many Hong Kong pastors are suspending or outright canceling their work for fear of endangering their followers.
“Now is a sensitive time. Many pastors tell me they will have to wait and see how [the regulations] are enforced,” says Rev. Wu.

A “Subversive Seabed”
Many pastors say Beijing’s interference in their work is symptomatic of China’s encroachment on Hong Kong’s political autonomy.
“Beijing sees Hong Kong as place of insurgency, a place that needs to be brought under control,” says Brynne Lawrence, an associate at China Aid.
From China’s perspective, Hong Kong needs to be reintegrated into the mainland, political economist and Hong Kong transition expert Michael DeGolyer writes in The Other Hong Kong Report, a Hong Kong-based academic journal. 

While Hong Kong enjoys greater liberties than the mainland under the “one country, two systems approach” instituted after the 1997 handover from British to Chinese sovereignty, DeGolyer describes this agreement as a temporary transition period during which differences generated during 150 years of separation are to be respected, and overcome.
Rev. Wu says Hong Kong has long been seen as the “subversive seabed” from which provocative ideas — religious or secular — seep into the tightly controlled mainland.
In 1923, nationalist revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen defined Hong Kong as ground zero for resistance.
“Where and how did I get my revolutionary and modern ideas? I got my ideas from this very place, in the colony of Hong Kong,” said Sun, who attended the first independent Chinese church, founded in Hong Kong.

Members of a house church meet for Sunday service May 15, 2011 in Beijing, China.

The enclave has long served as a harbor for agitators and insurrectionists. 

It was a hotbed of communists during the 1920s and ‘30s, a base for Japanese imperialism in the Second World War, a sanctuary for nationalists fleeing the PRC, a refuge for Russian émigrés fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, a home in exile for Indonesia’s national hero and communist leader Tan Malaka, a source of funding, supplies, and ideological encouragement for the Tiananmen Square protesters, a safe haven for NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden and, most recently, the birthplace of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. 

Beijing’s flag-waving state media did not fail to note that several Christian leaders helped spearhead those 12-week Occupy protests in 2014.
“[Nobody is] allowed to use Hong Kong for infiltration subversion activities against the mainland to damage its social and political stability,” Zhang Xiaoming, the head of China’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong, said during a state media interview last year.
The admonition appears to extend to Christian evangelizing.
“They do no want the water from the well poisoning the river,” says Cardinal Joseph Zen.
The Chinese Communist Party has long associated Christianity with subversive Western values, which are perceived as antithetical to Xi’s push for conformity to orthodox party thinking. 

Xi has even said the government “must guard against overseas infiltrations via religious means and prevent ideological infringements by extremists.” 

He advised religions to Sinocize by accepting Chinese traditions and socialist core values, which really means submitting to state authority.

Growing Crackdowns
Religious leaders say hostility toward Christianity peaked under Xi, who became party leader in 2012 and has presided over a crackdown on civil society to quash dissent and establish what academics have termed his complete “controlocracy”.
“They don’t want to totally restrict religion, they want to bring it fully under their control,” says the Hong Kong missionary.
Christian groups say sporadic persecution has intensified and campaigns to demolish unregistered churches, tear down crosses, raid homes for unauthorized gospel literature, arrest church leaders and monitor congregants have all become more common. 

Last November, local authorities in Jiangxi province told residents to take down Christian iconography inside their homes and replace it with portraits of Xi.
The sweeping new religious regulations “try to legitimate the repressive measures adopted in the past few years,” and provide a legal framework for future crackdowns, says Yang Fenggang, director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University.
Aiming to curb unregistered religious activities, the regulations give underground churches an ultimatum: join the official, antiseptic Three-Self Patriotic churches where faith is subordinate to party dogma, or face criminal repercussions left to local enforcers’ interpretation — traditionally anything from fines, to detention or even enforced disappearances.
“In the U.S., the citizens could say that the law protects us, the first amendment protects our religious freedom. In China it’s the other way around. The law is just to help the government crackdown on the churches,” says Rev. Wu.

A believer prays during a weekend mass at an underground Catholic church in Tianjin in Nov. 10, 2013.

To cope in such a hostile environment, China’s underground churches have adopted guerilla-like tactics. 

Rev. C. described Christians who use balloons to obscure their faces from CCTV cameras while they walk to church, shops that act as fronts for Sunday schools, and coded conversations that allow pastors to talk openly about planting new churches.
“China’s Christians have endured decades of persecution,” Rev. C. says. 

“They know how to deal with the Chinese government.”
Plus, he adds, “Beijing can’t arrest them all. There are too many Christians now and not enough jails.”
It’s Hong Kong’s future, and the ability to adapt to unfamiliar oversight from Beijing that he worries about. 

“We’ve been safe here for the last 20 years. In the coming years? We just don’t know.”
Few religious leaders were optimistic in their forecast for the metropolis.
Cardinal Zen said those who believe in the perpetuity of Hong Kong’s sovereignty under the “two systems” approach are blind to its steady erosion. 

“Here we have no future unless we want to be Beijing’s slaves,” he put it bluntly.
One Christian academic, who asked not to be named, tells TIME that Hong Kong’s liberties — including free expression — are withering fast under the unfavorable attentions of Beijing.
“My worry is that some church leaders in Hong Kong are surrendering,” the academic says. 

“They just obey the government and do whatever they are told, keeping their mouth shut and not daring to criticize policies. You can already see this happening.”

Party vs. Pulpit
Trouble began brewing even before the rollout of the new regulations. 

Mainland Christians were sporadically barred from attending conferences and conventions in Hong Kong, and Hong Kong pastors have increasingly paid a price for trying to spread the gospel beyond the territory’s border.
In 2016, China Aid held a training in Hong Kong attended by over 400 mainland Christians. 

Not long after the event, Fu said three facilitators from the Chinese University of Hong Kong faced repercussions when they tried to visit the mainland: in some cases they were beaten, and in others warned.-
“The authorities have their lists. If you are on the list, you have become a target, and you are not allowed to cross the border,” says Rev. Wu.-
In an unprecedented incident portending the tightening restrictions to come, in 2015, Rev. Philip Woo was summoned from his Hong Kong office across the border. 

Religious affairs authorities there instructed him to stop teaching mainland students, and to stop posting online advertisements offering to ordain mainland pastors. 

Since then, he says he’s also been warned by Hong Kong’s authorities to call off trips to the mainland, where he has been unable to return for over a year.-
“The Chinese government should not be trying to interfere,” he says.-
But for the Communist Party, there are practical reasons to clamp down, says Fenggang, from Purdue University.
Christians, drawn to the faith’s moral compass, “have shown the will to challenge the injustice of the party-state,” he wrote by email. 

“Their presence is a challenge to the moral authority of the party-state. The more the party-state feels the lack of moral authority, the more it [will] try to suppress Christianity.”

Participants raise their hands in prayer during the first Global Chinese Alpha conference in Hong Kong, April 10, 2007.

Yet paradoxically, the more severe the persecution, the more people are drawn to Christianity.
“By clamping down on it, the Communist Party has multiplied it,” says Carsten Vala, chair of the political science department at Loyola University.
He also noted that while most Chinese Christians are not interested in seizing political power, Christianity and communism are inherently at odds, competing over the souls and loyalties of the people.
“Protestants have arguably created the most sustained structural challenges to the Chinese Communist Party’s ordering of society,” Vala says.
Rev. C. says he is motivated by the belief that if Christianity continues to grow in China, it’s conceivable that 20-25% of the country could be Christian. 

At that point, he says, “the Communist Party will not be able to handle it.”
“With Christianity [there will be] morals, ethics, just laws, and a will to enforce it,” he says.”

Only Christianity can change this country.”

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.”