Although busy with international tensions and the COVID-19 crisis, the CCP managed to persecute religions in 2021 even more than in 2020.
by Massimo Introvigne
On April 25, 2022, the USCIRF (U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom) released its yearly report. The USCIRF is an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission created by the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA). Its Commissioners are appointed by the President and by Congressional leaders of both political parties.
The report contains useful information on a number of countries (and Bitter Winter is linked on Russia as well), but I focus here on the USCIRF’s authoritative assessment of the situation in China. The key point of the USCIRF’s analysis is that, rather than showing signs of improvement, “in 2021, religious freedom conditions in China deteriorated.”
“The government continued to vigorously implement its ‘sinicization of religion’ policy and demand that religious groups and adherents support the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule and ideology.” USCIRF notes that this has happened both through the issuance of new official documents and regulations, and practical repression.
Linking Bitter Winter, the USCIRF emphasizes the importance of the second National Conference on Religious Work held in Beijing in December 2021, after the first one organized in 2016. “At the National Conference on Religious Work, the report summarizes, top CCP officials reiterated many of the same policy priorities from the 2016 conference, which was followed by severe religious freedom violations in subsequent years.
General Secretary Xi emphasized ‘fully implementing’ the Party’s theory and policies on religious affairs, including the ‘sinicization of religion’ policy. He called for strengthening control and management of religion, requiring officials to adhere to Marxist views of religion, and demanding state-controlled religious groups to support the CCP’s rule and its religious policies. In addition to the top leadership, other central, provincial, and military officials—including officials from Xinjiang and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps—attended the conference virtually.”
After the Conference, the USCIRF says, “government authorities and state-controlled religious organizations at all levels organized separate meetings to study General Secretary Xi’s speech and to implement the policies. Minister of Public Security Zhao Kezhi convened one such meeting and emphasized that his agency must ‘effectively prevent and resolve major risks within the religious sphere [and] safeguard national security and unity, ethnic unity, and social stability.’ Specifically, Minister Zhao called for a crackdown on ‘religious extremist thoughts and forces,’ ‘illegal missionary activities,’ ‘cults,’ religious activities associated with the Dalai Lama, and ‘illegal religious activities on the internet.’”
Linking again Bitter Winter, the USCIRF also reports that in 2021 “the State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA)—a government agency under direct control of the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD)—and other agencies issued new legal measures, imposing further restrictions on clergy, religious schools, and religious content on the internet.”
On the practical side, the USCIRF reports that “underground Catholics, house church Protestants, Uyghurs and other Muslims, and Tibetan Buddhists” are all persecuted, but groups labeled as xie jiao whose members are repressed under Article 300 of the Chinese Criminal Code, such as “Falun Gong and The Church of Almighty God, are especially vulnerable to persecution.”
The report explains in detail how the system of the transformation through education camps continued to operate in Xinjiang, with instances of “physical and psychological torture, rape and other forms of sexual violence, forced labor, and forced sterilization and abortion while in custody. Moreover, authorities separated as many as 880,000 Muslim children from their parents and destroyed or desecrated important religious and cultural sites throughout Xinjiang.”
The USCIRF also reports that in 2021 several countries officially recognized the atrocities perpetrated against the Uyghurs as genocide, and details the measures the United States have enacted and implemented to support the Uyghurs. It also notes that “evidence suggests that Chinese authorities began to implement similar repressive policies against Hui Muslims—a group the government previously tolerated—throughout China.”
In the area of historical Tibet, the USCIRF reports that, “Local authorities organized seminars to indoctrinate monks and nuns at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, restricted Tibetans’ access to temples with heavy security presence, destroyed sites and symbols of religious significance, and detained and punished Tibetans for listening to the Dalai Lama’s teachings or possessing his portrait.”
The situation of Christians is not more encouraging. “Despite the Vatican-China agreement on bishop appointments, authorities continued to harass and detain underground Catholic priests who refuse to join the state-controlled Catholic association, such as Bishop Joseph Zhang Weizhu of Xinxiang, Hebei Province.” The persecution of Protestants has “intensified” “by harassing, detaining, arresting, and physically abusing leaders of Protestant house churches who refuse to join the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement, such as Elder Zhang Chunlei of Ren’ai Reformed Church and Pastor Yang Hua of Living Stone Church in Guiyang City, Guizhou Province.
Pastor Wang Yi of Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu City, Sichuan Province, remained imprisoned, serving a nine-year sentence amid reports of his deteriorating health. Moreover, authorities throughout China routinely raided churches, detained Christians, and confiscated religious materials. The government also continued to demolish church buildings and crosses—including the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Xinjiang—under its ‘sinicization of religion’ campaign.”
As mentioned earlier, more persecuted than anybody else are members of groups labeled as xie jiao, victims of the Chinese version of the “anti-cult” ideology. “In 2021, authorities harassed and arrested thousands of Falun Gong practitioners and sentenced 892 to prison terms. At least 101 practitioners died as a result of government persecution.” The persecution of The Church of Almighty God also “escalated,” and USCIRF cites reports, including from Bitter Winter, of massive arrests and of torture and extra-judicial killings.
I am impressed by the repeated use of words such as “escalated,” “increased,” “deteriorated.” While busy with international tensions and the COVID-9 crisis, the Chinese regime never forgets to persecute religion, and in fact in 2021 made the persecution even worse.