Christian Persecution in China “It’s only getting worse and worse, and it’s a crisis”

Xi Jinping plans to dominate by consolidating his power and crushing religious freedom.

The Heritage Foundation, the nation’s largest conservative research, and educational institution hosted a discussion on the urgent need to address rising religious persecution in China, in which Bob Fu and others gave us their analysis on the critical state of affairs within the communist country.

Now president of ChinaAid, previously Bob Fu was a student leader during the Tiananmen Square demonstrating for freedom and democracy in 1989, and a house church leader before being imprisoned in China for illegal evangelism in 1996. He relocated to the United States as a refugee in 1997 and founded ChinaAid, an organization that promotes religious freedom and brings attention to Chinas human rights violations.

Critical topics included during the talk were persecution of underground churches, the obscene crimes against the Uighur population, China’s invasion of academic institutions in the United States, and more.

First touching on mind transformation camps which he refers to as “the gulag,” Fu then explains the wildly rising religious persecution against Christians. China is utilizing data-analytics to drive a campaign of censorship and policing similarly practiced under the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

“They use a facial recognition system, Xinjiang perhaps the most monitored, every inch is covered,” he says. Citing the removal of 2,000 crosses in the Zhejiang province and the imprisonment of pastors Fu says, “this system is already applied to the religious freedom arena.”

Another example of such abuse occurred in January this year, when Chinese authorities detonated bombs to bring down a Christian Church in Linfen, China, marking a turning point in the ‘Religious Winter’ against Christianity in the Communist Nation.

The surveillance state of the future has already reached China where churches are mandated to install facial recognition systems and put up signs banning certain groups from attending. According to Fu:

“Every church is mandated, forced to install facial recognition systems, and every church building in front of the building they are forced to put a sign that says these five following groups of people are not allowed to enter the church building. Including children, including students, including civil servants, including military, and communist party members. They actually use the facial recognition system, try to record the image and purge the communist party member who there entered the church. It’s only getting worse and worse, and it’s a crisis.”

Confucius Institute

Earlier this month we reported that the CIA released a document that detailed the extensive campaign by the Chinese to infiltrate American institutions.

In addition, in February of 2018, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Intelligence Committee that the FBI is investigating dozens of Confucius Institutes, the Chinese-backed language and cultural centers hosted by more than one hundred universities across the country. In addition, Senator Marco Rubio, who co-chairs the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, called on the five Florida educational institutions that host Confucius Institutes to end those partnerships saying,

“Beijing is becoming increasingly aggressive in its aim to exploit America’s academic freedom to instill in the minds of future leaders a pro-China viewpoint,” Rubio said in a statement to the Washington Free Beacon. “Confucius Institutes across the country and my home state of Florida have given China’s communist regime an avenue to covertly influence public opinion and teach half-truths designed to present Chinese history, government or official policy in the most favorable light.”

Bob Fu explains that “China is using the Confucius Institute, over 100 of them are in the United States of America. Our FBI Director said in a public hearing they are not only purely academic institutions, they are China’s security, intelligence.” He calls on the US saying that these should be addressed too.

What can be done?

Host Olivia Enos posed the question of what the most useful step for the US government to take to serve the people of China would be.

Bob Fu explained that the Trump administration has already taken more steps than the previous administration, but there’s more work to be done. He suggested that the Trump Pence administration should, “take steps to invite the family of prisoners of conscience from China to the White House to have a public meeting.”

He confirms that “of course you can’t solve this problem with one meeting” but he thinks “when the President and the Vice President take these concrete actions, to choose to stand in public with these victims, the family prisoners, it will send a very strong and clear signal to the regime that the United States of America does not only care about the trade imbalance or tariffs, these are important issues, but all these bilateral relational issues have a human rights and freedom component.”

The Statistics

• The number of persecuted Christians went from 48,000 in 2016 to 223,000 in 2017.
• In 1949 when the communist party took power, the number of Christians was estimated to be less than one million. Now according to sociologists from Purdue University, there are over 100 million Christians estimated.
• It’s estimated China’s total Christian population, including Catholics, will hit 247 million by 2030, passing the United States, Mexico, and Brazil as the largest Christian nation in the world.

“Apparently the persecution will only help accelerate the growth,” says Fu in agreement with the statistics from Yang, a professor of sociology at Purdue University and author of “Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Communist Rule.”

“In President Xi Jinping’s mind, now in the past 3-5 years of his first term, you can see that he has a particular animosity against Christianity in particular, and two years ago there was a minister of state senior security official who published an article in China Daily listing five groups posing the most severe national security threat and the number one group is underground churches.”

Kristina Arriaga, Vice Chairwoman, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, caps off the Heritage talk saying, “The US continues to be a beacon of freedom. We must continue to not only advocate for people abroad but continue to remind our own elected officials that religious freedom is a core human right that is related to every other right in the universal declaration and to economic prosperity.”