‘All religious groups are viewed as a threat’
Barack Obama with China President Xi Jinping (Official White House photo by Pete Souza)
[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Real Clear Wire.]
By Susan Crabtree
Real Clear Wire
China is not only carrying out genocide against a religious minority, the Uyghur Muslims, but President Xi Jinping views all people of faith as a direct threat and is trying to insert himself in the “role of God” over all people of faith in China, a top House Republican has asserted.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, criticized Xi and his government for rewriting versions of the Bible distributed in certain areas of China and replacing the 10 Commandments with Xi quotes warning against the “infiltration of Western ideology” in government-sanctioned Christian churches.
“[Xi] has no problem with the First Commandment ‘to have no other gods before me’ as long as he and the CCP are playing God,” Gallagher said during a Wednesday roundtable on religious persecution in China. “[China’s] constitution states that citizens enjoy the freedom of religious belief, but of course, in the CCP definition, it’s a much closer resemblance to what we would call oppression.”
Gallagher organized the forum, attended by religious leaders from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist faiths, and several church leaders who fled persecution in China. His stated aim is to shine a spotlight on China’s religious crackdown on people of all religious beliefs, which he says is not getting the attention it deserves in the U.S. and other countries around the world.
Other religious freedom and human rights experts said the Chinese government is stepping up its religious oppression, reprising the CCP’s long history of trying to control every aspect of its citizens’ behavior, down to their most intimate spiritual beliefs.
“China’s repressive actions do not discriminate,” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council and a former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, or USCIRF. “All religious groups are viewed as a threat to the Chinese regime – whether it’s Christians who are monitored through artificial intelligence … or the Falun Gong who have been subjected to unbelievably brutal treatment.”
The Falun Gong and Uyghurs have been forced into labor camps and hundreds of thousands have been killed for their organs in what has become a billion-dollar involuntary organ-transplant industry in China.
For decades, U.S. policymakers more concerned with trade than human rights turned a blind eye to evidence of China’s gruesome human rights abuses, Perkins said, adding that this has proved naïve. In September 2000, the U.S. Senate voted to grant China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status, a decision that paved the way for China to enter the World Trade Organization.