China Aid Association, an organization formed in 2002 to aid Christians in China, presented several speakers and interviews at the recent Religious Freedom Institute summit in Washington, D.C., July 13-15, regarding the intensifying persecution of Christians and other religious groups in China. Some of what is happening, such as the Uyghur genocide, seems to be atrocities not seen since World War II, while other aspects, such as the mass surveillance state and social credit system, are terrifyingly new twenty-first century innovations in totalitarianism.
Bob Fu, the founder and President of China Aid, referring to the different groups present at the RFI Summit, noted that against this “Protestants, Catholics, Falun Gong practitioners, Tibetans, Muslims alike, but we are united … we have never seen such a unity among the different persecuted communities … we have a common soul in freedom.”
Fu said that one of the individuals to speak, a Kazakh woman, was sent to the emergency room numerous times, in agony for no reason that medical personnel could discover, but seemingly dying of the trauma that she had experienced. “I want a place to rest my soul,” she said. He said this was only one case of perhaps as many as three million Uyghurs in Xinjiang, or East (Chinese) Turkistan who have experience trauma. And there are many other religious groups that are persecuted in China. “This is the worst time for religious freedom, rule of law, under this evil regime,” he said. “How can we terminate, end, this twenty-first century genocide?” he asked.
The human rights organization Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights has collected 30,000 testimonies of Kazakhs who have fled Xinjiang for Kazakhstan, according to activist Serikshan Bilesh, who also spoke at the China Aid RFI summit event. He said that by China’s own estimate, there are one and a half million Kazakhs in forced labor in Xinjiang. However, the Kazakh government is not supportive of refugees nor addresses the persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, but is supportive of the Chinese government. But the Atajurt organization has rescued many Kazakhs from forced labor in China, he said.
A moving testimony of this persecution was given by the Kazakh woman, Gulzira Auelkhan, describing atrocities she experienced in camps in Xinjiang (Chinese Turkistan). She said that in 2017 her relatives in China contacted her and said she should come back to China from Kazakhstan to sign certain documents. Once she returned to China, she was arrested and put in a concentration camp. Over the course of 15 months, she was placed in six different concentration camps in Xinjiang. In July of 2017, she was sent to a concentration camp in which many Uyghurs were being sentenced to 15 or 30 year sentences. People sentenced were not criminals; they were sentenced to the camps “because they are Uyghur and Kazakh.” The camps she was in were also “re-education” camps, in which she and other prisoners were made to study Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s works “for 14 hours in one day.” They also were made to study the Chinese language for 14 hours a day and learn 30,000 Chinese characters.
Inmates of the re-education camp were required to tell their relatives that everything was fine. As part of the “re-education,” they were forced to eat food they thought was unfit and were given injections of unknown substances. Additionally, the Muslim prisoners were given pork to eat. Prisoners were questioned and tortured. She said that “married and unmarried young women” were led away at mid-night to secret rooms. She was later led to this area and heard the women crying. Cameras recorded all of her actions. She said she was tortured in prison, and shocked with electric batons.
After being the camps for 15 months, her husband, working through Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights from Kazakhstan, was able to get her out of the re-education camp, although not out of China. She said she was offered money to keep silent about what happened in the camps, but refused to take the money. After she was released from the re-education camp, she was sent to a forced labor camp, where workers made clothes. Chinese authorities forced her to sign a labor agreement to work in an “inner province” of China. She was, however, able to communicate with her husband from this location with a mobile phone, and was able to tell him what was happening to her. He then sent this information to the Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights organization, which publicized the information about the forced labor, which resulted in her being arrested again. Due to the intervention of her husband and the Atajurt organization, she was released in January 2019 from China to Kazakhstan, but was made to promise before she left not to disclose what happened to her in the camps. But after she did disclose what her experiences had been in the camps following her release, the Kazakhstan government pressured her to keep silent. Through the intervention of Bob Fu and China Aid, she was able to reach the United States in February 2019.
Due to the information she provided, the American government put the forced labor factory where she worked on a blacklist for U.S. government sanctions. But both the Chinese and Kazakh governments appear to be endeavoring to prevent information about the persecution of Kazakhs and Uyghurs from being publicized in the wider world. Her relatives in Kazakhstan seem to be under government pressure, and she said she has not heard from relatives in China. She maintained that the Kazakhstan government and pro-Kazakhstan government organizations have attempted to censor what she was saying. Many Kazakhs and Uyghurs are released from the camps, she said, but are pressured not to tell their stories. Chinese officials claim they are criminals. She said that like her, prisoners are forced to say that everything is the camps is good.
Enoch Li, the son of a Chinese pastor, gave his testimony of communist persecution in China. He said that his father and his church “did not work with the government politically.” For this reason, the Chinese government persecuted them. His father was imprisoned, and “the church was taken away.” After his father’s release, he was watched twenty-four hours a day. He said there were six to eight monitors placed in front of their house. The government threatened to have Enoch beaten up, or excluded from college if his father did not cooperate with the state. Enoch’s father contacted Bob Fu. Through China Aid’s efforts, Enoch was able to leave China. He “went through the visa interview twice … and eventually [went to] … Hong Kong, stayed there for one week, and then landed in Chicago.”
Describing what life was like for his family as a Christian in China, he mentioned his separation from his father when he was in prison, and an occasion of his own birthday. His father, then in prison, suggested by letter a birthday party for him to his mother. She then proceeded to have one with some friends from the church on his birthday. His father, who could only call with government permission, called during the party. He sang his son a birthday song over the phone, and then burst into tears. He said this was unusual, because his father was a strong man, who would restrain his emotions. Enoch, his mother, and brother all began crying. He then realized that although he was trying to pretend “that I don’t care and I’m fine,” nevertheless the trials of his family under communist rule had caused “tremendous pain.” He hopes that the communist persecution in China “could come to an end, before it harms more families, like mine.”
A former Hong Kong legislator, Baggio Lueng, spoke of the communist seizure of power in Hong Kong. He said the end of British rule in 1997, and the assumption of Chinese control of Hong Kong, although under a “one country, two systems” rule in 1997, was nevertheless the beginning of communist oppression in Hong Kong. The imposition of the “national security” law in Hong Kong in June 2020, without the consent of the people of Hong Kong reduced Hong Kong from being “the pearl of the orient” to “a city of pain and fear.” The city has been swallowed by “police brutality and mass arrests.” So far 55 pro-democracy activists have been charged with subversion, a pro-democracy newspaper has been shut down, and more than 10,000 protesters have been arrested. After the initial round of mass arrests, most activists are in hiding or in exile. Leung himself was arrested and released.
After his release, he was followed constantly. He said that China’s aggressive behavior is not only a problem for Hong Kong, but also for “international order and democracy around the world.” Summing up the situation, Lueng said that “from denial of responsibility for spreading the CCP virus, to the Uyghur genocide,” to supporting the Myanmar military dictatorship, “all that show[s] that the leading role of the United States in dealing with the China problem has never been more important.” Lueng observed that Hong Kong is home to many religions. But the adherents of these religions agree that Hong Kong should be a place where people can practice “any and all faiths without fear, and for this, we should fight again.”
In separate events at the summit sponsored by China Aid, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council interviewed Grace Gao, the daughter of prominent human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has not been seen for four years. Perkins noted that Gao defended “Falun Gong practitioners, house church leaders, and others.” In and out of prison, he was last known to be under house arrest, and has not communicated with anyone since August 2017. Grace Gao said that her father “is a very devoted Christian, and then I would say, a human rights lawyer.” She said “at the beginning of his career, in 2001, he was named as one of the top 10 lawyers in China.” He was then targeted by the government due to representing religious defendants. Grace said that there are “tens of millions of families like mine in China; they are only suffering because they stand up for others, they speak up for others.” She feels that she is carrying on her father’s legacy. She said that when she thinks of keeping silence, she thinks of the torture and twenty-four hour surveillance experienced both by her family and others, the house arrest, with government agents living with them 24 hours a day, documenting all their activities, and not allowing them to receive goods for family life that they needed or wanted. Publicly opposing persecution in China absolutely makes a difference in the situation there, she said.
Perkins also briefly interviewed Sen. Josh Hawley regarding Hong Kong. Asked what Hawley thought of the Chinese government sanctioning him because of his support of pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, he said “it’s kind of a badge of honor for me. I did go to Hong Kong in October 2019. I was out on the streets with the protesters … The people of Hong Kong were fighting for their faith and liberty … [and] the international treaty commitments that the government of China had made back in the 1980s and now are systematically violating.” Asked if the Chinese government fears religious freedom, Hawley says that the Chinese authorities know that religious freedom supports other freedoms, and that religious believers “will be opposed to authoritarianism. Religious believers understand the dignity of every human person.” Thus the Chinese regime is “particularly opposed to religious liberty … and we see crackdowns across China” against religious groups and religious liberty. In addition to calling out China’s domestic persecution, people outside of China should also oppose “efforts to export their surveillance state.” This is an unprecedented effort to control society through electronic surveillance, and giving individuals and their social relations “social credit” scores to determine access to travel and goods and services. It must be vigorously opposed, he said.
Former Congressman and international religious freedom advocate Frank Wolf recounted President Reagan’s observation that “the words of the Constitution were a covenant,” not only with the people who they bound at the time, but also with the world. He seemed to say we have a responsibility to advance justice in the wider world. He observed that during Reagan’s time, “no law firm, no lobby firm in the city [Washington], would ever [have] represented the Soviet Union.” He said that in the one instance that this was attempted, “Reagan spoke out, shut them down, and they never did it again.” But he said that “now this town is full of people … former members of Congress, and high ranking officials that lobby for the Chinese government.” After citing to the atrocities committed by the present Chinese government, such as the sale of kidneys taken from persecuted people, he said “I believe that the Chinese government will fall.”
Contemporary China is a dystopia that threatens to expand. Most threatened, perhaps, is Taiwan, which must maintain irregular relations with most of the world because of the communist Chinese claim to the island. But the freedom of Taiwan stands in sharp contrast to mainland China, and in particular Taiwan is a beacon for religious freedom. Its activity in that regard was examined in a separate event at the RFI Summit, and will be reviewed in a subsequent article.
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