The free world’s response has been embarrassingly weak.
The free world’s response has been embarrassingly weak.
T he Chinese Communist Party has never quite known what to do with God. Mao Zedong tried to bury Him under the rubble of the Cultural Revolution; Deng Xiaoping tolerated Him so long as He stayed in His designated pew; Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao kept a wary eye on Him. Xi Jinping has decided the experiment is over. Under Xi, the party has launched the most systematic campaign against religious life in the world today — a campaign that, for all its bureaucratic euphemism, amounts to a war.
The CCP calls it “Sinicization.” In practice, Sinicization means that every faith practiced in the People’s Republic must be reshaped to serve the party. Crosses come down from steeples in Zhejiang. Mosques in Ningxia lose their minarets and domes, reduced to the architectural vocabulary of a Han pagoda. Monasteries on the Tibetan plateau are forced to display portraits of Xi alongside those of the Buddha. Children under 18 are barred from entering churches, mosques, and temples — a measure that even Soviet authorities never fully managed, and one designed to ensure that the next Chinese generation is raised in atheist sterility.
Nowhere has the campaign been more brutal than in Xinjiang. Beginning around 2017, the party constructed an archipelago of “vocational training centers” — a phrase that would have made Orwell wince — into which more than a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Turkic Muslims have been swept. Survivors describe forced renunciations of Islam, compulsory pork consumption, political indoctrination, and worse. The U.S. State Department, under both Mike Pompeo and Antony Blinken, has called it genocide. Independent tribunals in London have catalogued forced sterilizations and mass detentions of Muslims at the camps. The party’s response has been to invite Muslim-majority dictatorships on guided tours of model camps.
Tibet has fared no better, only more quietly. Beijing has installed surveillance grids in monasteries, sent monks to political reeducation, and — most audacious of all — announced that it, the officially atheist Chinese Communist Party, will pick the next Dalai Lama. The Panchen Lama (the second-highest spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism), recognized by the Dalai Lama in 1995, was abducted by Chinese authorities at age six and has not been seen since. The party installed its own substitute. The arrangement is a dress rehearsal for the day the present Dalai Lama dies.
Christians, too, have learned what Sinicization means. Protestant house churches that decline to register with the state-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement are raided, their pastors imprisoned, and their members harassed. Wang Yi, founding pastor of Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church, is serving a nine-year sentence for “inciting subversion” after he refused to take down a sermon urging Christians to obey God rather than men. Some 500 members of his congregation were detained in the December 2018 sweep. Bibles have been removed from online marketplaces. New regulations require even sermons to be approved by Party-affiliated commissions.
The Catholic question is more painful, because the Vatican has been part of the problem. The 2018 secret accord between the Holy See and Beijing, renewed three times since, gave the CCP effective veto power over the appointment of Catholic bishops in China. Cardinal Joseph Zen, the nonagenarian retired bishop of Hong Kong and one of the moral giants of the global Church, has denounced the deal as a betrayal of underground Catholics who suffered for decades for their fidelity to Rome. In 2022, he was arrested under Hong Kong’s national security law. The arrangement that was supposed to bring the Chinese Church in from the cold has instead delivered it more thoroughly into the hands of its persecutors.
Then there is Falun Gong, the spiritual movement former Chinese President Jiang Zemin set out to “eradicate” in 1999. Practitioners continue to disappear into China’s prison system, and credible investigations — most notably the China Tribunal chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, who once prosecuted Slobodan Milošević — have concluded that the regime has engaged in the forced harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience. The world has shrugged. The trade in electric vehicles and rare earths seems, for some, more important.
What unites these campaigns is not the particular doctrine being suppressed, but the idea of conviction itself. A regime that demands total loyalty cannot abide rivals, and faith is the oldest rival authority known to politics. The party understands what Western elites have forgotten: Belief in something higher than the state is the seed of every meaningful resistance to it. Solzhenitsyn understood this from the Gulag; John Paul II understood it from Wadowice; Wang Yi understands it from his prison cell.
The free world’s response has been embarrassingly weak. Sanctions on a handful of officials, the occasional sternly worded statement, and an Olympics that proceeded as if Tibet and Xinjiang did not exist. The United States, whatever its other failures of nerve, has at least named the genocide. Europe, with a few honorable exceptions, has preferred its trade balance to its conscience. Former senator, governor, and U.S. Ambassador for Religious Freedom Sam Brownback’s new book China’s War on Faith is excellent reading for all interested in learning more about this sad state of affairs.
Religious liberty is not a sectarian concern; it is the canary in the coal mine of all human freedoms. In China, the canary is dead, and Xi Jinping has barely bothered to hide the body. The question is whether the rest of us will keep pretending we cannot smell it.