President Trump’s administration hammered China over the repression of Uighur Muslims and other religious minorities for the second day in a row, at a forum that has Beijing’s communist rulers fuming.
“China is home to one of the worst human rights crises of our time,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Thursday at the State Department’s ministerial on religious freedom. “It is truly the stain of the century.”
Those comments, a reference to the imprisonment of “more than one million Chinese Muslims and other minorities” in a western province of China, were just one part of a multipronged rebuke. Vice President Mike Pence delivered his own tongue-lashing at the ministerial, one day after the president hosted victims of repression in the Oval Office, as the administration is elevating religious persecution into dividing line between the two powers.
“The United States is engaged in ongoing negotiations and discussions over our trading relationship with China,” Pence said. “But whatever comes of our negotiations with Beijing, you can be assured, the American people will always stand in solidarity with the people of all faiths in the People’s Republic of China.”
Such rebukes have angered the Chinese government. “There is no so-called religious persecution in China at all,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said told reporters, per an official press briefing transcript. “This is a sheer interference in China’s internal affairs.”
The diplomat’s comments were a direct response to Trump’s meeting with four victims of Beijing’s policies during an event on the sidelines of the ministerial.
“With us today are men and women of many different religious traditions from many different countries,” the president said Wednesday, in a meeting with 27 people from 16 countries. “But what you have in common is each of you has suffered tremendously for your faith. You’ve endured harassment, threats, attacks, trials, imprisonment, and torture.”
Lu faulted Trump for meeting with “a member of the Falun Gong cult and some other people who have been smearing China’s religious policy.” The Falun Gong is a spiritual group that was banned in 1999 after staging a major protest against government harassment. Chinese authorities killed Falun Gong practitioners and harvested their organs, an international investigative panel concluded last month.
“We urge the U.S. to view China’s religious policies and freedom of religious belief in an unbiased manner,” Lu said. “It should stop using religion as a pretext to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.”
Pompeo replied by deriding Chinese for “demand[ing] control over the lives of the Chinese people and their souls” while claiming to support religious freedom.
“Chinese Government officials have even discouraged other countries from attending this very gathering,” he said. “If you’re here today and you’re a country which has defied the Chinese pressure to come here, we salute you and we thank you. And if you have declined to attend for the same reason, we took note.”
