China’s “war on faith” will fail, a top U.S. diplomat predicted while indicting the regime’s record on religious liberty during a trip to Hong Kong.
“It seems the Chinese government is at war with faith,” Sam Brownback, the State Department’s special envoy for religious liberty, said Friday. “It is a war they will not win.”
Brownback based that charge in a broad denunciation of China’s repression of Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists around the country. The speech elevated the ideological stakes of the multifaceted competition between the United States and Beijing, which enforces atheism within the ranks of the Communist party.
“The Chinese Communist Party must hear the cries of its own people for religious freedom,” he said. “The Chinese people are a great people. Someday soon, they will be free to practice their faith. The gates of religious freedom will fly open in China, and the iron curtain of religious persecution will come down. The Chinese government is currently on the wrong side of history … but this will change.”
Chinese officials have vowed to intensify their crackdown on religious minorities, despite a wave of international rebukes over the last year. “We must fully implement the [Communist] Party’s fundamental policy on religious affairs and uphold the Sinicisation of religion in China,” Chinese Premier Li Keqiang said Wednesday during his annual report to the party’s national legislature.
Brownback derided the persecution of Christians, who have not been permitted to purchase Bibles online since 2018. The crackdown on Uighur Muslims — “hundreds of thousands” of whom have been forced into “re-education camps”, according to State Department estimates — shows the government’s “disregard for the individual dignity of every Chinese citizen,” he said, while warning that they risk provoking a terrorist backlash. And he demanded that China stop harassing Tibetan monks, who have also been subjected to “patriotic re-education” by the Beijing regime.
“What does the Chinese Communist Party have to fear from its faithful people?” Brownback said. “Why can’t it trust its people with a Bible? Why can’t Uighur children be named Mohammad? Why can’t the Tibetans choose and venerate their own religious leaders like they have for more than a thousand years?”
The former Kansas governor delivered the address from the Foreign Correspondents’ Club — a subtle reminder of the Chinese government’s expulsion of the club’s vice president, a Financial Times editor who was barred from working in Hong Kong after hosting an event with an advocate for the former British colony’s independence from the mainland government.
Brownback is continuing his trip with another stop sure to irritate President Xi Jinping’s regime, as he plans to attend an international religious liberty conference in Taiwan — the last bastion of the government overthrown during the Chinese Communist revolution. China regards the island’s leaders as separatists and is waging an international campaign to ensure their diplomatic isolation.
“The goal is to infuse religious freedom as a priority among governments and among civil society and religious groups worldwide,” he said.
