Chinese officials are developing high-tech mechanisms to monitor and suppress religious believers as an alternative to physical detention camps, according to a senior United States diplomat.
“The big one that really concerns me is their use of advanced technologies,” Ambassador Sam Brownback, the State Department’s lead official for international religious liberty issues, told the Washington Examiner. “So they’ll have less people locked up probably in the future but more people under oppression by uses of cameras and artificial intelligence and social credit systems, where they will be controlling you.”
Those tactics might help Beijing obscure the repression targeting minorities such as the Uighur Muslims of Xinjiang, where the regime has established mass detention facilities that U.S. officials liken to the “concentration camps” of Nazi Germany. Brownback is emphasizing, through an international ministerial on religious freedom, that the repression will be as severe as it is invisible.
“If you want to operate in their society, you will not be able to practice your faith,” he said in an interview before the launch of the third annual ministerial this week.
The ministerial is being hosted this year by Poland, although the coronavirus pandemic spurred a decision to hold the forum virtually. The annual series of international religious freedom ministerials was launched by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2018, but State Department officials have attempted to establish it solidly enough that the idea won’t be regarded in diplomatic circles as a pet project of the former Kansas Republican lawmaker.
“We thought it was very important to get other countries to step to make it an enduring practice,” Brownback said when explaining why Poland is hosting the event. “I think that the global push for religious freedom is launched.”
The subject of religious freedom has taken on a polarized political charge within U.S. domestic politics in recent years, with Pompeo’s efforts often seen by Democratic critics as an attempt to curry favor with Christian conservatives, but the overseas diplomatic initiative has bipartisan support. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi participated in the 2019 ministerial, Brownback recalled.
“I can’t speak on what the Biden administration will do on religious freedom. I think they’ll be supportive of it,” he said. “It’s one we do stay united on overseas even though there’s differences of opinion domestically.”
Poland’s hosting of this 2020 ministerial was announced in tandem with the unveiling of the international religious freedom alliance, a network with more than two dozen founding members — a roster that includes NATO allies such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic. While U.S. officials tend to put a spotlight on China’s abuse of religious believers, Brownback acknowledged that it remains difficult even within the religious liberty alliance to muster forthright denunciations of Beijing.
“It’s still a hard one because China just really plays hardball. They threaten nations all the time,” Brownback said. “It’s a hard one to get countries — particularly smaller ones that are really looking for some economic opportunity and they see investment possibilities from China — it’s hard to get them to act because of the way China so aggressively pushes back on it.”
Chinese state-owned telecommunications giants have sold surveillance technology to Beijing’s partners and clients, such as Nicolas Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, according to U.S. officials and international agencies. Brownback expects that to continue, with a focus on the repression of religion.
“They are a country that is a lead persecutor of people of all faiths,” he said. “They unfortunately are moving into the use of advanced technology. This is something we do not want to see take root around the world amongst authoritarian, atheistic regimes.”
