President Trump’s administration does not regard the Chinese Communist Party as “a legitimate system” of governance, according to a senior U.S. diplomat.
“The Chinese Communist Party is saying they have a legitimate system for the rest of the world to emulate,” Ambassador Sam Brownback, the State Department’s special representative for international religious freedom, told the Washington Examiner. “And we are saying they do not.”
Brownback has functioned as one of the State Department’s chief gadflies in denouncing Beijing’s abuse of religious people, especially the Uighur Muslims imprisoned in reeducation camps in Xinjiang. His latest rebuke underscores the depth of the worsening U.S.-China rivalry and identifies religious liberty as a “very substantial” organizing principle of that competition.
“It’s a basic human right,” Brownback said. “It’s foundational to the United States’s founding, and it’s being obliterated in China. And it is a central piece of the dispute.”
Chinese officials have rejected U.S. criticism of China’s treatment of the Uighurs, maintaining that they have taken only those steps necessary to mitigate terrorism threats in Xinjiang. Uighur activists accuse party officials of implementing a so-called Pair Up and Become Family initiative that places ethnic Chinese men in the homes of Uighur women — a program that amounts to “mass rape” as a tool of genocide, they say, while camp survivors have reported that guards beat inmates while mocking their religious beliefs.
“You have a Communist Party that continues the communist way of being at war with faith,” Brownback said. “We don’t have a problem with the Chinese people. It’s the Communist Party and the atheistic control that they seek.”
Such human rights abuses may be acquiring geopolitical significance by alienating European governments that are otherwise inclined to form economic partnerships with Beijing. That shift dovetails with American efforts to rally a coalition of democratic nations for a geopolitical competition that the Trump administration argues should be understood as an ideological struggle.
U.S. officials have tried to “put a face on the crime” taking place in China by imposing sanctions on Chen Quanguo, the party’s top official for Xinjiang and a member of the regime’s ruling Politburo. Brownback expressed optimism that U.S. allies will follow suit, adding that the State Department has heard anecdotal reports that Chinese prison guards have improved their treatment of religious prisoners in order to avoid being blacklisted themselves.
“We have heard back from various places where people were put in jail in various people in China telling [the inmates] … ‘I treated you well. Don’t turn me in and have visas taken away from my family members,’” Brownback said. “So they do have impact. They are noticed because there’s so many Chinese officials or family members that have assets or children who are being educated in the West.”
Brownback stopped short of arguing that the Chinese Communist Party must renounce any central tenets of its ideology, noting that Chinese citizens enjoyed greater degrees of religious freedom prior to General Secretary Xi Jinping’s rise to power.
“The Communist Party looks at people of faith as having another allegiance than the Communist Party, and they’re going to stomp that out,” Brownback said. “Governments have tried to do this for millennia, and they’ve never been successful. And the Chinese Communist Party will not be successful [in] stomping out faith.”
