China: time to start asking questions - religious persecution | Nathaniel Hayward
As far as the Chinese Communist Party is concerned, China has far too much religion. For an officially atheist country, it has a myriad of people following a remarkable variety of religions. Yet the practices of these are often perceived by the state as a direct challenge to its authority. Officially, China endorses the right of all its citizens to confess and practice whichever faith they so desire.
Article 36 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China (1982) states that:
“Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief. No state organ, public organization or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion. The state protects normal religious activities…”
Yet, within ten years of this publication, the Chinese government, with the full sanction of the Chinese judiciary, was attempting to stamp out a religious movement with over 70 million adherents across the country. Indeed, the attempt to control and curtail the activities of China’s Falun Gong religious minority even led to strongly-evidenced accusations of organ harvesting on the part of the authorities.
Falun Gong is a syncretic religion founded by Li Hongzhi in 1992; an odd love-child of Buddhism, Taoism and a Chinese religious ritual known as Qigong - a semi-religious health practice that promotes slow breathing, slow movement and meditation. Initially, Qigong (and Falun Gong as an offshoot of this) were embraced by the Communist hierarchy for their promotion of order and harmony. Yet, as the years progressed and the number of Falun Gong adherents passed 70 million, the Chinese state began to grow fearful of its influence. Ultimately, while the Chinese state accepts all religions as long as they are tightly controlled by its sprawling bureaucracy, it cannot accept a locus of loyalty beyond its influence. Hence, the violent and thorough suppression. But the Chinese government’s ire has not been confined to the Falun Gong. Indeed, based on the evidence available it would seem that the CCP especially despises the two youngest children among the Abrahamic faiths: Islam and Christianity.
In the far west of China lies the province of Xinjiang, bordering Mongolia, Kazakhstan, India and Pakistan. It does not form part of the traditional western view of China. Much of the population is ethnically Turkic rather than Asiatic, and its capital Urumqi is closer to Baghdad than it is to Beijing. The culture and religion there is a sore point for the CCP. Its autonomous status – largely a paper autonomy - is routinely debased and ignored. For almost half of the population, Islam is the dominating force in their lives. It must rankle the Central Committee that the people of this impoverished region turn to Mecca five times a day but never to Beijing. Perhaps for this reason the recent years have seen a concerted effort at the Sinicisation of this enormous far-flung province at the centre of the world.
Indeed, not only has the government militarised the provinces’ police force but it has also taken the demographically drastic step of literally bussing in hundreds of thousands of ethnic Han Chinese, the predominant ethnic group in China. Yet, this repression has only grown worse as satellite images and other evidence has since confirmed the existence of a growing number of concentration camps – what the government terms ‘re-education camps’ all across Xinjiang.
‘Cursed be he that removeth his neighbours landmark…’ (Deut. 27:17)
A BBC report in late 2019 uncovered the extent of this crackdown. Far out into the deserts of Western China endless rows of compounds and outhouses, surrounded by razor-wire fences and high walls have appeared like mirages. But these mirages don’t even feign to offer salvation – they are little more than concentration camps (in the original sense); camps built for the confinement of a particular ethno-religious group.
At first denying their very existence, the Chinese authorities are now hailing these camps as a uniquely successful experiment in fighting terrorism, claiming that the Uighurs who enter them do so of their own volition and undertake classes that not only improve their academic attainment but also increase their job prospects. Leaving aside the fact these are obvious lies, this still means that the 44 separate state detention facilities in Xinjiang alone are housing somewhere in the region of a million Uighurs. It remains for the Chinese state to explain exactly what these Uighurs are being re-educated to believe and in what manner this ‘re-education’ is being conducted. It seems highly dubious that the teaching methods resemble anything approaching international norms or even anything in keeping with human rights laws.
Indeed, the stories from within the camps only prove to confirm this assumption – with beatings and deprivation administered as correctives and punishment for failing to learn the elements of the curriculum which tutors insist must be committed to memory.
The truth of the matter is this: the Chinese state is attempting to first dilute and then destroy Uighur culture and religion.
Even relatively low-key displays of adherence to Islam, such as the recitation of a verse from the Qu’ran at a funeral can result in long-term incarceration. And this is not even the most insidious form that the new persecution has taken. Muslims have now joined their Christian brothers in the sad loss of their places of worship. Since 2016, the Chinese state has bulldozed more that two-dozen Muslim places of worship. Pilgrimage to a network of Sufi and other Islamic religious shrines across Xinjiang is central to the practice of Islam in a region where most believers are simply too impoverished to undertake the Hajj. The complete erasure of these buildings marks an assault on the very history of a people.
In a move that shows remarkable parallels with the ideologically motivated attacks on public representations of history in places as far removed as Palmyra and Oxford, the Chinese state appears to be attempting cultural genocide – an assault on the collective memory of a people; a nihilistic attempt to erase the soul of a people.
These actions cannot be de-contextualized from a past rich in examples of vicious and vindictive religious persecution. On September 8th, 1955, along with 200 of his brother priests, then-Archbishop of Shanghai, Ignatius Kung Pin-mei, was arrested and thrown into the jail cell of an interrogation centre. Held in solitary confinement for a number of months, Archbishop Kung was then brought to a packed Shanghai dog-racing stadium where he was forced to speak into a microphone to confess his ‘crimes’ against the state. But in an act of insane bravery, Kung shouted ‘Long live Christ the King! Long live the Pope!’. It is likely this sealed his fate and for the next thirty years he was kept under lock and key, often in solitary confinement and unable to receive letters, visitors or money to buy essentials. Secretly elevated to the rank of Cardinal by Pope Saint John Paul II, Kung was finally released in 1985.
The revered Cardinal died in exile in the United States in 2000, yet the persecution of Roman Catholics in China has only grown worse. Thousands of clergy and laity that refuse to join the state-controlled Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association are being imprisoned or prevented from worshipping. Despite a cowardly accord being signed between the Vatican and the Chinese state in September 2018, the PRC went so far as to destroy the two major Marian Shrines in China – Our Lady of Bliss in Guizhou and Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows in Shanxi. Thus, the persecution of the Church in the East shows no signs of abating.
This persecution of Catholics in China was met with a muted response internationally too. Worse by far than this indifference is the fact that the Vatican now seems to be cooperating in its own destruction. An accord signed by Pope Francis in 2018 has legitimised the phoney state organ of the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association and betrayed the faithful Catholics of the underground Catholic Church to their tormentors. Similarly, the detaining of up to a million Uighurs in what amount to concentration camps has only belatedly garnered global attention. From within the Muslim community itself, the response has been surprisingly anaemic. While bogus claims of blasphemy against Asia Bibi, a poor farm labourer in Pakistan evinced enormous protests and calls for the imposition of the death penalty, the mass incarceration of their co-religionists by an often violent and always coercive Communist police-state meets only with toothless condemnations from a patchwork of more or less insignificant Muslim community leaders. As the old legal idiom has it: ‘silence gives consent’, so is the Islamic world is consenting to perhaps the greatest persecution it has ever faced?
And it is not just voices in the Islamic world that remain silent. The West too has remained remarkably reluctant to criticise the CCP. To examine the origin of this reluctance would take at least another entire article, yet it is perhaps useful to use the present Coronavirus crisis in which we find ourselves as an example. The World Health Organisation and most Western media outlets have, since the very beginning of the pandemic, announced as a matter of primary importance a prohibition of mentioning the Chinese origins of the virus. It is deemed racist to point to the fact that the virus originated in the Chinese province of Hubei and was then covered-up by the Chinese state for some weeks, allowing the disease to spread around the world unchecked.
Now, conspiracy theories aside, it is unlikely that all these journalists are in the pay of the Chinese state. Still, they insist on dancing to the tune that Beijing plays, rather than paying rightful scepticism and scrutiny to such a serious act of wrongdoing. Instead of condemning the initial response of the CCP – and Xi Jinping in particular – they have run defensive editorials and sought to deflect any criticism of China by attacking either Donald Trump or Boris Johnson for their efforts to tackle the disease. This is eerily similar to the Western media’s reaction to China’s religious persecutions – they either seek to minimise their coverage of it or ignore it entirely. All of this reminds us of the attitude among Western intellectual circles to the Soviet regime under Stalin in the 1930’s: their acceptance of USSR narratives, wilful ignorance of the horrors of the regime and active campaigning against any critics of the regime.
We know that this rise in religious persecution goes hand-in-hand with a wider trend of increasing Chinese state power, or certainly a refinement of this power. On the one hand, you have an expansion and improvement of the technical aspects of control; eg. video surveillance, the Social Credit System, etc. And on the other hand, a push to retrench the power of the Communist Party, especially after Xi Jinping removed the previous Presidential two-term limit in 2018.
Despite this obvious slide into autocratic despotism and the evidence of simultaneous widespread repression within mainland China, the vast majority of the Western media and especially the Western political establishment appears to turn a blind eye. Indeed, many western journalists seem content to take Chinese narratives at face-value. And in the USA they spend a disproportionate amount of time attacking Donald Trump as the dictator he isn’t, rather than attacking Xi Jinping as the dictator he so very obviously is.
However, on a note of hopefulness, there remains a general attitude of resistance among the Chinese Catholics. Or at least a resistance to the overweening power of the state and its abuse of this power.
The light of faith cannot easily be extinguished. As Cardinal Zen said in a recent interview. ‘They take away your churches? You can no longer officiate? Go home, and pray with your family. Till the soil. Wait for better times. Go back to the catacombs. Communism isn’t eternal.’
