The US State Department’s annual report on international religious freedom has said China continues to be “one of the worst abusers of human rights and religious freedom in the world”.
“They continue to engage in genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs. They are also continuing their repression of Tibetan Buddhists, Protestants, Catholics, Falun Gong, and Hui Muslims,” a senior State Department official said. The official added that the department has a number of tools, such as financial sanctions, visa restrictions, and collaboration with international allies around the world in response to the regime’s treatment of religious minorities, while briefing the media on May 15.
“We continue to see the situation worsening, and we will continue to use all the tools that I described to do everything that we can to help the people of China as they face repression at the hands of the government.”
The report features a string of stories of believers struggling to survive under the regime’s unceasing efforts to suppress their faith. The report said that Gao Heng of the Guangzhou Bible Reform Church was secretly tried and sentenced in February on charges of “provoking trouble and picking quarrels” for holding up a sign reading “pray for the country” at a subway station in 2021. Details of the sentence remain unclear.
In March 2022, authorities arrested Chen Wenshang in Hengyang City of Hunan Province in central China for publicly preaching the gospel. He was arrested six times in 2021. The Human Rights Without Frontiers organisation estimates that Chinese authorities imprisoned 2,649 individuals for exercising their freedom of belief, including more than 2,100 adherents of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, 23 Muslims, 40 Christians, and 20 Buddhists. The report noted that because of a lack of transparency over religious persecution, some estimates go as high as 10,000 or more.
Minghui.org, a website that gathers firsthand materials about the regime’s campaign, said a total of 172 adherents have died of persecution, while 446 Falun Gong practitioners received sentencing varying from six months to 15 years due to their faith. Several other imprisoned adherents died in custody after police denied them medical parole.
“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has mastered the art of religious persecution,” said Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), citing the Beijing regime’s “acts of genocide against Uyghurs and other ethnic groups.”
“In addition to its persistent harassment of Falun Gong practitioners, the CCP has recently implemented bans on domestically generated online religious content and prohibited overseas organisations from operating virtual religious information services in China,” he said in a statement after the release of the State Department report.
The United States remains “deeply concerned about human rights abuses taking place within the PRC (People’s Republic of China),” Vedant Patel, Principal Deputy Spokesperson for the State Department. The United States was among the first nations to decline to send diplomatic representation to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics over the regime’s ongoing human rights abuses. In 2022, the State Department sanctioned three current and former Chinese officials for human rights violations in Tibet and for arbitrary detention of Falun Gong adherents in Chongqing, the megacity in China’s southwestern region. “Human rights are something that we raise quite regularly in our bilateral engagements, and we will continue to do so,” Patel said.