China’s Orwellian War on Religion
“Concentration camps,” electronic surveillance and
persecution are used to repress millions of people of faith.
Opinion
Columnist
· May 22, 2019
·
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Let’s be blunt: China is accumulating a
record of Orwellian savagery toward religious people.
At times under Communist Party rule,
repression of faith has eased, but now it is unmistakably worsening. China is
engaging in internment, monitoring or persecution of Muslims, Christians and
Buddhists on a scale almost unparalleled by a major nation in
three-quarters of a century.
Maya Wang of Human Rights Watch argues
that China under Xi Jinping “poses a threat to global freedoms unseen
since the end of World War II.”
To its credit, China has overseen
extraordinary progress against poverty, illiteracy and sickness. The
bittersweet result is that Chinese people of faith are more likely than several
decades ago to see their children survive and go to university — but also to be
detained.
China’s
roundup of Muslims in internment camps — which a Pentagon official called concentration camps —
appears to be the largest such internment of people on the basis of religion
since the collection of Jews for the Holocaust. Most estimates are that about
one million Muslims have been detained in China’s Xinjiang region, although the
Pentagon official suggested that the actual number may be closer to three
million.
Muslims reportedly are being ordered to
eat pork or drink alcohol, against their religious principles. China has also
offered “free health checks” that are used to get fingerprints, photos and DNA samplesfrom Muslims for a
surveillance database.
While China hasn’t established concentration
camps for Christians, it has harassed congregations,
closed or destroyed churches, in some areas barred children from attending services
and last year detained Christians about 100,000 times, according to China Aid,
a religious watchdog group (if one person was detained five times over the
year, that would count as five detentions).
China has tried to install monitoring cameras in
churches, including on the pulpit aimed
at the congregation. With China’s facial recognition software, that would
enable security authorities to identify who shows up at services.
The country is also experimenting with
even more Orwellian technology, including the Ministry of Public
Security’s mass surveillance system and a “Social Credit System” that
can create a blacklist for those who don’t pay debts or who cheat on taxes,
break traffic rules or attend an unofficial church.
Blacklisted
individuals can be barred from buying plane or train tickets: Although the
system is still being tested in
different ways at the local level, last year it barred people 17.5 million times from purchasing air tickets,
the government reported. It could also be used to deny people
promotions or assign a ring tone to their phonewarning
callers that they are untrustworthy.
The system isn’t focused on religious
people, and some argue that it isn’t as menacing as it is sometimes portrayed,
but it’s easy to see how the Social Credit System could punish faith
communities — especially if it is integrated with a mass surveillance network.
The Xinjiang mass surveillance system explicitly targets people who
collect money for a mosque “with enthusiasm.”
Through it all, Chinese people of faith
have shown enormous courage. One Catholic bishop, James Su Zhimin, 87,
has been detained by
China since he led a religious procession in 1996. Counting previous
detentions, he has spent a total of four decades in prisons and labor camps.
The paradox is that for half a century
before the Communist revolution in 1949, Western missionaries traveled around
China, operated schools and orphanages and had negligible impact on the country
— yet these days missionaries are banned, ministers are persecuted and
Christianity has grown prodigiously. There are many tens of millions of
Christians, mostly Protestants, with some estimates as high as 100 million.
Some are part of officially recognized
churches that pledge loyalty to the government, but most are part of the
underground church that has been the main target of the crackdown.
Tibetan Buddhists have likewise
suffered brutally. Most extraordinary is the fate of the Panchen Lama, the No.
2 figure in Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama.
The previous Panchen Lama died in early 1989. Following tradition, Tibetans
in 1995 chose a 6-year-old boy as the next incarnation of the Panchen Lama.
Shortly afterward, the Chinese authorities kidnapped the boy and his family,
and they haven’t been seen since. In his place, the Chinese helped pick a
different person as a rival Panchen Lama. (When the Dalai Lama dies, something
similar may happen, so at that point there would be two Dalai Lamas and two
Panchen Lamas.)
The true Panchen Lama,
once the world’s youngest political prisoner, has now apparently been detained
for 24 years, along with his entire family, through reformist Chinese leaders
and repressive ones.
We can’t transform China, but we can
apply levers like targeted sanctions on individuals and companies participating
in abuses of freedom — plus we can certainly do more to speak up for prisoners
of conscience of all faiths. It’s as important to push for their freedom as to
seek more soybean exports.
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