By William Z. Nardi, Read the original here.
A roundup of stories of religious discrimination in China
Over the past decade, rash optimism that China was finally moving past the era of former Communist dictator Mao Tse-tung’s influence has given way to president Xi Jinping’s reconsolidating his power. One of the major ways he’s done that: persecuting religious believers.
Demanding psychological submission to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), teachers in China are feeding school-age children intensely anti-Christian propaganda, building on the new Regulations on Religious Affairs that ban anyone under the age of 18 from entering a church.
Bitter Winter, an Italy-based publication reporting on Chinese persecution of religious groups, published anonymous accounts of children returning home from school and chastising parents for their faith. Their kids are told that Christianity is a “xie jiao” (Chinese for “cult”) and that if they love their parents, they will warn them not to participate.
“If you believe in it, you will leave home and not take care of me. You might set yourself on fire, too,” one young boy told his mother.
In his textbook titled “Morality and Society,” his mother found lessons on how to resist the xie jiao. She began hiding any religious symbols in her house, reports Bitter Winter, but one day she accidentally left out a religious pamphlet. Her son proceeded to take a knife from the kitchen, aggressively stabbing it several times.
Chinese policy dictates that anyone holding religious activities outside of a church will be arrested. That means no church camps, no Bible studies, no youth groups, no orphanages, no Church-run health clinics, and since 2017, police have begun disrupting funerals for any faith, including native Taoists, Catholic News Agency reported.
Mosher, author of Bully of Asia, explains that the Chinese officials do not simply want to contain Christianity; they ultimately want to eradicate it. They see human rights as a Western plot to subvert their control of the country, centered on the growing cult of personality around Xi Jinping. This is referred to as China’s campaign to “sinicize” religion, meaning that all citizens must convincingly profess their ultimate loyalty to the Communist Party — or else.
One man told the Guardian that he had been verbally abused and interrogated for hours, deprived of sleep and food. Others are being forced to sleep in uncomfortable positions, kept in isolation, and even tortured with electric shocks, simply for wearing a hijab or displaying other Muslim symbols on their clothes. Furthermore, the Guardian reported, police force Muslims to undergo “health checks” which amount to collecting fingerprints, voice recordings, face scans, and blood-type and DNA samples.
Until last month, mass collection of biometric data was regarded as an Orwellian fear tactic. That is, until an independent London-based tribunal of international legal and medical experts confirmed that it’s used for mass organ-harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
“Chinese hospitals promise that they can deliver hearts, livers, kidneys, and corneas of matching blood type and size in two weeks. The surgeries can be scheduled in advance, which suggests hospitals know exactly when the ‘donors’ are going to die. By contrast, America has a highly developed voluntary organ-donation system, and recipients typically have to wait hundreds of days,” the report added.
“You used to be only able to make a $150,000 dollars transplanting an organ, but now that life-support machines exist, they can hook up a person until all their organs are sold, making upwards of $700,000,” Mosher told National Review.
