Beijing Ramps Up Repression of Faith, Labeling Believers as Carriers of ‘Thought Viruses’: US Religious Freedom Official

Chinese Catholic worshippers kneel and pray during Palm Sunday Mass during the Easter Holy Week at an underground church on April 9, 2017. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

The Chinese Communist Party has ramped up its repression of all faiths while labeling believers as people “affected with thought viruses,” according to U.S. religious freedom officials.

“Instead of making improvements in the Chinese government’s treatment of people of faith, people of belief, they have been ratcheting up and turning this regime into a genocidal regime,” Nury Turkel, the chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), told The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet NTD.

“They have been ruthlessly persecuting religious groups, including the Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Christians, [and] Falun Gong practitioners,” he said, adding that the human rights situation and religious freedom situation in China has “significantly deteriorated since last year.”

Nury Turkel, then the vice chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, speaks at a virtual hearing on China’s religious freedom violations on Dec. 14, 2022. (USCIRF/screenshot via NTD)

The deterioration manifests in several ways, including the sinicization of religion and the elevation of religious practices “to the national security level,” according to Turkel.

“The Chinese government publicly openly labels people of faith into some sort of people who have a mental illness, who were affected with thought viruses,” he said.

Uptick in Persecution of Falun Gong

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline involving meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the core principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. The practice gained popularity in China during the 1990s, with estimates putting the number of adherents at 70 million to 100 million at the height of its popularity.

The communist regime, fearing that the number of practitioners posed a threat to its control, initiated a sweeping campaign aimed at eradicating the practice. The campaign against Falun Gong, which the regime began in July 1999, remains active.

Millions of Falun Gong adherents have been detained in prisons, labor camps, and other facilities. Hundreds of thousands have been subjected to torture while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.

The USCIRF’s 2023 annual report (pdf), released on May 1, cites 7,331 cases of harassment and arrest of Falun Gong adherents, 633 prison sentences, and 172 deaths because of the persecution.

Pang Xun, a 30-year-old radio host for a state-owned television network in southwestern China, died in December, about one year after his arrest. He had been sentenced to five years for handing out flyers raising awareness about the persecution campaign. His family reported that his body was covered in bruises and that there were traces of blood on his lips, chest, and legs.

“The Falun Gong practitioners have been subjected to all forms of torture, physical abuse, hospitalizations under the guise of them being mentally ill,” Turkel said, noting that the regime has subjected Falun Gong adherents to forced organ harvesting for more than a decade.

“This issue is gaining momentum,” he said, citing the U.S. House’s passage of the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act.

“At the end of the day, the Chinese leadership would need to recognize that people of faith are actually not a threat to the society,” but rather a contributing force to a healthy society, he said.

“The countries that respect religious freedom naturally become a harmonious and peaceful society. The country or regime that represses religious freedom creates resentment and, to an extent, lays the foundation for violent activities.”

Turkel added that China’s regime has been “investing so much time and energy and also brutally repressing religious practitioners.”

“That has to stop,” he said.

Clampdown on Democracy in Hong Kong

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) (R) speaks with former Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation's Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom award ceremony honoring Cardinal Joseph Zen in Washington on Jan. 28, 2019. (Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

Former Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), the current commissioner of the USCIRF, highlighted China’s clampdown on democracy in Hong Kong during an interview with The Epoch Times.

He pointed to the arrest of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai, who was sentenced to five years and nine months in jail for fraud after being convicted of breaching a lease contract for his newspaper’s headquarters last December. He was charged under the national security law imposed by Beijing in 2020.

The commissioner also cited the case of Joshua Wong, founder of the pro-democracy party Demosisto.

The young activist has been sentenced and jailed many times since 2018 on charges that include unlawful assembly, contempt of court, participating in and inciting others to participate in an unlawful assembly, and violating Hong Kong’s no masking regulation. The pre-COVID law made it illegal to wear a face covering at a protest or assembly. Wong was arrested in October 2019 for participating in an “unauthorized” protest against the law.

In early March 2022, he was charged with subversion of state power for participating in unofficial opposition primaries before the 2020 Legislative Council election.

Most recently, on April 17, he was sentenced to three months in prison for “doxxing” a police officer who shot an unarmed protester during 2019 antigovernment protests.

Another example is former Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen. Last year, the nonagenarian Roman Catholic cardinal was arrested and found guilty over a fund to help pro-democracy protesters who were in financial need.

Wolf said that had the Hong Kong authorities sent him to jail, it “would be almost a death sentence,” given Zen’s advanced age.

“The human rights conditions in China are very, very bleak,” he said.

China Lobbying

The USCIRF annual report notes that the Chinese regime and state-owned entities such as Hikvision, which has been accused of complicity in abuses in Xinjiang, have hired former U.S. officials and former members of Congress to lobby on their behalf.

In one example, former Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) registered to lobby for a Chinese firm in 2021 but decided to deregister hours after her registration was made public by the media.

Wolf says such a practice is unacceptable.

“You can’t have lobbyists and law firms representing China when they’re committing genocide, when they’re taking organs out of Falun Gong followers, when they’re arresting Catholic bishops, Catholic cardinals, when they’re literally destroying democracy in Hong Kong, when they’re stealing our trade secrets,” he said.

“When you have your organ taken out, you’re dead. You’re dead. And so how can you represent a country that’s doing that? It’s just time to change.”

At the height of the Cold War in the 1980s, no reputable firm would want to take on the Soviet Union as a client, and that shouldn’t happen today, Wolf said.

He cited lyrics from “The Boxer,” written by Simon & Garfunkel in 1969: “Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”

“You can’t disregard what’s taking place in the Catholic Church, the Protestant church, human rights dissidents, the Uyghur Muslims, Tibetans, the Falun Gong, and the people of Hong Kong, and potentially, the people of Taiwan. So it’s now time for the Congress and for the administration to pass a ban prohibiting this activity from taking place,” he said.

A Whole-of-Government Approach

To address the “present and clear danger” facing religious communities in China, the USCIRF chair has suggested that the U.S. government adopt a whole-of-government approach, “elevating and integrating religious freedom as a key strategic objective” in U.S. foreign policy toward China, and raising religious freedom concerns in all bilateral dialogues and engagement.

Turkel called on the U.S. government to “impose all the tools at our disposal in our toolbox to expand the sanctioning over to the Chinese entities and officials that have been responsible for human rights abuses.”

That includes the United Front Work department, which works to “neutralize” sources of potential opposition to the regime, as well as the public security and state security apparatus.

The USCIRF report also seeks a concerted effort by like-minded governments, allies, and partners to establish a U.N. Commission of Inquiry to address the ongoing worsening religious persecution in China.

Turkel cited the regime’s transnational repression activities, such as the “significant number of satellite police stations specifically established and function to silence the critics of the Chinese Communist Party.”

“That has to stop, and those who have been designing, carrying out these activities need to be held to account,” he said.