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

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 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 NTD in an interview. “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, 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) Turkel, who spoke on May 1, after USCIRF published its 2023 annual report (pdf), said that the deterioration manifests in several ways, including the sinicization of religion and “elevating the religious practices of individuals into the national security level.” “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 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 started in July 1999 and continues to the present. 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 report cited 7,331 cases of harassment and arrest of Falun Gong adherents, 633 prison sentences, and 72 deaths because of the persecution. One of the adherents who died is Pang Xun, a 30-year-old radio host for a state-owned television network in southwestern China. He was sentenced to five years for handing out flyers raising awareness about the persecution campaign. In December, about a year after his arrest, he was dead. There were bruises and traces of blood on his lip, 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,” said Turkel, noting that the regime has subjected Falun Gong adherents to a more than a decade-long practice of forced organ harvesting. “This issue is gaining momentum,” he said, citing the House 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 actually not a threat to the society” but 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,” he said. He added that China’s regime has been “investing so much time and energy and also brutally repressing religious practitioners, that has to stop.” 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.) is the current commissioner of the USCIRF. In an interview with The Epoch Times, Wolf highlighted China’s clampdown on democracy in Hong Kong. Wolf pointed to the arrest of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai. Lai 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, the founder of the pro-democracy party Demosisto. The young activist has been sentenced and jailed many times since 2018 on charges including 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 fac

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

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) 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 NTD in an interview.

“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.”

Epoch Times Photo
Nury Turkel, 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)

Turkel, who spoke on May 1, after USCIRF published its 2023 annual report (pdf), said that the deterioration manifests in several ways, including the sinicization of religion and “elevating the religious practices of individuals into the national security level.”

“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 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 started in July 1999 and continues to the present.

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 report cited 7,331 cases of harassment and arrest of Falun Gong adherents, 633 prison sentences, and 72 deaths because of the persecution.

One of the adherents who died is Pang Xun, a 30-year-old radio host for a state-owned television network in southwestern China. He was sentenced to five years for handing out flyers raising awareness about the persecution campaign. In December, about a year after his arrest, he was dead. There were bruises and traces of blood on his lip, 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,” said Turkel, noting that the regime has subjected Falun Gong adherents to a more than a decade-long practice of forced organ harvesting.

“This issue is gaining momentum,” he said, citing the House 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 actually not a threat to the society” but 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,” he said.

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

Clampdown on Democracy in Hong Kong

Epoch Times Photo
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.) is the current commissioner of the USCIRF. In an interview with The Epoch Times, Wolf highlighted China’s clampdown on democracy in Hong Kong.

Wolf pointed to the arrest of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai. Lai 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, the founder of the pro-democracy party Demosisto.

The young activist has been sentenced and jailed many times since 2018 on charges including 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 prior to 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 anti-government protests.

Wolf also spoke of former Hong Kong bishop Cardinal Joseph Zen. Last year, the Catholic cardinal was arrested and found guilty over a fund to help pro-democracy protesters.

The Hong Kong authorities “prosecuted Cardinal Zen who’s ninety years old. And if they sent him to jail, probably that would be almost a death sentence,” Wolf told The Epoch Times.

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

Stop Lobbying on Behalf of China

The USCIRF annual report states that “the Chinese government and state-owned entities such as Hikvision—accused of complicity in abuses in the Uyghur region, known as Xinjiang—hired former U.S. officials and former members of Congress to lobby on their behalf, undermining religious freedom and related human rights in China.”

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.

In Wolf’s opinion, 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 so 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 neither should it happen today, said Wolf.

He cited lyrics from The Boxer written by Paul Simon in 1997, which says “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.”

A Whole-of-Government Approach

To address the clear and present danger facing religious communities in China, USCIRF 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 calls 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 pressed for 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.

“We also wanted the U.S. government to address, along with allies and partners, the transnational repression of the Chinese Communist Party, [which] have been engaging in malign activities within the United States and Europe,” the human rights advocate said, referring to the dozens of satellite police stations specifically established to silence the critics of the communist regime, according to a 2022 report by Safeguard Defenders.

“There are a number of key recommendations that we have made to the United States government that are in line with our values … with our global leadership, and also in line with the very first human right which is religious freedom,” Turkel said.

Harry Lee, Aldgra Fredly, Connie Yuen, and Summer Lawson contributed to this report.