10/21/2024 China (International Christian Concern) — In a report published last week by the Hudson Insitute, researcher Nina Shea outlined an increased campaign of repression by the Chinese government against the Catholic church. The report concludes that China has persecuted leadership in the church and finds a pattern of increased persecution since the secretive 2018 China-Vatican agreement. 

While China does allow a form of the Catholic church to exist under intense government scrutiny, it has consistently worked to co-opt the state-sponsored church for government propaganda purposes.  

“The Chinese government’s persecution of the Chinese Catholic Church is targeted,” the report said, “against the hierarchs who resist Chinese Communist Party control over religious matters.” 

While the China-Vatican agreement has not been released, it reportedly reserved for the Vatican the right to appoint church leadership, including bishops. However, China has failed to uphold its end of that agreement, instead insisting unilaterally announcing several appointments and pressuring bishops to join the state-sponsored church. 

The report focuses on 10 bishops who have experienced particularly severe persecution since 2018, including “indefinite detention without due process, disappearances, open-ended security police investigations, banishments from their dioceses, or other impediments to their episcopal ministries including threats, surveillance, interrogation, and so-called reeducation.” 

The Chinese Communist Party takes a hostile stance against religion and persecutes groups attempting to practice their faith outside of the strict confines set by the Chinese government. Authorities regularly harass and shut down unregistered Christian gatherings, called house churches, arresting leaders and threatening those who wish to practice their faith freely. 

China has a long history of repressing religious expression, both inside and outside its borders. During the last several decades, it has been known to have forced abortions on its citizens, sterilized women without their consent, and murdered religious minorities to sell their organs on the black market. Christian home churches are an attempt to escape government scrutiny, but even they are often raided and their members arrested on charges of working against the interests of the state. 

China operates a concentrated campaign of persecution against its Muslim-majority Uyghur population. The recent genocide designation comes after detailed research by government and civil society organizations around the world documenting a vast network of concentration camps throughout the Xinjiang region used to oppress and indoctrinate Uyghur prisoners of conscience. 

China has even reached beyond its borders to suppress religion and silence opposition. Afghanistan recently discovered a Chinese spy ring operating out of Kabul. The ring worked with the Haqqani network, a Taliban-affiliated terrorist group, to hunt down Uyghurs and bring them back to China. China also recently stepped up its efforts to capture religious minorities through the more traditional route of formal extradition requests. 

China has come under harsh condemnation from human rights groups and governments around the world for its repression of political dissent and religious expression in Hong Kong, over which it reestablished control in the summer of 2020. 

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