China continues to persecute religious minorities, rewriting the Bible to make it conform to Chinese Marxist doctrine, and sending Uighurs Muslims to re-education camps, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said.

Speaking during a session at the Values Voter Summit 2020, held virtually, Pompeo said: “We watch today the challenge that Christians and Catholics have to practice their faith inside of China.”

“The Chinese Communist Party is trying to rewrite the Bible itself to ‘Sinicize’ the Christian doctrine,” he added. “That’s unacceptable. That will diminish the Chinese people. We want good things for them.”

China officially recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism. However, the US Department of State’s 2019 Report on International Religious Freedom: China notes that although “the constitution, which cites the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the guidance of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, states that citizens have freedom of religious belief,” it “limits protections for religious practice to “normal religious activities” and does not define “normal.””

It further notes: Only religious groups belonging to the five state-sanctioned “patriotic religious associations” representing these religions are permitted to register with the government and officially permitted to hold worship services. There continued to be reports of deaths in custody and that the government tortured, physically abused, arrested, detained, sentenced to prison, subjected to forced indoctrination in CCP ideology, or harassed adherents of both registered and unregistered religious groups for activities related to their religious beliefs and practices.”

In 2018, The Rev. Bob Fu, a former house church leader who emigrated to the US and founded persecution watchdog China Aid, told Congress that China’s government was enacting a five-year plan to “Sincize” Christianity.

One way they planned to do this was by “retranslating” the Old Testament, and providing new commentary on the New Testament to introduce Buddhist and socialist concepts, making them appear divinely inspired.

“There are outlines that the new Bible should not look Westernized and [should look] Chinese and reflect Chinese ethics of Confucianism and socialism,” Fu told The Christian Post after the hearing. “The Old Testament will be messed up. The New Testament will have new commentaries to interpret it.”
Pompeo also slammed China for “trying to eliminate anyone who is not Han Chinese.”

According to the State Department report, “The US government estimates that since April 2017, the [Chinese] government arbitrarily detained more than one million Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Hui, and members of other Muslim groups, as well as Uighur Christians, in specially built or converted internment camps in Xinjiang and subjected them to forced disappearance, political indoctrination, torture, physical and psychological abuse, including forced sterilization and sexual abuse, forced labor, and prolonged detention without trial because of their religion and ethnicity. There were reports of individuals dying as a result of injuries sustained during interrogations.

I believe and President Trump believes that absent of religions freedom, the lives of people around the world are very difficult,” Pompeo said. “Authoritarianism almost always follows the oppression of religion. Pushing religion out of the public square drives oppression, drives authoritarian regimes. And so we have made that a priority.”

He added: “The Chinese Communist Party is seeking hegemony across the world, and we have an obligation to do our best to make sure that the freedoms that we value and the capacity to exercise our human rights aren’t trampled upon by whether that’s their predatory economic activity or their military might or their misinformation campaigns here in the US.

“We work hard to make sure that we maximize religious freedom for every human being all across the world.”