U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo blasted China’s egregious violations of religious liberty, telling journalists on Wednesday the Chinese Communist Party has been waging a “decades-long war on faith.”
In China, “state-sponsored repression against all religions continues to intensify,” Mr. Pompeo said during the official roll-out of the 2019 International Religious Freedom Report.
“The Chinese Communist Party is now ordering religious organizations to obey CCP leadership and infuse communist dogma into their teachings and practice of their faith,” Pompeo said. “The mass detentions of Uighurs in Xinjiang continues. So does the repression of Tibetans and Buddhists and Falun Gong and Christians.”
The Secretary of State recommended the religious freedom report as “evidence of our strong resolve to defend human dignity,” while noting that he had had the honor of meeting with several survivors of the Chinese Communist Party’s massacre at Tiananmen Square that took place 31 years ago.
“I also released a statement on China’s obscene attempts to take advantage of our domestic situation to press their political agenda, which I’m sure many of you saw,” Pompeo said.
“There is no equivalence between our two forms of government,” he continued. “We have the rule of law; China does not. We have free speech and embrace peaceful protest. They don’t. We defend religious freedom; as I just noted, China continues its decades-long war on faith.”
“The contrast couldn’t be more clear,” he concluded. “During the best of times, China ruthlessly imposes communism. And amidst the most difficult challenges the United States faces, we work to secure freedom for all.”
The international religious freedom report is similarly unsparing in its criticism of China’s communist government.
“Despite Chairman Xi Jinping’s decree that all members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) must be ‘unyielding Marxist atheists,’ the government continued to exercise control over religion and restrict the activities and personal freedom of religious adherents that it perceived as threatening state or CCP interests,” the report notes.