After media reports on the ‘brainwashing’ camps for Uighur Muslims, a Christian human rights organisation said the news was the ‘tip of the iceberg’.
Reports from China indicate Christians are facing the worst persecution since the Cultural Revolution.
A BBC Panorama programme in mid-November saw China claim the camps are for voluntary re-education and training. But documents revealed on the programme indicate a brainwashing regime that has been likened to the Nazis, where detainees are controlled with iron discipline and kept in order with electric shock batons.
According to the BBC, about a million mainly Muslim Uighurs have been detained without trial.
According to Release partner Bob Fu: ‘In China’s northwestern Xinjiang region, between 1-3 million people from Turkic minority groups have been rounded up and imprisoned in internment camps. Camp survivors have reported starvation, forced labour and torture.
‘If a child’s parents have been taken to the camps, then the child is placed in an orphanage and forced to speak Mandarin instead of their native language, effectively erasing their identity.’
A leaked Communist Party memo showed that, far from being places of ‘voluntary retraining,’ China’s internment camps are designed to break the will of detainees and control their minds. Human Rights Watch describe them as places of ‘psychological torture’. The leaked memo calls for ‘discipline and punishment… repentance and confession and full video surveillance.’
Leading human rights lawyer Ben Emmerson told the BBC the camps were designed for ‘mass brainwashing… directed at an entire ethnic community… to wipe the Muslim Uighurs of Xinjiang as a separate cultural group off the face of the Earth.’
Crackdown on Christians
Although the media spotlight was on China’s treatment of Muslims, the authorities are also cracking down on Christians.
‘Persecution has been rising since 2018, when China imposed tough new religious restrictions,’ says Release CEO Paul Robinson. ‘Freedom of faith is guaranteed under Article 36 of the Chinese Constitution. But in practice, the authorities bulldoze churches, tear down crosses and imprison pastors. Lawyers who speak up for them in the courts simply disappear. It used to be just the unofficial churches that were targeted; today China is pulling down state-registered churches and persecuting their pastors.
Ban on prayer meetings
‘The authorities have banned Christians from holding prayer meetings in their homes. Hosts risk having their houses demolished or taken from them. Christians are banned from sharing religious messages with anyone under 18.’
In July, officials raided a church in China’s southern Guizhou province. When churchgoers asked what law they were supposed to have broken, they were told: ‘It is illegal for you to teach your children to sing hymns and to spread [Christian] thoughts.’
And in echoes of the all-pervading video surveillance in the Uighur camps, China is installing face-recognition cameras in churches to spy on congregations and preachers. ‘Is it any wonder the people of Hong Kong have just voted overwhelmingly for democracy?’ asked Robinson. ‘When Hong Kong residents look at mainland China they fear they are seeing into their future.’
