While many are excited to watch the global sporting competition taking place in Beijing, activists are taking this opportunity to raise awareness on China's atrocities and human rights violations against religious minorities such as Christians and Uyghurs. The head of a religious liberty watchdog lamented that China's persecution of Christians continues to escalate.
"It is getting worse," Open Doors USA president and CEO David Curry told the Christian Headlines. China placed 17th in this year's World Watch List, a countdown that ranks the world's worst countries where Christian persecution takes place. The report said that Christians in China are "facing increased pressure from the Chinese authorities" partially due to the "most oppressive and sophisticated" surveillance system in the world.
China's president Xi Jinping "knows that he cannot stamp out" Christians in the communist state, Curry said, as there are about 96 million of them. Curry explained, "So he is slowly strangling Christian faith, and he's doing it with high-tech surveillance. They watch, and they track everybody in what they're doing - through facial recognition and other things."
Curry likened it to having the IRS install a camera in every restaurant on every street in the U.S., which would make people "very concerned." In China, the exact same thing is happening. He said, "China has that plus other means of surveilling, and so they have the ability to track and to score behavior."
In China, Christians are required to attend government-approved churches that are heavily regulated, including their sermons that are edited by authorities. Many Christians are forced to attend illegal underground churches because of this control.
Curry explained the Chinese government's strategy as, "[These two citizens] are going to church too often. Therefore, they're not good communists. Therefore, they should lose their job. They can't fly - they're on a no-fly list. And all they did was go to Bible study. That's happening right now in China."
Curry also reported that youth aged 17 and below are not allowed to attend church. This forces parents to disciple them or sneak them into Bible study gatherings. He lamented that the children "may not be let into the college of their choice if they attend Bible study, they may not get jobs, the parents may lose their job. So there's repercussions for this sort of thing."
The COVID pandemic has also given the communist authorities to implement stricter rules about gathering. Once restrictions began to lift over time, "some churches were forced to remain closed...and were quietly phased out," Curry reported.
With the Beijing Olympic Games launching tomorrow, some religious groups are calling for a prayer boycott of the event. According to the National Review, The Voice of the Martyrs (VOM) is calling for people to commit to praying for Christians in China during the Winter Olympics. VOM is a nonprofit that advocates for persecuted Christians all over the world.
VOM's "Pray for China 2022" initiative calls for the faithful to pledge to "pray for our Christian brothers and sisters suffering persecution at the hands of China's Communist government." The pledge has been signed by 14,000 people from 117 countries so far.
