Susan Crabtree
Susan Crabtree is RealClearPolitics’ national political correspondent.
For five months in a Chinese detention center, the pastor had no name. He was T07. His senior pastor, Wang Yi, was T01.
“They just made me reduce my name to a number,” Pastor Ding Shuqi of Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church said of his imprisonment following the CCP’s crackdown on the church in 2018. Ding was speaking in public for the first time since arriving in the United States last year.
Fellow inmates warned him that if the detention center kept no record of his name, he could die inside and no one outside would ever know.
“I don’t know if that was true,” he said. “But it felt true.”
Chinese police had detained Ding during raids on church gatherings multiple times until he was able to escape to the United States last year. But the persecution against his church, a prominent Reformed Presbyterian underground Christian church based in Sichuan province, hasn’t stopped.
Just days before, Ding said Chengdu police arrested an elder and another member of his church for organizing a reading group for elderly neighbors. Ding said the book was called Walking Through Suffering. In China, he said, reading an unauthorized Christian book with others is labeled “organizing illegal religious activity.”
Ding was one of more than a dozen speakers at a gathering at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC, last week organized by the International Religious Freedom Summit and its partners. The event, “CCP Oppression in America and China,” was deliberately scheduled days before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival for White House talks with President Donald Trump.
The talks, set for Thursday, are expected to focus largely on trade and artificial intelligence. Top religious freedom advocates also want Trump to press Xi on the plight of several religious freedom prisoners.
“The Chinese government is at war with faith, and they’re at war with us,” said Sam Brownback, former Kansas governor, senator, and former US ambassador for international religious freedom who co-chairs an annual religious liberty summit. “We respectfully ask [Trump] to bring up the topic of religious freedom in his upcoming summit with President Xi. We ask that the people incarcerated in China because of their faith be set free.”
During Xi’s visit, the advocates aren’t just talking about the need for China to release several prisoners of conscience.
On Wednesday evening as Xi arrives in Washington, DC, another group involved with religious freedom advocacy, the Human Rights Foundation, plans to project large-scale images of eight prisoners of conscience in China onto prominent buildings and locations in Washington and call for their release.
The images featured include: Joshua Wong, a student and activist who has been imprisoned twice under Hong Kong’s National Security Law; Owen Chow, a legislator and activist, imprisoned in the “Hong Kong 47” national security case; Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur professor serving a life sentence for his advocacy for Uyghur rights; Gulshan Abbas, a Uyghur physician, imprisoned in what is widely understood as retaliation for her sister’s advocacy abroad; Gao Zhen, an artist arrested in 2024 for art confronting authoritarian rule; and Pastors Wang Lin, Gao Yingjia, and Gao Quanfu, church pastors imprisoned for their faith.
A precedent in the room
The advocates have reason to believe their controversial pitch can work. Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri, founder of Beijing’s unregistered Christian Zion Church, was sitting in the audience last week at the religious freedom advocacy event. Trump raised Jin’s case with Xi at their May summit in Beijing, and Jin was freed weeks later. He had been held since Oct 9 and was reunited in Los Angeles with his wife, daughter, and two sons for the first time in years.
David Trimble, president of the Religious Freedom Institute, thanked the Trump administration for “bringing Pastor Ezra Jin home” and asked the president to press the case for more releases. Eight Zion Church leaders remain imprisoned, facing trumped-up fraud and illegal business charges centered mainly on church offerings and seminary tuition.
Jin was not the only prisoner Trump raised in May. At the Beijing summit, the president also asked Xi to free Jimmy Lai, the Catholic pro-democracy campaigner and Hong Kong publisher, but on the flight home Trump told reporters that Lai’s case was a “tough one.” A Hong Kong court sentenced Lai to 20 years in February after convicting him under the national security law Beijing imposed on the city.
Last week, Lai’s son Sebastien appealed for his father’s release on humanitarian grounds before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. He thanked Trump and lawmakers of both parties for their support, noted that his father will have spent six years in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison by year’s end, and asked Chinese authorities to consider compassionate release for a 78-year-old man.
His message to Xi, he said, was simple. “My father poses no threat,” Sebastien Lai told the hearing. “His imprisonment makes him a symbol of injustice; his death in prison would be a disgrace. Let Jimmy Lai come home to his family and let him sit beside his daughter in her hardest moment.”
‘Dragon holding the pillar’
Eight years ago, an overnight raid on the Early Rain Covenant church led to more than 100 arrests, he said. Thirty-eight members were placed in criminal detention. For two weeks, Ding said, he was forced into a stress position guards called “dragon holding the pillar.” He had no lawyer, no contact with his family and no Bible. Two inmates were assigned to watch him, and he was forbidden to speak.
“My story is not special,” he said, asking the audience to remember three church members detained since January. “Lots of Christian leaders wake up every morning, not knowing if today is the day the police will come for them.”
A son waiting on a passport
Wang Yi, prisoner T01, has been in custody since December 2018 and is due for release in 2027 after serving a nine-year sentence for inciting subversion of state power. Corey Jackson, president of the Luke Alliance, spoke on behalf of the family.
According to Jackson, Wang Yi’s wife, Jiang Rong, and their son have lived under house arrest for seven and a half years, with police stationed outside their home every day. Authorities set up a police station inside their apartment community to watch the family, he said, and they censor any religious references in all correspondence sent to the home – even between husband and wife. Prison visits come only every 16 to 36 months, and are closely monitored, and the couple cannot speak about God or even discuss their son’s future.
That son, Shuya, known in English as Joshua, is now a high school senior who wants to go college abroad but Chinese authorities have told his mother he must wait until his father is released. He is now applying to colleges in the United States and elsewhere, with early admission decisions due in October and November.
“If they deny him, you will be hearing a lot more from me and others at Luke Alliance about it,” Jackson said.
‘When will my mother come home?’
Several speakers focused on what advocates call transnational repression: Beijing’s reach into the lives of people abroad.
Ziba Murat, a Uyghur American, recalled calling her mother on Sept 10, 2018, as she did every day, while holding her three-month-old daughter. The phone rang and rang but her mother never picked up. She had been abruptly detained by Chinese authorities. Six days earlier, Murat’s aunt, Rushan Abbas, an American citizen, had spoken at the Hudson Institute in Washington about the persecution of Uyghurs.
Her mother, Dr Gulshan Abbas, a retired physician, is now 64 and serving a 20-year sentence imposed after a secret trial.
“She is not a terrorist. She is not a political activist. She is a doctor,” Murat said.
“My daughter is eight years old. She has never hugged her grandmother,” she added. “I will continue to ask the same question I have asked for more than eight years. When will my mother come home? I hope the answer is soon.”
A bipartisan resolution authored by Sens Ted Cruz of Texas and Dick Durbin of Illinois, urging Trump to prioritize Dr Abbas’ release in talks with Xi, passed unanimously in both chambers this spring.
Others described scenarios in which China’s transnational pressure appears to have hit closer to home. Purdue University sociologist Yang Fenggang, a US citizen since 2000, said he was removed this summer as keynote speaker at a US Catholic scholarly conference in Houston after what he described as Chinese officials telling the organization’s board chair not to include his name in the program.
Steve Lance, Washington bureau chief of NTD Television, a television network founded in New York by Chinese Americans and followers of the spiritual movement Falun Gong, described cases in which he said Beijing tried to turn American lawsuits, regulators, and media coverage against Shen Yun Performing Arts, a group founded by Falun Gong practitioners.
William Huang, a Falun Gong practitioner and former Tsinghua University doctoral student, held up a Spiderman toy that he said was the kind of product he was forced to make during five years in a Chinese slave labor camp, working 16 to 18 hours a day.
Huang, who said he was subjected to electric-baton shocks and months of sleep deprivation, also voiced concern about blood tests he was given while in custody, which he later came to fear were linked to forced organ harvesting. He cited a new report from AI company Anthropic, which described a China-based religious affairs intelligence operation targeting Catholic, Tibetan Buddhist, Falun Gong, and Taiwanese Christian communities.
‘Who decides?’
Tibetan advocates framed their concerns around religious succession. Ryan Fioresi, executive director of the International Campaign for Tibet, told of two young Tibetans who secretly studied at a monastery because they were barred from becoming monks. When police came to detain them in January, he said, they ran to a river and jumped. Both drowned, he said, noting that the outside world learned of it in September.
He called the 1995 disappearance of Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, the Panchen Lama and second-highest spiritual leader in Tibetan Buddhism, a “rehearsal” for Beijing’s plans to control the succession of the Dalai Lama.
“Who decides whether a young Tibetan may become a monk?” he asked. “For the Chinese Communist Party, the answer is simple: The party alone decides.”
Piero Tozzi of the America First Policy Institute described how far CCP persecution reaches: “Our gathering here violates [China’s] ethnic unity law.”
What Washington can do
After Brownback urged Trump to raise religious freedom and seek the release of believers imprisoned for their faith, he noted that Chinese authorities have detained 10 Catholic bishops for refusing to join the state-controlled Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association.
If the persecution continues, Brownback argued that the United States should strip China of permanent normal trade relations, a preferential legal status the US Congress gave Beijing in 2000. He also urged the US to back the United Nations’ call for China to repeal the ethnic unity law, national legislation that codifies Beijing’s approach to its 56 officially recognized ethnic groups, shifting official policy from regional autonomy toward forced assimilation. Tibetan religious freedom advocates are pressing Xi for access to the Panchen Lama, as well as the ability to defend Tibetans’ right to choose their own religious leaders. Huang, for his part, called for passage of a Falun Gong Protection Act, a bill targeting state-sponsored forced organ harvesting in China, which is now before the Senate.
Brownback said China’s record religious persecution should be a central, not side issue, in any trade, national security, or AI negotiations.
“The Chinese Communist Party fears religious freedom more than they fear our aircraft carriers or nuclear weapons,” he asserted. “This is something [that] just goes right at the heart of the control in their system.”
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
