China is not only carrying out genocide against a religious minority, the Uyghur Muslims, but President Xi Jinping views all people of faith as a direct threat and is trying to insert himself in the “role of God” over all people of faith in China, a top House Republican has asserted.

Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, criticized Xi and his government for rewriting versions of the Bible distributed in certain areas of China and replacing the 10 Commandments with Xi quotes warning against the “infiltration of Western ideology” in government-sanctioned Christian churches.

“[Xi] has no problem with the First Commandment ‘to have no other gods before me’ as long as he and the CCP are playing God,” Gallagher said during a Wednesday roundtable on religious persecution in China. “[China’s] constitution states that citizens enjoy the freedom of religious belief, but of course, in the CCP definition, it’s a much closer resemblance to what we would call oppression.”

Gallagher organized the forum, attended by religious leaders from Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist faiths, and several church leaders who fled persecution in China. His stated aim is to shine a spotlight on China’s religious crackdown on people of all religious beliefs, which he says is not getting the attention it deserves in the U.S. and other countries around the world.

Other religious freedom and human rights experts said the Chinese government is stepping up its religious oppression, reprising the CCP’s long history of trying to control every aspect of its citizens’ behavior, down to their most intimate spiritual beliefs.

“China’s repressive actions do not discriminate,” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council and a former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, or USCIRF. “All religious groups are viewed as a threat to the Chinese regime – whether it’s Christians who are monitored through artificial intelligence … or the Falun Gong who have been subjected to unbelievably brutal treatment.”

The Falun Gong and Uyghurs have been forced into labor camps and hundreds of thousands have been killed for their organs in what has become a billion-dollar involuntary organ-transplant industry in China.

For decades, U.S. policymakers more concerned with trade than human rights turned a blind eye to evidence of China’s gruesome human rights abuses, Perkins said, adding that this has proved naïve. In September 2000, the U.S. Senate voted to grant China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status, a decision that paved the way for China to enter the World Trade Organization.

Free-trade advocates, including President Bill Clinton, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and leading members of Congress, insisted that greater trade between the U.S. and China would help China become more democratic and vastly improve its human rights record.

Instead the opposite dynamic occurred. The values of U.S. businesses changed, not those of China’s government, Perkins said. “China is more repressive today than it was decades ago” because it can more easily ignore critics after becoming a global economic power.

Pastor Pan Yongguang fled China with more than 60 members of his Protestant church in 2019 and was eventually granted asylum in the United States in April. Pan told the House Select Committee on China that he and other pastors are routinely threatened with jail time, forced to relocate and close.

“The CCP is staunchly atheistic and against all religious beliefs,” he told the panel. “There’s no freedom of religious in China under CCP rule.”

Pastor Pan founded the Holy Reformed Church in Shenzhen in 2012 and has served as its pastor for the last 11 years. During that time, he said Chinese national security agents continuously threatened him with arrest and imprisonment. His theological training at the Philadelphia Bible Reformed Church of the Presbyterian Church in America, the second-largest Presbyterian denomination in the United States, made him a top target for harassment.

The training and ordination in the U.S., he said, were viewed as “colluding with anti-Chinese forces overseas in the eyes of the CCP.” To add to the American connection, Pastor Pan and his flock are referred to by some advocates as the “Mayflower Church,” inspired by the Pilgrims who left their homeland for the New World four centuries ago. The pastor and his congregation spent several years in legal limbo living on an island in South Korea and then in Thailand before the U.S. government granted them asylum.

While the Mayflower Church members managed to escape, millions of other Chinese citizens are forced to worship in secret, hide their beliefs or face jail time. Bhuchung Tsering of the International Campaign for Tibet described China’s decades of persecution in Tibet against its unique form of Buddhism as an all-out suppression of Tibetans’ culture and spiritual beliefs. 

Following China’s occupation of Tibet in 1959, the Dalai Lama fled to India, and the Chinese government destroyed several thousand monasteries and temples.

“In recent years, particularly following the assumption of office by President Xi, the Chinese government’s policy on the Tibetan religion has become one of insidious control of religious institutions and systems in an attempt to serve its own objectives … including the right to determine Tibetan Buddhists’ own leaders and modes or practice,” Tsering said.

Roughly 1 million Tibetan children in China have been separated from their families and placed in government-run boarding schools, where they are indoctrinated into Chinese Communist beliefs, taught Mandarin, and forced to abandon their Tibetan language and culture, a United Nations panel of experts determined earlier this year.

Bhuchung urged the Select Committee to endorse and Congress to pass the Tibet-China Conflict Act, which would pressure the Chinese government to resume negotiations with the Dalai Lama’s envoys without any preconditions and ensure U.S. support for Tibet will continue.

The U.S. and leading nations must take bold, decisive action if it wants to change China from within, Perkins argued. Congress should revoke Beijing’s trade status, and consumers should stop buying any goods made in China.

A Uyghur Muslim refugee identified as Imam Hajim testified that most Muslim nations in the Middle East and Africa are unaware of China’s genocide against the Uyghur Muslims, even though they share the same faith. Hajim urged U.S. leaders to do more to educate these populations in countries that are strengthening their ties to Beijing because of Chinese investment in their infrastructure. 

Other prominent religious freedom advocates agreed, calling on churches, synagogues, and mosques worldwide to speak out about China’s religious persecution and human rights atrocities. Rabbi Abraham Cooper, who chairs USCIRF, called on the State Department to designate China as a country of particular concern, adding it to the U.S. government’s blacklist of the worst religious freedom offenders around the world.

“This is also a call to action to all religious groups represented in the United States,” he said. “It’s time to awaken the sleeping giant that is all people of faith.”