China

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Question: What is the world's worst government on religious liberty? Clearly, it's China

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THE QUESTION:

What is the world’s worst government in terms of restricting religious liberty?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

China. No contest.

That’s shown in an elaborate Pew Research Center accounting issued this month that covers all categories of official religion restrictions in 198 nations and territories as of 2018. The Communists who rule the world’s largest population expend incredible efforts on their atheistic crusades, and are equal opportunity offenders who attack both faith in general and a variety of specific religions.

Global religious conditions over-all are getting worse, Pew reports. It calculates there are other highly troublesome governments in this descending order of oppression: Iran, Malaysia, Maldives, Syria, Russia, Algeria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Myanmar, Iraq, Morocco, Singapore, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Brunei, Mauritania, Western Sahara and Yemen. (North Korea information is lacking).

Though Pew doesn’t say this, you’ll see most of the worst are Communist, or Muslim or post-Communist and Muslim.

Yet one of the most distressing crackdowns is in Buddhist Myanmar (a.k.a. Burma), with its forced displacement of at least 14,500 Rohingya Muslims. As with China’s mistreatment of Muslims, noted below, ethnic and religious enmity are combined.

Examples of other problems: Uzbekistan put at least 1,500 Muslims in prison on charges of extremism. Tajikistan’s new religion law gives the regime control over appointment of Muslim imams, religious education, and foreign travel, and there’s been a roundup of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Thailand has arrested hundreds of Christian and Muslim refugees fleeing mistreatment in Pakistan and Vietnam. Methodist missionaries were forced out of the Philippines for investigating human rights abuses.

Pew separately lists countries on a “Social Hostilities Index,” referring to serious harassment of religions by private individuals and groups as opposed to governments (though governments often encourage or turn a blind eye to these problems). Here, India has the worst track record.


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Pay attention to this sect-run news source. It's a growing force in pro-Trump media universe

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Up for a brief journalism quiz? Of course you are — or so I will assume. Let’s begin.

Name a news outlet that publishes separate English-language additions for the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, and also offers its product in 21 other languages spoken around the globe. That’s even more than offered by Reuters, the most widely translated international wire service, which offers 16.

Need more hints? OK.

This mystery outlet is run by a faith group that claims tens of thousands of adherents in more than 70 nations. The group burst on the scene in the late 20th century and has been harshly persecuted by its homeland’s ruthlessly authoritarian government.

Additionally, the same faith group sponsors a traveling cultural dance extravaganza (no peeking until the quiz is over, please) that, until the coronavirus epidemic largely shut down live performances, advertised widely on American television and at local malls.

Still in the dark?

It’s motto is “Truth and Tradition” and, as of this writing (this past Monday) it’s declined to join the preponderance of other news media — including Fox, heretofore among the staunchest of pro-Trump media platforms — that have called former Vice President Joseph Biden the 2020 presidential-election winner.

As of this date, our mystery news source has even declined to place Michigan or Wisconsin in the Biden win column — not to mention Pennsylvania, Arizona or Nevada — maintaining that it will not do so until all of President Donald Trump’s legal ballot challenges have been resolved.

Have you guessed the platform in question?

The answer is The Epoch Times, published by the spiritual, and fervently anti-Beijing, movement known primarily in the West as Falun Gong. The movement, while a relatively new formulation, draws its philosophical roots from ancient Chinese Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian and folk traditions.

Over the years, GetReligion writers have mentioned Falun Gong — along with underground Christian churches, Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims, and others — in dozens of posts focused on the persecution of religious minority groups in China.

So why mention Falun Gong, also know as Falun Dafna, yet again?


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New York Times considers free speech wars in Hong Kong, while ignoring religious issues

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The locals had few illusions, back in 1997, when I spent a week in Hong Kong during the days just before the handover ceremonies that put one of Asia’s most important cities under the control of Chinese authorities.

The purpose of my trip was to attend a conference about religion and the news (click here for the text of my presentation during that event), so it was understandable that participants talked to quite a few leaders in Hong Kong’s diverse and prominent religious community.

But that really didn’t matter. Secular human-rights people I met were saying the same things as the church leaders. They were all digging into the fine details of the new Special Administrative Region's Basic Law and seeing ominous loopholes.

Article 23, for example, was causing concern, with its language stating that Hong Kong's new leaders "shall enact laws ... to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition (or) subversion against the Central People's Government, ... to prohibit foreign political organizations or bodies from conducting political activities in the Region, and to prohibit political organizations or bodies of the Region from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies".”

Did that include the Vatican? Would Baptists, Methodists, Anglicans and others be allowed to maintain ties to their global fellowships or communions?

Global issues were sure to surface, activists told me. But that would not be the first place where the hammer would fall. Activists warned that free-speech issues would be the first war zone — free speech about politics, of course, but also about religion, an area of life that troubled government leaders.

This brings me to a recent New York Times feature — a mix of text and graphics — that ran under this headline: “What You Can No Longer Say in Hong Kong.” Surely this story about the impact of new laws in Hong Kong would address religious speech issues as well as politics? Here is a crucial summary:

The police have since arrested more than 20 people under the new law, which lays out political crimes punishable by life imprisonment in serious cases, and allows Beijing to intervene directly if it wants.

Hong Kong was once a bastion of free speech. It served as a base for the international news media and for rights groups, and as a haven for political refugees, including the student leaders of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. Books on sensitive political topics that are banned in mainland China found a home in the city’s bookstores.


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BuzzFeed plumbs satellite photos for exhaustive report on China's persecuted Muslims

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I knew that BuzzFeed News was trying to expand its reach, but I didn’t think it would take on as complex a project as in-depth reporting on China’s insane genocide of its Uighur Muslims.

Then last week, the site dropped two stories that emerged after Megha Rajagopalan, their Middle East correspondent, spent major time in neighboring Kazakhstan interviewing those Muslims who had managed to get out of China.

The first of a two-part expose starts off with satellite photos of the prison camps of western China and this statement: “China rounded up so many Muslims in Xinjiang that there wasn’t enough space to hold them.” And then:

In the most extensive investigation of China’s internment camp system ever done using publicly available satellite images, coupled with dozens of interviews with former detainees, BuzzFeed News identified more than 260 structures built since 2017 and bearing the hallmarks of fortified detention compounds. There is at least one in nearly every county in the far-west region of Xinjiang. During that time, the investigation shows, China has established a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities, in what is already the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.

How was this done?

BuzzFeed News identified 268 newly built compounds by cross-referencing blanked-out areas on Baidu Maps — a Google Maps–like tool that’s widely used in China — with images from external satellite data providers. These compounds often contained multiple detention facilities.

Adding that it had employed Alison Killing, a licensed architect as one of the reporters on the story, BuzzFeed was able to figure out that these were buildings that could easily hold 10,000 inmates each. This story even went into what these places looked like inside.

Unlike early sites, the new facilities appear more permanent and prisonlike, similar in construction to high-security prisons in other parts of China. The most highly fortified compounds offer little space between buildings, tiny concrete-walled yards, heavy masonry construction, and long networks of corridors with cells down either side.


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Hong Kong's religious freedom crisis takes backseat to basic journalistic norms in USA

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It’s been quite a time in America — arguably unprecedented — with massive Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupting across the nation following the death in police custody of George Floyd. And all of it in the midst of a killer pandemic, economic upheaval and a frightening, and for many psychologically debilitating, uncertainty over what will happen next.

Importantly, the BLM protests have also popped up in many smaller cities in America’s hinterlands, communities not generally thought of as activist hot spots. Click here for a sampling of the coverage of how widespread this has been, care of USA Today, or here for The Washington Post.

There are many offshoots to this monumental story, the core of which is the state of race relations, policing injustices and the Donald Trump administration’s response to this national reckoning.

One sidebar (from The Washington Post, again) is the absurdly hypocritical response of some authoritarian nations — perhaps China above all — to America’s turmoil.

That’s the nature of international political maneuvering, isn’t it? Never miss an opportunity to blame your adversaries when they display problems — no matter how unequal the comparison —that they’ve pestered you about for years.

I’m reminded of the quote attributed to G.K. Chesterton: “When a man concludes that any stick is good enough to beat his foe with — that is when he picks up a boomerang.”

I will pick on China — you would not be wrong to think, “What, again?” — because of its Hong Kong problem that has, understandably, largely been absent from American press coverage of late.

Why understandably? Because, as should be obvious, the first responsibility of American mainstream journalism is to cover important domestic stories. Moreover, I’d wager that few Americans currently give a hoot about Hong Kong’s concern, given what’s going on in their own lives and streets.

So even normally well-read GetReligion readers may have fallen behind on the crucial human-rights angles in the Hong Kong story.


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In search of news coverage of China's moral responsibility for coronavirus pandemic

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A slew of European and African nations, plus Australia and, of course, the United States are angrier at China than they’ve been in a very long time. To which I say, good.

The reason for all this, as you undoubtedly know, is Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which originated on its turf in the city of Wuhan.

Bottom line: It took a direct threat to the lives of other nations’ citizens for the international community to finally react to the heavy-handed and duplicitous manner that China deals with its own people and the world.

Just how widespread this opprobrium has become is detailed in this New York Times overview piece.

My question?

When this pandemic ultimately subsides — or at least becomes relatively manageable — will the international community’s attitude toward China revert to the previous just-look-the-other-way approach because there’s lots of money involved?

Or is there a chance that, at least some Western-style democracies will view China’s morally questionable political and economic values and actions in a different and more critical light?

The realist in me — or cynic, take your choice — thinks that the passage of time and humanity’s seemingly insatiable appetite for material comforts will again serve China’s imperial designs. And that China’s ruthless authoritarianism will again be overlooked. That accepting its police-state treatment of political dissidents and religious believers will again be viewed as the price global capitalism simply must pay to have access to China’s huge markets and it’s relatively cheap consumer products. Correct?

Journalists might want to start asking these questions now. And not only of the business and political leaders in their area. But of their religious leaders and thinkers — their community’s presumed moral compasses.

Also, don’t overlook the rank-and-file religious believers (and non-believers); they represent a community’s popular moral outlook.


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What’s happening to the religious makeup of the world (including in locked-up China)?

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What’s happening to the religious makeup of the world (including in locked-up China)?

THE QUESTION:

What are the long-term trends for the world’s religions? What’s the situation in China?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Broad-brush, Christianity remains the world’s largest and most widespread religion and will still be so in 2050 thanks to steady growth in “Global South” nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America. However, Islam is steadily gaining ground.

Declines relative to the population have been suffered by folk religions in China, tribal traditions elsewhere, and the ranks of the non-religious. In 1800, Christianity and Islam together represented a third of the world population but these outreach-oriented faiths will encompass a projected 64 percent by 2050.

All that and much more is reported in the newly published third edition of the"World Christian Encyclopedia" (Edinburgh University Press, 998 pages, $215.95), compiled by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, an evangelical Protestant school in Massachusetts. It was edited by the center’s Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo, who led a team of 40 along with hundreds of expert consultants across the globe.

The encyclopedia contains unique statistics and analysis on each religious group that exists within each of the world’s 234 nations and territories, with elaborate information on cultural groupings and 45,000 Christian denominations. Quite obviously, this monumental reference work belongs in every serious library in the English-speaking world.

Here are the estimates comparing major religions’ size as of 1970 with their current numbers.


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Hot tip: Here's almost everything you ever wanted to know about every religion everywhere

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The third edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia, just published, boasts accurately of being “the most comprehensive attempt to quantify adherents of Christianity and other world religions.”

The 998 pages are packed not only with such statistics but overview articles and then descriptions about every religion and 45,000 denominations of Christianity as found within each of the world’s 234 nations and territories. This monumental project is the work of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Yes, this is a missionary-minded evangelical Protestant school, but the center's research is widely acknowledged as objective and authoritative. (The center planned a related conference on world religions March 30-April 1 that looks interesting and has just postponed it until September due to The Virus.)

The 40-member encyclopedia team drew upon the 1982 and 2001 editions in a 50-year project now led by the center’s Todd Johnson and Gina Zurlo. The latter is also a fellow at Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs. Zurlo (gzurlo@gordonconwell.edu) can help media reviewers obtain access to a full electronic text of the encyclopedia on a “personal use only” basis.

This volume obviously belongs in any serious library, including those at media companies, despite the $215.95 price.

More immediately, there are breaking news articles here for the taking that will be enhanced by maps, charts and graphs by your art department. Here’s a sampling of research findings.

* The encyclopedia’s major theme is that “Global South” nations are the population center of Christianity after long dominance by Europe and North America. Veteran religion writers are generally aware of this shift, but consider the particulars.


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Is a 2022 Olympic boycott over China's treatment of Uighur Muslims a possibility?

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Is a 2022 Olympic boycott over China's treatment of Uighur Muslims a possibility?

I’m a big track fan, which is why one of my all-time favorite sports memories is watching from a nose-bleed seat at the Los Angeles Coliseum as Britain’s Sebastian Coe won the 1984 men’s 1,500-meter Olympic finals. But I also recall my excitement being dampened just a tad by knowing that Coe’s win was diminished by the absence that day of world-class Soviet bloc runners.

You’ll remember that President Jimmy Carter had pulled the United States out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (sadly, almost 40 years later Afghanistan remains an open-ended U.S. foreign policy concern). More than 60 other nations joined the U.S.-led boycott.

As payback, the USSR pulled its athletes out of the following Summer Olympics, the Los Angeles games. More than a dozen other communist nations joined that boycott, hence the absence of many quality athletes and, in my mind, the need for an asterisk next to Coe’ name. (Ironically, Coe also won the 1,500 meters in 1980, which probably warrants a second asterisk.)

Jump forward to the present, which finds the U.S. and Russia, the rotting core of the old USSR, still at odds. But unlike the 1980s, China — then just a hint of the economic powerhouse it would become — is arguably as bad an actor today and at least equally as problematic for the U.S.

Guess what? The 2022 Winter Olympics is scheduled for China.

Given how horribly Beijing has persecuted its Muslim Uighur minority (plus the Tibetan Buddhists, underground Christian churches, and others, including ordinary citizens who disagree to any degree with the government’s heavy-handed policies), might another boycott of Olympic proportions be due?

The odds of that are long, for reasons I’ll enumerate below.


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