The chairman of the House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Congressman Mike Gallagher, in the latest salvo against the party and President Xi, admonished Communist leaders for their abuses against religious minorities. In his remarks, he highlighted abuses of religious groups in the country who fail to fall in line with the party. 

At a roundtable discussion with interfaith leaders on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Mr. Gallagher accused the Chinese Communist Party of playing “God” within their own borders, persecuting Christians and other faith groups, and replacing the holy texts with the ideological writings and quotes of Mr. Xi. “Religion is a tool to be coerced, co-opted and corrupted to advance Party goals and, once harnessed, control people’s minds,” Mr. Gallagher stated.

At the 19th Party Congress at Beijing in 2017, the president declared, “We will … insist on the sinicization of Chinese religions, and provide active guidance for religion and socialism to coexist,” meaning he would bend Christianity and other faiths to better embody the characteristics and ideology of Communist China. Mr. Gallagher said that Mr. Xi is portraying himself as the narrator of the First Commandment — “I am the Lord thy God.”

Mr. Gallagher also highlighted abuses against other religions in the country. Communist China and its party apparatchiks recognize only five religions — Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism. In recent years, the treatment of the Muslim minority Uyghur population in the western region of Xinjiang has come under scrutiny and condemnation from the Western world and was the focus of the House China Committee’s first public hearing. Accusations of forced labor, torture, re-education, and organ harvesting have abounded as members of the Uyghur population have fled the country. 

Mr. Gallagher also mentioned the plight of the Falun Gong, a religious movement that dates back to the 1990s with a focus on multidisciplinary moral, physical, and meditative practices. “The Falun Gong remains an unfamiliar spiritual practice to many outside China, but that does not make their suffering at the hands of the CCP any less real,” Mr. Gallagher stated. 

“The State Department estimated that at times half of the population of China’s ‘Reeducation through Labor’ camps, or modern gulags, were Falun Gong adherents,” he said. “Thousands were tortured to death and there have been widespread reports of on-demand organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners.”

Mr. Gallagher makes a point to mention the abuses that Communist China has long committed against people of all faiths, especially in its western provinces and Tibet. 

“It is in Tibet and Xinjiang that we see the CCP’s unsanitized, brutal attitude towards religion,” he said during the roundtable discussion. “While other faiths are persecuted throughout China, Buddhists and Muslims in the far west of the country are facing, quite simply, the attempted annihilation of their faith and, in some cases, their population. The CCP is committing genocide, the crime above all crimes.”

Despite these abuses and crackdowns, Mr. Gallagher ended his remarks on a hopeful note, highlighting the growing faith of Communist China’s citizens and the strength of the nation’s religious dissidents.

“Even under intense persecution, faith persists throughout China and the number of faithful grows,” he stated. “In my work in Congress, I’ve heard unthinkable stories of religious persecution. But I’ve also listened to accounts of underground churches, brave clergy, and steadfast believers every bit as courageous as saints of the early Church.”