The United States and China are engaged in a broad strategic competition that extends to conflicting approaches to religion: American protections of conscience versus the Chinese Communist Party’s drive for control. Recent actions include the October detention of more than 30 Zion Church pastors and parishioners and widespread repression of Tibetan Buddhists and Muslim Uyghurs. The CCP also conducts transnational intimidation of exiled believers. The author urges the U.S. and its allies to lead a coordinated response that centers human rights and religious freedom.
America Must Confront China’s Campaign Against Religion — A Fight for Global Freedom
The United States and the People’s Republic of China are locked in a strategic rivalry that stretches beyond trade and technology to competing visions of human freedom. Nowhere is that contrast clearer than in how each country treats religion: one rooted in the protection of conscience, the other in centralized control and surveillance.
America’s story begins with people fleeing religious persecution. The nation’s founders understood that freedom of belief is essential to all other liberties, which is why religious freedom and the separation of church and state were enshrined in the Constitution nearly 250 years ago. Those principles remain central to the American idea of freedom.
China’s modern trajectory is different. Seventy-five years ago the Chinese Communist Party founded the People’s Republic of China on an atheistic model that viewed independent religion as a potential challenge to party authority. While China’s governance has evolved in many ways since then, the CCP’s emphasis on social control endures, producing sustained human-rights abuses.
In October, Chinese authorities detained more than 30 pastors and parishioners associated with the Zion Church network for attending Christian services. Many congregations are forced to worship in secret to avoid harassment, detention or worse — and even possessing a Bible can expose believers to penalties in some places.
Tibetan Buddhists, Muslim Uyghurs and adherents of other faiths have faced mass detentions, forced assimilation, destruction or reappropriation of sacred sites, and intense surveillance. These measures are not limited to mainland China: the CCP’s transnational repression targets exiled believers, activists and their families abroad through intimidation, surveillance and threats designed to silence dissent overseas.
The human toll is severe: families separated, communities intimidated, and religious practice driven underground. Yet amid persecution, acts of faith persist — from clandestine Christian house churches to monasteries and mosques that continue to serve communities under pressure.
This issue matters to Americans and the broader international community. More than 70 percent of Americans identify with a religion; defending religious liberty resonates politically and morally. If democratic nations ignore systematic efforts to erase or control faith, they risk normalizing repression and weakening the global norms that protect freedom.
The United States and its allies should lead a principled response: publicly document and denounce abuses, support independent journalists and human-rights defenders, protect asylum seekers and exiles, and keep religious freedom central to diplomacy and policy toward China. Religious leaders, civil-society organizations and ordinary citizens — of all faiths and none — should refuse to look away.
In defending the right to believe, democracies defend the broader idea of human freedom.
Adam J. King is Regional Director for East Asia and Pacific at the International Republican Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that promotes freedom and democracy worldwide.
