Combating the Persecution of Religious Groups in China Act

Floor Speech

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Mrs. KIM of California. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I rise in support of this bill. The Chinese Communist Party is at war with religious freedom. The CCP treats as threats those organizations and allegiances that it does not control. Members of the CCP and the PLA are required to be atheists and are prohibited from practicing a religion. National law effectively prohibits young people in China from receiving any religious education.

Xi Jinping is ramping up his so-called Sinicization of religion and is expressly demanding that religious groups support the control and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party. The consequences for those who refuse to submit are brutal.

House-church Protestant Christians, underground Catholics, Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, Falun Gong practitioners, and other people who seek to worship freely are repressed.

The State Department's annual religious freedom reports note deaths in police custody. They also state that the PRC ``tortured, physically abused, arrested, disappeared, detained, sentenced to prison, subjected to forced labor and . . . harassed adherents of both registered and unregistered religious groups for activities related to their religious beliefs and practices.''

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have correctly recognized the PRC's brutal crackdown and forced encampment of Uyghur Muslims and other minorities in Xinjiang as a genocide, involving crimes against humanity.

According to credible reports, more than 800,000 Muslim children have been separated from their families.

Just this week, 90-year-old Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen is on trial in Hong Kong, one of several Catholic bishops imprisoned and actively persecuted by the CCP. Numerous Protestant pastors remain in detention, and the government continues to demolish church buildings and crosses.

Religious believers in China deserve our prayers, our respect, and our support.

This bill before us today will help ensure that CCP officials responsible for this persecution are identified, sanctioned, and denied visas into the United States.

It also states that the People's Republic of China has continued to earn designation as a ``country of particular concern'' under the International Religious Freedom Act. It calls for efforts by the United States, including diplomacy at the highest levels, to promote the protection of Christians and other religious minorities inside China. It expresses the sense of Congress that the U.N. Human Rights Council should formally condemn the PRC for its ongoing genocide in Xinjiang as well as its persecution of Christians and other religious groups. The inability of that Council to condemn such massive human rights abuses is an indictment of its effectiveness.

Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Missouri (Mrs. Hartzler) for introducing this important bill of which I am a proud cosponsor.

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Mrs. KIM of California. Madam Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Missouri (Mrs. Hartzler).

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Mrs. KIM of California. Madam Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith).

Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Madam Speaker, I thank Vicky Hartzler for authoring this very important and extraordinarily timely resolution.

Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party is waging war against all faiths: Christians, Falun Gong, Tibetan Buddhists, Muslims, Uyghurs. He is actually committing genocide against the Uyghurs and has been doing it for some time now.

Thankfully, this Congress has spoken out before, particularly on the Uyghurs, but we need to speak out again on the Christians who are suffering, the most persecuted group in all of China.

Let me say, too, that in calling for sanctions, we have sanctions, Madam Speaker. The Global Magnitsky Act and other sanctions are in place for the violation of the Religious Freedom Act of 1998, and the sanctioning could occur there as a CPC country, a country of particular concern.

I believe we need to do more to hold individuals and, collectively, the Chinese Communist Party to account. That goes for all. That goes for Trump when he was in office. It goes for President Biden now.

We should have done more. We need to do more now because it is all- out war on religion.

I wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post in 1998. I titled it ``The world must stand against China's war on religion'' and noted that the sinicization, making all faiths comport to Xi Jinping's horrible, nightmarish vision for that country, needs to be incorporated. Whole texts, the Bible texts and sacred scriptures of all faiths, are being rewritten in order to comport, again, with his socialist ideology.

In 1994, after Tiananmen Square, I went to China. I went there many times--barred from going now. I know Bishop Shu of Baoding Province. Here was a man who spent years being tortured, being deprived of food, but especially being tortured because there were terrible usages of cattle prods and all the other terrible things that they do in Chinese prisons, Laogai.

I couldn't believe when he looked me in the eyes and said: I pray for my persecutors.

I mean, we all get a little mad when we get a bad editorial or something politically. Here is a man saying he has endured all this, and he prays for the people of China and for his persecutors.

I held a hearing as co-chairman of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission, asking Xi Jinping, just this Congress: Where is Bishop Shu?

He disappeared. He may have passed away due to the mistreatment, but that is what they do, as well. People all of a sudden just disappear. Numbers of Christians and other believers just go off the face of the Earth.

This resolution couldn't be more timely. The Chinese Communist Party is getting worse by the hour. Xi Jinping may get reelected by his peers to a third term as dictator. Our hope is that the Chinese Communist Party will realize they bring gross dishonor to China by their gross misbehavior.

Thankfully, the U.N. High Commissioner, as we all know, just released a report calling out China for its genocide. They called it crimes against humanity. That is good. Hopefully, the U.N. Human Rights Council will take this up, as well.

We need to do sanctioning, and we need to do it now.

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Mrs. KIM of California. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume for the purpose of closing.

Madam Speaker, the Chinese Communist Party persecutes religious believers who will not submit their religious convictions to CCP control. It reacts with brutality against any attempted religious practice outside of the five religious patriotic associations allowed and controlled by the regime.

This bill tells the truth about the dangers faced by Christians, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, and other religious minorities in China and takes steps to sanction their CCP persecutors.

I am an enthusiastic cosponsor of this bill by my colleague from Missouri, and I urge its unanimous passage.

Madam Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

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