{"id":301599,"date":"2025-01-09T06:40:12","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T06:40:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=301599"},"modified":"2025-01-11T06:33:42","modified_gmt":"2025-01-11T06:33:42","slug":"report-china-waging-a-full-on-assault-on-christians-with-high-tech-surveillance-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=301599","title":{"rendered":"Report: China \u2018Waging a Full-on Assault on Christians\u2019 with High-Tech Surveillance State"},"content":{"rendered":"

Frances Martell \u2013 Briebart Jan 3, 2025<\/strong><\/h1>\n

The Chinese Communist Party is \u201cintent on rooting out every pocket of independent religious thought\u201d and persecutes Christians by shutting down house churches, stripping children from Christian families, and monitoring every detail of Christian citizens\u2019 lives, International Christian Concern (ICC) announced on Thursday.<\/p>\n

ICC, a global Christian advocacy organization helping the persecuted church, published its annual Global Persecution Index<\/a> on Thursday, highlighting the most dangerous places in the world to be a Christian. China plays an expansive role in the study, both for being one of the most repressive countries in the world and for helping allied governments repress Christianity across the planet, from North Korea to Nicaragua.<\/p>\n

China is the largest communist country in the study identified as a repressor. ICC noted that Marxism is one of several ideologies fueling the violent repression of Christianity, alongside Hindu nationalism and political Islam, among others. The organization noted that advances in surveillance technology and construction of repressive infrastructure have caused the deterioration in religious freedom around the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe details of persecution you will read in our report are not isolated incidents. They represent the lived-out reality of millions of Christians worldwide who face daily threats to their lives and religious freedom,\u201d ICC President Jeff King asserted in a message opening the Global Persecution Index for 2025. \u201cThis year, we cite persecution trends, including the growing use of technology to monitor and oppress faith communities, transnational persecution where regimes cross borders to target Christians, and the continued rise of religious nationalism, including radical Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n

China is an officially atheist communist state that claims to tolerate only five legal religions: Catholicism, Protestant Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam. All five of these religions are only legal through government-operated institutions, however, that do not actually preach the teachings of the faiths but instead encourage believers to abandon the faith and worship dictator Xi Jinping.<\/p>\n

ICC noted that the Chinese government has enacted its most brutal policies against the Uyghur Muslims of East Turkistan, where China has been engaging in acts of genocide to eliminate both Islam and the indigenous minorities of the region since at least 2017. Christians, it noted \u201care spread throughout China, rather than concentrated in one region as with the Uyghurs,\u201d so shepherding them into concentration camps<\/a> is less practical than with Uyghurs. Regardless, the report noted, \u201cthe arrest and imprisonment of Christians in China stems from the same motivation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWorking to eradicate the house church movement, the government regularly arrests or harasses church members and leaders, sometimes holding them incommunicado for years,\u201d it continued. \u201cIn some cases, the government has removed children from families that are part of unregistered religious groups, presumably to indoctrinate them in communist ideology and to prevent them from adopting their parents\u2019 faith.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Chinese \u201chouse church\u201d movement is a group believed to include millions<\/a> of Christians who refuse to worship at communist-controlled legal churches, where the teachings of Jesus are almost entirely absent. Instead, they convene at home to pray and study the Bible, which is illegal. To contain the house church movement, China uses its pervasive, high-tech citizen surveillance network to target and often imprison worshippers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe CCP uses the data captured by this system to track and control those it deems a danger to the state,\u201d ICC noted in its report. \u201cThis includes anybody associated with the unregistered house church movement and anyone else wanting to practice religion outside the confines of the state-run institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cChina leads the world in the surveillance of its citizens,\u201d the report continued.\u201d\u00a0While the full extent of its surveillance apparatus is likely unknown, research has shown that it operates a system that aims to track every citizen\u2019s movement to gain insight into their loyalty to the CCP.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom mundane details, like what a person wears, to larger observations, like who they associate with, the system works to track and understand each citizen\u2019s loyalty,\u201d it noted.<\/p>\n

Another institution that ICC identified as part of China\u2019s apparatus to repress religious sentiments is the \u201cChina Organ Transplant Response System (COTRS).\u201d China has faced<\/a> decades of accusations of using political prisoners as fodder for harvesting organs, killing them by cutting their organs out while alive and selling them around the world.\u00a0A 2022 study by the Australian National University (ANU) accused<\/a> China, citing extensive government data, of \u201cexecution by heart removal,\u201d killing political prisoners with the intent to harvest their organs for sale.<\/p>\n

\u201cQuietly created in 2011, COTRS is an insidious tool for religious repression in China,\u201d ICC noted in its report this week. \u201cIts mandate is to kill and harvest organs from members of certain unfavored groups, including members of religious groups that the government would like to eliminate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chinese persecution methods against Christians are used around the world. The ICC report noted in particular that China aids North Korea, one of the world\u2019s most dangerous places to be a Christian, in hunting down and erasing Christians. Outside of the region, the ICC Global Persecution Index noted that China plays a role in Eritrea and Nicaragua.<\/p>\n

\u201cA Christian-majority nation, persecution in Eritrea is largely driven by political extremism. Ideologically, Eritrea follows many of the patterns seen in Communist China,\u201d the study observed. \u201cPresident Afwerki even traveled to China in the 1960s to study Maoism, returning inspired and ready to implement Maoist policies in his country.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEritrea remains close to China to this day, particularly since the rise of Xi Jinping, whose leadership style is strikingly similar to Mao\u2019s,\u201d the study continued. \u201cthose who dare cross the government are swiftly punished, with many Christians and other persons of conscience thrown in prison for standing by their faith in the face of government persecution. Survivors of these prisons report regular beatings, severe torture, and degrading conditions in the overcrowded facilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like Eritrea, Nicaragua is a Christian-majority country run by a brutal communist dictatorship. Tyrant Daniel Ortega has significantly increased his persecution of Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, since the 2018 wave of anti-communist protests that ended with deadly regime repression. The Global Persecution Index documented Ortega using surveillance \u201cstrikingly like that imposed by China on its religious communities,\u201d including government intimidation and monitoring of Catholic churches.<\/p>\n

\u201cNicaragua keeps a close relationship with China, which it sees as an important ally in the face of increasing sanctions from the West and a struggling economy,\u201d it reported.<\/p>\n

Courtesy Smoking Mirrors<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chinese \u201chouse church\u201d movement is a group believed to include millions of Christians who refuse to worship at communist-controlled legal churches, where the teachings of Jesus are almost entirely absent. Instead, they convene at home to pray and study the Bible, which is illegal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39262,"featured_media":301600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-china"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/39262"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=301599"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301599\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":301601,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301599\/revisions\/301601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/301600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=301599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=301599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=301599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}