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#HumanRightsWithoutFrontiers - Religious persecution in #China

Published

7 years ago

December 11, 2018

Chinese authorities estimate that the Church of Almighty God has up to 4 million followers. It’s probably exaggeration but another Christian missionary organization reckons that it has more than a million members. Fear of government persecution has driven religious groups in China underground, making an accurate head count of any group’s followers virtually impossible.

It’s estimated that a million Uighur Muslims have been put into compulsory re-education camps. Christian and Buddhist places of worship have been closed. Human Rights Without Frontiers has documented more than 2,000 cases of Falun Gong prisoners and more than 1,200 from the Church of Almighty God, many of them, it’s alleged, facing torture. And those numbers could well be under-estimates. The Church of Almighty God is now said to be “most persecuted religious movement in China” and to have “replaced Falun Gong as the main target of religious persecution”.

They allegedly identify their incarnate God with a Chinese woman, Yang Xiangbin, also known as “Lightning Deng”, born in north-western China in 1973. They never name her publicly.

Senior EU Reporter Jim Gibbons correspondent discussed the issue is Dr. Zsuzsa-Anna Ferenczy has been working as a political advisor at the European Parliament since 2008, focusing on foreign affairs and global human rights. Her field of expertise includes Asia – especially the Korean Peninsula, India and Nepal and especially China. She has worked closely on the situation of religious and ethnic minorities living in and outside China with a view to protecting their right to education in their mother tongue and other issues of freedom, self-governance and rights.

She’s conducted academic research and interviews on EU-China relations, European normative power, human rights, civil society and the rule of law as part of a doctoral programme at the Free University of Brussels. I’m also joined by Willy Fautre and Lea Perekrests, respectively the Director and Deputy Director of Human Rights without Frontiers.