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The Winter Olympic Games in Beijing are taking place against the backdrop of an ongoing genocide of China’s Uyghur Muslim minority—prompting countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia to announce diplomatic boycotts of the games. Hosting the Olympic Games is a golden propaganda opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which publicly presents a cheerful, confident façade while suppressing any hint that its ethnic Muslims and other human rights victims are suffering egregious repression at its hands.
To keep the focus on the CCP’s systematic human rights abuses, Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom is marking the games with a series of four deep-dive discussions on genocide and religious repression with noted China experts. The series addresses the CCP’s responsibility for religious genocide against Xinjiang’s ethnic Muslims and abuses against various other religious minorities, its deceptive tactics to cover these up, and successful strategies to document evidence of repression in China’s strictly-controlled political environment.
Christian churches in the Hong Kong Administrative Region have been spared the type of repression suffered by Chinese churches on the mainland under Beijing’s new “Sinicization” of religion policy—but there are worrying signs that this is about to change. In the third installment of Hudson’s “Olympics Boycott Series,” Nina Shea, the director of Hudson’s Center for Religious Freedom, will be joined by Reverend L, a Hong Kong Christian cleric visiting North America, who has first-hand knowledge about the various Chinese churches (he wishes to remain anonymous) to discuss the new threat to religious freedom on the island.
