China continues efforts to exert party control over religious groups
The UN has received reports of Muslim minorities being detained; Christians recount churches raided, crosses destroyed, and Bibles burned.
Pastors and a group that monitors religion in China said the government is ratcheting up a crackdown on congregations, while a United Nations committee expressed concerns that Muslims are being detained and tortured.
Under President Xi Jinping, China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, religious believers are seeing their freedoms shrink dramatically even as the country undergoes a religious revival.
Though religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1982, there is a campaign to Sinicize religion by demanding loyalty to the officially atheist Communist Party and eliminating any challenge to its power over people’s lives.
