Beijing Knows It's Losing Battle of Hong Kong

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The regime is so alarmed that it is even disrupting private meetings in Europe

Almost exactly a year ago, the Holy See and the Chinese government signed an agreement on the appointment of bishops designed to “normalise” relations and – at least in the mind of the Vatican – enhance protection for China’s 10 million Catholics. A year on, where are we?

Well, there has been no tangible sign of improvement in religious freedom in China. Christians – both Catholic and Protestant – continue to face what most analysts regard as the most severe crackdown since the Cultural Revolution. Churches are still being closed or destroyed, clergy jailed and crosses torn down. Those below the age of 18 are prohibited from worshipping and surveillance cameras mounted at the altar record every worshipper with facial recognition technology.

China’s Muslims, particularly the Uighurs in Xinjiang, are facing a cultural, if not yet physical, genocide. At least one million (and perhaps as many as three million) are reportedly being held in internment camps, some subjected to torture and slave labour.

China’s state media have publicly declared that the goal in regard to the Uighurs is to “break their lineage, break their roots, break their connections and break their origins”. As the Washington Post put it, “it’s hard to read that as anything other than a declaration of genocidal intent.”

The persecution of Tibetans and Falun Gong practitioners continues, and earlier this year an independent tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, concluded that the Chinese state has been forcibly extracting human organs from prisoners of conscience for the transplant industry, that it amounts to a crime against humanity and that anyone engaging with the Chinese state should do so in the knowledge that they are “interacting with a criminal state”.

This is the very same state that Bishop Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, has described as the best example in the world today of Catholic social teaching. I am only a six-year-old Catholic and so I hesitate to question the judgment of an eminent bishop. But when I was exploring the Catholic faith before entering the Church I read the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church from start to finish, and I cannot see anything in Xi Jinping’s China that matches in any way the Church’s social teaching. One wonders what the courageous Cardinal Ignatius Kung Pin-Mei, who was made a cardinal by Pope St John Paul II in pectore (in secret), would have made of this, having spent 30 years in Chinese prisons because of his refusal to accept the Communist Party’s control of the Church.

And then on top of all this, there is the continuing crisis in Hong Kong. It did not come out of nowhere. For at least the past five years, Hong Kong’s freedoms, autonomy and rule of law have come under increasing pressure. We have seen promises of universal suffrage – which are there in black and white in the region’s Basic Law – denied. Pro-democracy legislators and candidates have been disqualified, and pro-democracy protesters jailed. Booksellers publishing titles critical of Beijing’s leaders have been abducted. Academic and press freedoms have been threatened. A law has been proposed to criminalise vaguely defined “insults” to the Communist Party’s national anthem. The Financial Times’s Asia news editor has been expelled.

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