US slams China’s ‘extreme hostility’ towards religious freedom in new report, citing ‘abuse’ of Uygur Muslims in Xinjiang
- US government condemns China’s ‘intense persecution’ of religious faiths, days before Donald Trump’s meeting with Xi Jinping at G20 summit
- Report singles out ‘staggering scope of religious freedom abuses’
The US government on Friday condemned China’s “intense persecution” of religious faiths, days before the two countries’ leaders were expected to meet in Japan during the G20 summit.
“The Chinese Communist Party has exhibited extreme hostility to all religious faiths since its founding,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said at the release of the “2018 Annual Report on International Religious Freedom”. “The party demands that it alone be called ‘God’.”
This year’s report departed from its predecessors by dedicating a separate section of its China chapter to Xinjiang, Pompeo said, to document “the staggering scope of religious freedom abuses” in the region. Past reports singled out only Tibet, Hong Kong and Macau with separate sections.
“I had the chance to meet with some Uygurs, but unfortunately most Chinese Uygurs don’t get the chance to tell their stories,” the top US diplomat said.
He was referring to his meeting in March with Mihrigul Tursun, a Uygur who has spoken publicly in the United States about what she said was widespread torture in China’s prisons for the minority group, and relatives of prisoners in the internment camps.