Bolton: Repression of Chinese Catholics, Falun Gong 'didn't register' to Trump
A Catholic Church in China. Creative Commons photo.
U.S. President Donald Trump showed little interest in combating the religious repression of Catholics or Falun Gong members in mainland China, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton writes in his tell-all book on his time inside the Trump administration.
Bolton’s newly released book, “The Room Where It Happened,” details his observations and criticisms of Trump over the course of his time serving as national security adviser from 2018 to 2019.
One of the biggest claims Bolton makes is that Trump showed repeated indifference to various forms of political and religious persecution occurring across mainland China. While many noted Trump’s silence about the Uighurs, the Muslim group in western China facing imprisonments, repression of practicing Islam and a cultural genocide, Bolton also mentions the Catholic Church and Falun Gong members in China as a group dismissed by the president. Falun Gong is a Buddhist-based religion with specific mediation practices, developed in China.
“Religious repression in China was also not on Trump’s agenda,” Bolton writes, “whether it was the Catholic Church or Falun Gong, it didn’t register. That was not where Pence, Pompeo, and I were, but it was Trump’s call.”
The religious and political turmoil currently unfolding in China’s Catholic community is nothing new, and has been a lightning rod of controversy for several years as the Holy See and the Chinese government have pushed and pulled to maintain control over the Church’s leaders.
China’s Communist Party-sponsored persecution of Falun Gong has been widespread since 1999, involving arbitrary detentions, censorship, torture and even organ trafficking.
“Ethnic (Uighurs and Tibetans) and religious (Catholic and Falun Gong) persecution on a massive scale continues,” Bolton writes in his book.
About 9 million Chinese on the mainland are Catholic, according to Pew estimates, and an estimated 100 million Chinese practiced Falun Gong before its suppression began, according to the advocacy group Falun Info.
The main point of contention in the Chinese Catholic Church is the perceived split in the faithful after China rolled out its Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA), a civil association that exercises control over its members and churches.
The CPCA is not affiliated with Rome, and does not answer to the clerical hierarchy within or outside of China. This organization was rejected by large groups of “underground” Catholics, who have rebuked membership, separating Chinese Catholics into two groups: those who are registered with the government and those who hide their worship.
In an interview with Axios, Trump was asked why he did not place sanctions on China over the treatment of religious minorities, specifically the highly oppressed and often jailed Uighur community.
The president said “he held off on imposing Treasury sanctions against Chinese officials involved with the Xinjiang mass detention camps because doing so would have interfered with his trade deal with Beijing,” Jonathan Swan writes in the Axios piece.
This may shed light on Trump’s similar inaction on members of the Catholic Church in China.
In order to serve openly, Catholic priests in China are required to register with the government, a requirement that the Holy See has said is not mandatory, though it refuses to take strong action against the system.
The religious oppression of Catholics, coupled with Uighurs and other minority religious communities in China like Falun Gong, has been condemned by many high-ranking U.S. diplomats, Bolton claims.
“U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, pressing for Trump to do a religious freedom event at the upcoming September 2019 opening of the U.N. General Assembly, thought China was ‘horrible across the board,’ which was just about right,” Bolton wrote.
However, these alleged appeals for action seem to have largely come to nothing.
The U.S. has done little in the way of combating China’s ongoing religious persecution. These new allegations by Bolton bring Trump to the forefront, and offer an explanation of why religious communities in China continue to go without support from the U.S. government.
Trump signed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act on June 17, the same day as the release of Bolton’s book. The law requires U.S. officials to report human rights abuses that occur in Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of Uighurs have been forced into mass re-education camps.
No major action has been taken in recent months to combat the persecution of other religious groups in the country.
Timothy Nerozzi is a writer and editor from northeastern Pennsylvania. He covers religious issues with a focus on the Catholic Church and Japanese society and culture.