Christian who survived Chinese persecution warns US against slipping into ‘communist style of government’

The leader of a monitoring group that monitors the persecution of Christians in China said he sees echoes of the Chinese Community Party’s “playbook” in the US, and is worried it could get worse.

Bob Fu, President of a US-based NGO ChinaAidHe said that he sees the same tactics in Western countries that the Chinese Communist Party uses to suppress churches.

“The similarities are quite striking between the Chinese Communist way of persecution and the American leftist way of restricting and even discriminating,” Fu told Fox News Digital.

Fu said he has observed with concern how the left in the United States is increasingly displaying “dictatorial” attitudes culturally and politically by censoring speech, imposing a culture of “wake-up” and intolerance of dissent. He cited the use of alleged political weapons by federal law enforcement agencies as a troubling escalation of such trends.

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“It is absolutely shocking and shocking to see the transformation of American society developing from its constitutional foundation,” Fu said.

He said Fu was a student leader at his university during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and became a Christian in China’s underground church decades ago. As reported in his 2013 book God’s Double Agent, he and his wife were jailed in Beijing for leading house churches, Christian congregations that are not registered with China’s official Protestant or Catholic churches.

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The couple fled the country in 1996 and became refugees in the United States the following year. He said he founded ChinaAid in 2002 to provide “a voice for those persecuted brothers and sisters in China” as well as “legal and humanitarian aid for those persecuted, imprisoned and tortured”.

Fu, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen and attended Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, said some of the tactics used to suppress churches during the pandemic in both the United States and other Western countries were sometimes drawn from the “Chinese Communist playbook.”

“They only have one playbook,” he said. “I saw the governor of California prescribing and basically ordering the church to close and saying not only when they could worship, but how. The ways he threatened to punish those churches and pastors were sometimes quite literally like what the Chinese Communist Party uses against Chinese churches.”

Fu noted that at one point Democratic former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti threatened to cut off the facilities of homes and businesses that defied California’s COVID-19 restrictions.

“Guess this is exactly the same tactic, word for word, that the Communist Party has issued over the years against churches,” Fu claimed. Neither Newsom nor Garcetti had responded to Fox News Digital’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Fu also cited how pastors have been treated in Canada in recent years as a particularly egregious example of Chinese methods being used to stifle churches in a Western democracy, adding that the country was engaging in “passive and active persecution” against churches.

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“On camera, the police would invade the church during Sunday worship, expel all the faithful and push the pastor away from the church building, and then lock the whole church,” Fu said of Canada. “This is what is happening now. I think the Church in the West should be prepared for something like this to happen and maybe more.”

During the pandemic, churches across Canada faced jailed priests, closed facilities, heavy fines and constant interference from government officials. After Pastor Tim Stephens of Calgary, Alberta, was arrested a second time in 2021 when a police helicopter found his church gathering outside, US Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo. wrote a urging letter US Commission on International Religious Freedom to consider adding Canada to its watch list.

Reverend Derek Reimer of Calgary remains in jail as of Wednesday after being arrested twice in recent weeks for protesting the withdrawal of Queen’s Story time for children in public libraries. He was recently charged with allegedly violating a release order that prohibited him from communicating with LGBT people or being within 200 meters of events involving the LGBTQ community.

Reverend Artur Pawlowski, another Calgary pastor who has been jailed repeatedly for keeping his church open during the pandemic, told Fox News Digital last week that Reimer’s arrests indicate that authorities are anti-Christian and are beginning to impose the ideology using the same tactics they have used to enforce the law. COVID-19 protocols.

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“There are so many unprecedented things that really break my heart,” Fu said. “I feel that America is descending into the Chinese Communist style of government. The media propaganda is exactly the same as in Communist China, where I was born and educated in this direction.”

He claimed that much of the American mainstream media had become “the mouthpiece of one party, one ideology, by twisting and even lying and using all their so-called reporting to promote one ideology.”

“I feel that America is descending into the Chinese Communist style of government.”

– ChinaAid President Bob Fu

Big Tech’s crackdown on speech in the United States is also a trend he has seen in China, Fu said, where his organization’s posts have been removed from Facebook.

After the implementation of the “Administrative Measures for Online Religious Information and Services” in 2022, Chinese censorship of online Christian content – including group chats – has reached an “unprecedented” level, According to the latest report by ChinaAid.

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Fu said Christian persecution in China has gotten worse to a degree not seen since the Cultural Revolution. According to his organization’s report, Chinese Christians are routinely imprisoned and tortured, and the government uses traditional Christian practices of tithing and offerings to concoct fraud charges in an effort to “financially strangle churches.”

several Pastors and Elders of the House Church Jailed and may face years in prison, religious citizens in China’s Henan Province must register on the government’s new “Smart Religion” app to participate in worship services, according to the report.

The report further noted that while the Chinese government has long demanded sole allegiance to the Communist Party, in recent years it has asserted allegiance to Chinese President Xi Jinping. As the CCP “exports its repressive tactics” around the world, Fu believes that the same attitude has transcended some Western politicians.

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“There is a great spirit of sameness against the Church of God,” he said. “Suddenly mayors and governors become petty tycoons. They think their power is above that of God and over the church. They want to be the administrators of the church, and they want to tell you when and how to worship.”