‘A serious foreign policy weapon’: Russia and China align against religious liberty advocates

United States activists say religious liberty is a deepening fault line in international affairs, as Chinese and Russian officials align to repudiate Western condemnation of their human rights abuses.

“The religious factor is increasingly becoming a serious foreign policy weapon,” Russian ambassador-at-large Gennady Askaldovich told the upper house of the Russian Legislature this week. “There is a growing tendency on the part of a number of external players to play on the factor of protecting the rights of believers in order to fight against their international opponents.”

That allegation dovetailed with a subsequent outburst from China, which imposed sanctions on a former member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in retaliation for Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s condemnation of Beijing’s repression of the Falun Gong. The specific disputes reflect a deeper disagreement about the relationship between religious activity and political stability — a dispute that all sides agree could organize diplomatic blocs and intensify geopolitical competition, according to a religious freedom commissioner.

“We have a treaty obligation as a country to speak out when we see acts of genocide, crimes against humanity committed against a religious minority,” said USCIRF’s Nury Turkel, an Uyghur-American lawyer appointed to the commission by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to the Washington Examiner. “So, it is a national security concern for us.”

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Russian and Chinese officials agree that religious freedom is relevant to national security, but they apply the principle in the opposite direction. Chinese officials have justified their atrocities against the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang as a legitimate counterterrorism strategy.

China banned the Falun Gong in 1999, just days after 10,000 of the spiritualists angered Chinese Communist officials by staging “the largest [protest] since the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989,” according to a 2014 account of the history of the crackdown. The ensuing repression has ranged from arbitrary arrests and torture to, as the State Department religious liberty report acknowledged, allegations of organ harvesting.

“China broadly criminalizes religious expression and continues to commit crimes against humanity and genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups,” Blinken said on May 12, when he announced the sanctioning of a Chinese Communist official implicated in the abuse of the Falun Gong.

Chinese officials have made clear they perceive religious beliefs are in tension with the regime’s interests, an assessment that was emphasized by a senior official’s self-congratulatory comments about the putative decline in Tibetan Buddhism.

“More and more believers have been trained from pursuing a good afterlife to living a good life in this life, and religion has been increasingly compatible with a socialist society,” Wu Yingjie, the top Chinese Communist official in Tibet, told reporters last week.

The Tibet chief’s statement reflects the suspicion of religious activity displayed in the 2013 communique known as Document Number Nine, which accused “some private organizations” of “using the ethnic and religious issues to divide and break up” China and undermine the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Foreign Ministry likewise evinced that view on Wednesday in response to Blinken and the latest human rights report.

“This so-called report from the U.S. side, in disregard of facts and fraught with ideological bias, has unscrupulously denigrated China’s religious policy and severely interfered in China’s internal affairs,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. “China urges the U.S. side to rectify its mistake, rescind the so-called sanctions and stop interfering China’s internal affairs in the name of religious issues.”

Askoldovich, the Russian diplomat, voiced a similar sentiment on Tuesday as he complained that the United States favors “protecting religions as such, while ignoring the standards of morality and national interests of sovereign states.” Russia has banned the Jehovah’s Witnesses as an “extremist” organization and arrested dozens of Witnesses, including two sentenced to prison and lost their appeal in a Russian court his week.

The abusive policies are self-defeating, U.S. officials argue. “Whenever any government, any regime oppresses a religious minority, that could pave the way for radicalization, that could pave the way for instability,” Turkel said. “Then if it becomes a regional bigger problem, then we will be dragged into it.”

In any case, these disputes are going to become a more prominent feature of geopolitics, the Russian diplomat predicted. That’s because of the December launch of the International Religious Freedom Alliance by the U.S. and other allies.

“This structure is absolutely unacceptable for us as it is an openly U.S.-controlled interstate mechanism potentially capable of using sanctions against countries they don’t like,” Askoldovich said, lamenting that “a number of post-Soviet republics” have joined the alliance.

Turkel believes governments with like-minded views of religious liberty will align in the diplomatic arena. Lithuania, one of the founding members of the International Religious Freedom Alliance, has emerged in recent years as one of the European Union’s most outspoken critics of China on other policy matters.

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“Because of their past history being part of the Soviet bloc, being a country that experienced various forms of human rights abuses … they are joining the nations, the democratic nations, in support of the U.S. effort,” Turkel said.