Ms Marie Rimmer

I beg to move, That this House has considered Government support for freedom of religion or belief in China. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship for the first time, Ms Jardine. I am grateful for the opportunity to lead this important debate on freedom of religion or belief in China. I would like to open with a tragic story. On a hot August day in 2022, in Shanxi, northern China, more than 100 police officers descended on a Christian family summer camp, surrounding the gathering, forcibly searching and detaining dozens of believers—over 30 adults and 40 children. The police were breaking up not a dangerous gathering or insurgency, but a family day out. The camp was organised by an unregistered church called the Linfen Covenant House Church, and was a harmless event aimed at building church community. In the months that followed, pastors Li Jie and Han Xiaodong were arrested and reportedly subjected to harsh interrogation, including sleep deprivation, humiliation and torture. Church member Wang Qiang was later detained and tortured for weeks after refusing to renounce his faith or fabricate testimony against the church leaders. It took three years for the court to process that case, but justice was nowhere to be found. Prosecutors did not accuse the pastors of violence or any threat to society—they could not. Instead, they charged them with fraud, arguing that the voluntary offerings given by members of their unregistered church were somehow illegal. Pastors Li Jie and Han Xiaodong were each sentenced to three years and eight months in prison and fined heavily, while church member Wang Qiang received a sentence of one year and 11 months. The community church insists that the three men had committed no crime, and that they had suffered simply because of their faith. We have all come here today because we believe that freedom of religion or belief is not a secondary liberty; it goes to the heart of human dignity. It concerns the right to hold beliefs, to change beliefs, to have no belief, to worship in public and private, to teach and to live according to conscience without fear of intimidation, criminalisation, imprisonment or torture. That is why Parliament cannot look away, and why the situation in China requires ongoing and determined scrutiny. What is taking place in China is not merely the sporadic mistreatment of a few isolated believers, nor is it the meddling of local officials. What we are seeing is the rolling out of a sophisticated system of repression, in which law, administration, surveillance, propaganda and coercion are all being weaponised to subordinate religion to the Chinese Communist party. The issue before us is not only persecution; it is the construction of an entire architecture designed to make genuine freedom of religion or belief impossible. China’s persecution of religion comes under the broad policy initiative of Sinicisation. That term is made to sound mild, as if it refers only to making religion compatible with Chinese culture, but that is not the case; instead, it is political domestication. It means that every religious tradition must first be made subordinate to the ideology, priorities and authority of the Communist party. The goal is not merely to make religion Chinese, but to ensure that religion is stripped of its independence and made to serve the party’s political project. Sacred texts can be reinterpreted, clergy can be screened and managed, venues can be monitored, publications can be censored, foreign links can be severed, and anything that escapes that framework can be branded illegal, extremist, fraudulent, subversive, or labelled as a cult. Religion must not simply co-exist with the party; it must be remade in the party’s image. Recent Sinicisation policies mean that all clergy must support the leadership of the Communist party, and must be evaluated and ideologically disciplined. All online or in-person religious activity requires a permit from Government. No child can be given religious education. Furthermore, the sad story of the Linfen community church, which I referred to in my opening remarks, demonstrates that in China the law is always secondary to the will of the Chinese Communist party. China’s constitution appears to protect so-called normal religious activities, but in practice that protection is a joke. The same is true of China’s legal system. The party retains overriding authority over state institutions, including the courts and legislature. In other words, rights exist only to the extent that the party permits them to exist. Evidence gathered by Christian Solidarity Worldwide takes us deeper. It shows how the law in China is drafted in deliberately vague terms to condemn believers, vaguely accusing them of “harming national interests”, “disrupting social order”, “resisting infiltration” or “extremism.” Such phrases are not carefully bounded legal concepts; they are instruments of selective enforcement. They create uncertainty by design and allow ordinary religious life to be reclassified as a threat. As we saw with the Linfen community church, the vagueness of the rules means that donation to an unregistered church can be reframed as fraud. Similarly, a Bible study can become an illegal gathering; publishing or sharing religious materials can become an illegal business operation; and a sermon can become incitement to subversion. This is not neutral law enforcement; it is ideological criminalisation. Then, when the full weight of the justice system is brought down upon a believer, the defendant themselves becomes subject to serious procedural abuses. Lawyers are denied access to defendants, cases are shrouded in secrecy, and detainees can be isolated from family and counsel for prolonged periods, placed in legal black holes where torture and coercion become far more likely. The case of the Linfen community church tells us a great deal. It tells us that family church life can be raided; it tells us that children are not shielded from the machinery of repression; it tells us that secret detention and torture remain live concerns; and it tells us that “fraud” is being used not as an honest response to dishonesty, but as a legal fiction to criminalise churches that refuse to submit to state control. The situation in Xinjiang illustrates one of the most severe forms of ethno-religious persecution in China today, and as chair of the all-party group on Uyghurs, this topic is very close to my heart. Since 2016, the Xinjiang region has been transformed into one of the most heavily policed areas in the world, under a so-called counter-extremism campaign, marked by pervasive surveillance, forced interrogation and mass incarceration. It is worth pointing out that not all Uyghurs are Muslim and that non-Muslim Uyghurs are also persecuted.