Contribution
I owe you an apology, Ms Jardine, for arriving late to the debate. I am grateful for your chairmanship, and grateful to be allowed in, having been delayed. I congratulate the hon. Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Ms Rimmer) for securing the debate, and for being stalwart in all these issues about freedoms and rights of worship. I bow before her greater authority in this matter.
Much of what I wish to say has already been said. Therefore, in the short time available, I will try to cover the issues that are at stake. We have talked consistently about the problems in China. There are of course many other countries in the world where Christians and Muslims are persecuted, but it is in China that the collective persecution becomes an absolute, state-inspired problem.
The nature of what has been discussed already is quite remarkable. Look, for example, at the programme of Sinicisation of religion by law, and by deliberately abusive behaviour. Crosses must be removed from churches and domes, and the minarets of mosques must be demolished to make them look more like Chinese buildings. Pastors and imams are told to focus on religious teachings that reflect socialist values in line with those of China. Newly annotated versions of core religious texts, including the Bible, the Quran and others, have been issued back to places of worship, and what is left of the churches are regularly ordered to replace images of Jesus with pictures of Xi Jinping. Blatantly, boldly and in full view, China does not want to have any kind of worship beyond the worship of the communist, and in particular of Xi Jinping.
In March this year, China approved a new law that codifies ethnic assimilation, in contravention of China’s own constitution and of international law. It mandates that all children must be taught Putonghua before kindergarten and—interestingly—that they will therefore avoid all aspects of other religions as a matter of doctrine.
That brings me to two elements that I want to focus on. First, as has been said well by hon. Members in this debate, the Uyghurs are suffering a genocide. There is no question about it. The Chinese authorities find them a deeply troublesome group. They are not Han Chinese, and that is what most Chinese policy is about. At the core of the dislike of the Uyghurs lies their Muslim belief. What astounds me so often is that we know about this. We have campaigned on it. I was sanctioned because of the campaign on the Uyghurs. It is interesting how easily people have been allowed to forget the issue and not raise it. I would love all the mosques in the United Kingdom to raise the plight of the Uyghurs, because it is the right thing to do. I would love Christian churches to constantly talk of the plight of the Uyghurs. The Uyghurs have, in many respects, become forgotten.
The persecution of the Uyghurs is appalling. Many hon. Members have talked about the nature of the re-education camps. When did we last hear about the concept of re-education camps? In Nazi Germany. It is astonishing. The women are persecuted and raped, and are now no longer having babies. The population of the Uyghurs has now collapsed because they are being forcibly sterilised, and the men are going off to forced labour—it is so obvious; millions have gone.
By the way, to those who like the free market, I should underline the point that forced labour completely undermines the free market. How can anyone compete with a country that uses forced labour on a grand scale to make products and drive out competitors? There is, in every respect, an absence of tolerance to Christianity, Islam and Buddhism—we too often forget about the persecution of Tibetan Buddhists, nearly a quarter of a million of whom are in forced labour camps, rather like the Uyghurs.
What is happening to the Uyghurs is a terrible travesty, but I also want to speak about Christianity and Christian churches. My right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), who I have a huge amount of time for, raised the issue of the role of the Catholic Church. I have to say to him that, since I set up the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, we have tried to extract from the hierarchy in the Catholic Church—I say this, by the way, as a Catholic—the text of what it agreed with the Chinese Government, and we have never been able to. It has never been published. We have never been able to refer to it. All we are asking for is that it be laid out in the open, so that we can see, first of all, whether the Chinese stick to their arrangements and, secondly, whether there was any provision for other Christians in China.