Nury Turkel, a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), said the Chinese Communist regime is unleashing another “cultural revolution,” this time with worldwide implications.
In a recent interview on American Thought Leader, Turkel said, “What’s happening in China today, for religious minorities in this repressive environment …… is simply a doped-up cultural revolution.”
Turkel is no stranger to the Cultural Revolution, having been born in a labor camp in Kashgar, China, where his mother was imprisoned during her pregnancy, at the height of a violent mass movement that began in 1966. The 10-year-long Cultural Revolution destroyed China’s cultural heritage and traditions and caused the deaths of millions of people.
Turkel said, “Whatever happens to minority religious believers in China is no longer about their human rights and religious freedom, but about how we, as a free society, can prevent this from becoming a new normal in the world, which will create even bigger problems for us to deal with.”
Victims of the CCP regime’s ongoing human rights abuses include: Catholics, Falun Gong followers, house church Christians, Muslim minorities, and Tibetans. In China’s westernmost region of Xinjiang, some 11 million Uighurs, and at least 1 million Uighurs, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz, are detained in internment camps where political indoctrination takes place.
In January, then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that the Chinese Communist Party had committed “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” against the Uighurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.
A War on Faith
Turkel, a Uighur-American lawyer, said the Chinese regime has declared a war on faith; it is the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology that is driving its attacks on religious beliefs.
“Believing in any religion or having a spiritual life is considered a potential threat or a sign of disloyalty,” Turkel said. “So when you go on a pilgrimage, it’s not a pilgrimage to God, it’s a pilgrimage to Xi Jinping, to learn Xi Jinping’s ideas.”
Under current Communist Party leader Xi Jinping, Communist authorities have dismantled churches and crosses, arrested priests and ordered the removal of Christian icons, including those of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, and replaced them with portraits of Xi Jinping or Mao Zedong.
Turkel added, “They’ve been using a term extensively for a human reengineering project: thought reform, that is, cleansing someone’s religious beliefs from their mind or soul and replacing them with communism and Xi Jinping thought.”
Turkel applauded Pompeo’s genocide determination, calling it “one of the most important policy responses by the U.S. government.” Turkel welcomed U.S. sanctions against a number of Chinese Communist Party officials (including Chen Quanguo, a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo) and entities for human rights violations in Xinjiang.
Monitoring the People
Turkel said the international community must recognize that the Chinese Communist Party is a “threat to Western civilization. For policymakers around the world, they must understand this threat in order to develop an effective foreign policy response to Beijing.
Turkel said, “There can be no effective foreign policy response to the threat (of the Chinese Communist Party) without recognizing the danger it poses to the stability of civil rights, human rights and religious freedom around the world.”
More importantly, Turkel said, the Chinese Communist Party is exporting its “tight surveillance system” to other countries, which is worrisome.
Sheena Greitens, an associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, said at a USCIRF hearing in July 2020 that based on her research, the CCP has exported surveillance technology platforms to 80 countries around the world.
Most of these countries are located in South America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, Greitens said. The number of countries using CCP surveillance technology has increased significantly since 2014, with about 20 countries using Chinese surveillance technology that year.
Imagine the way the Chinese Communist Party spies on its own population becomes a new normal,” Turkel said. What does that mean for democracy? What does that mean for civil liberties? What does that mean for religious freedom around the world?”
Turkel compared the CCP to the notorious East German secret police agency, the Stasi.
“When you talk about surveillance (by the Chinese Communist Party), think of the East German Stasi (Stasi) with its artificial intelligence (and) preemptive policing capabilities.”
“If not taken seriously, if not stopped, this will become a much more serious problem for religious minorities around the world, which many authoritarian governments, dictatorial regimes, are already suppressing with their own means and tools.”
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