The U.S. government on Thursday (May 27) condemned the Chinese government for sanctioning Johnnie Moore, a former commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). Secretary of State John Blinken said that China’s actions will only increase international attention to human rights abuses in China. In an interview with Voice of America, Moore said he views Beijing’s sanctions as the highest praise and said he will continue to speak out on behalf of religious and other persecuted Chinese Communists. He believes the CCP’s approach will ultimately fail.
China announced Wednesday that in response to recent U.S. sanctions against Chinese Communist Party officials for human rights abuses, Beijing has decided to impose sanctions on Moore, barring him and his immediate family from entering China and the Hong Kong and Macau special administrative regions.
The U.S. imposed sanctions on Chinese Communist Party official Yu Hui earlier this month. Secretary of State John Blinken said at the time that Yu Hui, who was the former director of the Chengdu office of China’s Central Leading Group for the Prevention and Handling of Cult Issues, was involved in serious human rights violations and the arbitrary detention and persecution of Falun Gong practitioners.
This comes after China retaliated by sanctioning then-US Commission on International Religious Freedom Chairman Gayle Manchin and Vice Chairman Tony Perkins after the United States, Britain, Canada and the European Union sanctioned several Chinese Communist Party officials in Xinjiang over human rights issues there.
Blinken issued a statement Thursday condemning Beijing’s approach. He said, “Beijing’s attempts to intimidate and silence those who speak out for fundamental freedoms such as human rights and freedom of religion only draws international attention and scrutiny to Beijing’s gross human rights abuses.”
Blinken said the United States will continue to speak out for human rights and to push for accountability for human rights abuses by the Chinese government.
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom also issued a statement Thursday condemning Beijing’s latest retaliatory sanctions. In the statement, the commission’s new chairwoman, Anurima Bhargava, said, “The latest sanctions imposed by the Chinese government against the commission for defending the religious freedom of the Chinese people are counterproductive at best. It will only increase international attention to the atrocities and terror that the Chinese government has inflicted on Uighurs, Tibetan Buddhists, Christians, Falun Gong practitioners, and untold other Chinese citizens.”
The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom is a cross-party federal government agency that monitors and analyzes the state of religious freedom in countries around the world and provides policy recommendations to the U.S. government. Commissioners are appointed by the president and congressional leaders of both parties.
Moore, who was appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom by former President Donald Trump in 2018, stepped down from his post on May 14 of this year.
Moore told VOA that he viewed Beijing’s sanctions as “supreme compliment” because he was “sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party for speaking out on behalf of Uighur Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists and other dissidents targeted by the Chinese Communist Party. “
Last December, Moore nominated One Media founder Lai Chi-ying, who was charged under Hong Kong’s version of the National Security Law, to the U.S. International Religious Commission’s list of “religious prisoners of conscience,” and urged the Chinese Communist Party to release Lai and others arrested for advocating for democracy and freedom.
In December 2018, he co-authored an open letter with Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center urging Chinese leader Xi Jinping to end his crackdown on Uighurs, Christians and other people of faith.
Moore currently serves as CEO of a public relations consulting firm he founded and as president of the U.S. Christian Leadership Conference. He says that even after stepping down from his position on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, he will not leave the cause of promoting religious freedom, but rather he “even has more time to devote to it without his public position.”
He said, “The Communists seem to believe that they can change humanity, but I believe differently. I believe that everyone is different and born free, and that no matter how much the Communists try to make everyone the same, they will eventually fail in that attempt. The one thing they cannot do in this world is they cannot silence people outside of China. We in the United States have always been happy to be a voice for people who can’t have a voice. That’s how we become the most powerful and wealthy nation in the world. I believe that this is the path to wealth and prosperity, this is the path to freedom.”
Moore has traveled to China and Hong Kong, talking to locals and listening to their stories. He says, “In fact, one of the reasons I’m so outspoken in my criticism of the Hong Kong dynamic is because I’ve seen Hong Kong in its heyday. I’ve walked those streets and sat down and talked to the people who made their lifelong dreams come true in that glorious city. What shocked me was that the Chinese government could take this great gift of Hong Kong and the best of it and turn it into what we’ve seen in the last year and a half.
He said that when he last went to China more than a decade ago, he seemed to feel that China was reforming and entering a different era, but today China “seems to be a full retreat to those worst trends of the Cultural Revolution.”
What worries me most, he said, “is the scale. We’ve never seen persecution on this scale, in all its forms, targeting many different groups. And the Chinese Communist Party is also trying to export religious persecution globally, through a policy of extortion and economic coercion to get these kinds of egregious acts pushed out beyond China.”
Moore said he wants China to be the best country in the world. But he said, “(The CCP) they don’t need to retreat to the Cultural Revolution to make the Chinese Century. They can do it the way everybody else has done it throughout history. But if they continue to want to take those shortcuts, they will not only fail, they will fail miserably in the most absurd way that human beings can imagine.”
He said a united front across party lines, which he called the “Great Wall of Cooperation,” is forming globally to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for its practices.
The Chinese government has for years denied criticism of its human rights situation, and in 2016 Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi accused reporters of bias and arrogance when confronted with questions about human rights and questioned whether they had been to China. Beijing has also repeatedly stressed that China “attaches great importance to and protects human rights.
Recent Comments