Human rights advocates attending the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington in early February have called on the United States not to trade off human rights in China for its own green revolutions.
He noted that it would take some more time to get “our supply chains coming out of countries that aren’t tied into China.”
However, Brownback said, “most major companies and most countries will pick the economy of the West and not the economy that’s associated with China because of the long-term trajectory of the two.”
“This one is a very dogmatic, dictatorial regime that has no respect for human rights, and ours is a way towards human flourishing and human existence,” he said in a Feb. 4 interview.
Nadine Maenza, Former Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, echoed Brownback’s views, saying it “makes absolutely no sense for buying parts from China, even if it’s for the Green Revolution.”
Maenza said that it would make the U.S. economy dependent on the Chinese economy, which “puts us in a really bad situation.”
“We saw that with the COVID [pandemic], when companies shut down and we couldn’t get parts,” she said in another interview aired on Feb. 17.
“There’s no reason to ever push aside human rights, there’s no good reason. And even if we’re looking for a long-term chain, we’re looking for stability,” she added.
David Curry, President and CEO of Global Christian Relief, agreed.
“We shouldn’t be bifurcating any of these issues, splitting off these issues. What we need is shared values around the environment,” he said in a yet-to-be-aired interview. “You can’t sell out the human beings that almost 2 billion people who are living their freedoms, their human rights in order to forward an agenda around the environment.”
No Tolerance for Religious Freedom
As to why the Chinese regime can not tolerate religious freedom, Curry said that the Chinese Communist Party does not want to be challenged.“So in a sense, it’s not just about Christianity, it’s also why you see attacks on the Uyghur Muslims and any other sort of ideology or person that dares to bring up the idea,” he said.
Maenza chimed in, saying that the CCP deems faith to be an anti-patriotic threat.
“I think that what the current Chinese Communist Party wants is its ideology to be treated like a religion … and people to worship Xi Jinping as the leader,” she said.
“It’s part of, of their own ideology, that you can’t have another ideology other than the ideology of the state,” Maenza said.
Paul Marshall, senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom and Hudson Institute, also noted that “totalitarian countries like China don’t believe in religious freedom.”
According to Marshall, in China people are only “allowed to practice the form of religion that the government dictates.”
“So there’s no freedom to deviate from that.”
Turning point
Katrina Lantos Swett, president of Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, believes that the failure and subsequent reversal of the CCP’s draconian “zero-COVID” policy have “opened up the eyes of the Chinese people to the fact that their government is not always right, not infallible by any means.”She hoped that the white paper protests would be “the first signs of cracking in that façade of invincibility and infallibility.”
“The beginning of change in society has to begin with people believing that change is possible,“ Swett said. ”We are seeing just the very beginnings of stirrings that there is an opening up of the minds of the people in China to the possibilities.”