Rights Advocates Calling for US Not to Trade Off Human Rights in China for Green Revolutions

A facility believed to be a reeducation camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, in Artux, north of Kashgar in China's western Xinjiang region, on June 2, 2019. Greg Baker/AFP/Getty Images

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.

Between 2010 and 2020, China’s share of global polysilicon production increased from 26 percent to 82 percent, according to a 2021 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

Meanwhile, Xinjiang produces about 45 percent of the world’s supply of polysilicon, according to research by the UK’s Sheffield Hallam University.

“I think it’s a false choice to say that you can’t be environmental without having the products come from China,” Sam Brownback, former ambassador at large for International Religious Freedom, said during an interview with NTD’s “China in Focus” on Feb. 4. “We may have to get more imaginative on our supply chains. We may have to go to places that price a little higher than what China is.”

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.”

“Both can coexist. This is just part of our set of values. It’s about a healthy environment. It’s also about human rights, dignity, the ability of somebody to make up their own mind,” he added.

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.”

“They say they would define it differently, but in practice, they restrict it, they don’t want it,” he said on “China in Focus” on Feb 7. “It wants everything to be subservient to the party.”

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.”

Marshall said that while many join the party to get “economic benefits, chances of kids getting into university, good schools, and good jobs,” the Chinese people don’t really believe in the CCP.

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.”

“But [the Chinese people] also just have begun to raise that question: ‘Are they [the CCP] all-powerful? Because the Chinese people have seen that in response to protests and outbreaks and public outrage, that in fact, they did need to retrench,” Swett said on “China in Focus” on Feb. 2.

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.”