Days before Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s planned visit to Washington, D.C., former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback told a gathering of religious freedom advocates the Chinese government is “at war with faith.”
Brownback said the Sept. 16 event was intentionally timed ahead of Xi’s Sept. 24 meeting with President Donald Trump to press religious freedom and the cases of imprisoned religious leaders onto the U.S.-China agenda. “Our fight is not with the Chinese people,” he said. “Our fight is with their rulers.”
Bob Fu of ChinaAid speaks at advocacy event “CCP Oppression in America and China,” held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Joshua Wang / ChinaAid)
The gathering, titled “Chinese Communist Party Oppression in America and China,” was held at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. The Religious Freedom Institute, International Religious Freedom Summit, ChinaAid Association and several human rights and religious freedom advocacy groups sponsored the event.
Former U.S. officials, advocates, scholars and representatives of persecuted faith communities discussed restrictions inside China and the CCP’s growing use of transnational repression against critics and diaspora communities overseas.
Calling for cooperation across religious and political lines, Religious Freedom Institute President David Trimble said, “Human dignity knows no boundaries. Our defense of religious freedom must know no boundaries.”
The coalition’s work also produced a Sept. 14 open letter to Xi signed by 30 organizations. Released before the event, it urges him to take concrete human rights steps before arriving in Washington, including releasing prisoners of conscience and ending transnational repression.
“Such steps would diminish criticism around the visit of your government’s human rights violations,” the letter says. It names Gulshan Abbas, Jimmy Lai, Pastor Wang Yi and Zion Church leaders among those sought for release and also urges changes to the 2026 Ethnic Unity and Progress Law.
Ezra Jin at the Museum of the Bible event. (ChinaAid)
Turning to China’s house churches, Bob Fu, founder and president of ChinaAid, introduced Pastor Dale Shuqi Ding of Early Rain Covenant Church in Chengdu, one of China’s best-known unregistered Protestant congregations.
Ding described police raids, detention and surveillance targeting the church and pointed to recent arrests of members. In one case, he said police detained Christians who had gathered to read a book. “Why? Because they just organized a reading group,” Ding said.
He also recalled his own detention after the sweeping 2018 crackdown on Early Rain, when more than 100 church members were taken into custody. Senior Pastor Wang Yi later received a nine-year prison sentence on charges of “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegal business operations.”
Beyond the house church cases, several speakers highlighted pressure on Uyghurs, scholars and other communities affected by Chinese government policies or transnational repression.
Gulshan Abbas
One of the most personal accounts came from Ziba Murat of the Campaign for Uyghurs, whose mother, retired Uyghur physician Gulshan Abbas, disappeared in September 2018 and is serving a 20-year prison sentence.
Abbas disappeared six days after her sister, Rushan Abbas, spoke in Washington about the Chinese government’s treatment of Uyghurs. Murat said she believes the timing was deliberate. “My mother’s imprisonment was a retaliation for my aunt’s speech here in the United States,” she said.
The discussion also touched on academic freedom, as Fu said the CCP has extended its reach “even to the academics in the U.S.” Purdue University sociologist Fenggang Yang said Chinese databases removed his publications and scholars in China were prohibited from citing him.
A panel later examined China’s Ethnic Unity and Progress Promotion Law, which went into effect July 1. Piero Tozzi of the America First Policy Institute said the law expands government control over ethnic, religious and cultural life and contains provisions that could reach organizations and individuals outside China.
Attention then turned to Hong Kong. Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, said the case of imprisoned Catholic media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai illustrates “the long arm of the CCP” and the importance of challenging repression beyond China’s borders.
Lai, founder of the once-popular and since shuttered Apple Daily newspaper, has been jailed since 2020. He was sentenced in February 2026 to 20 years in prison following convictions on two charges of conspiracy to collude with foreign forces and one sedition-related conspiracy charge.
Pastor Ezra Jin, founder of Beijing Zion Church, closed the event by reflecting on his detention and the October 2025 crackdown, in which authorities detained about 30 church leaders and members. Jin was released in July after nine months in detention following high-level U.S.-China diplomatic engagement. Eight other church leaders and members, the so-called “Zion 8,” remain imprisoned.
“A China without human dignity, a China without religious freedom, it’s not something that we can accept,” Jin said. He urged U.S. and Chinese leaders to address human rights alongside economic and technological issues during their talks.
Returning to the stage, Brownback urged continued attention to religious prisoners and transnational repression ahead of the U.S.-China meeting. “It is a confrontational moment,” he said. “Spread this message far and wide.”
This article was originally published at ChinaAid News and has been reprinted with permission.