RFI President Tom Farr was recently interviewed on The Catholic Association’s “Conversations with Consequences” podcast to shed light on the grievous religious freedom violations taking place across China, especially against religious minorities and particularly the Uyghur Muslims, an ethnic group of Muslims in the Western Xinjiang province of China. 

Farr highlighted how the Uyghurs are being tortured and imprisoned due to their religious beliefs, and essentially being subjected to genocide:

The bottom line is that Xi Jinping and the Chinese are brutalizing up to and possibly more than a million Chinese Muslims in internment camps – in effect, in concentration camps… It is impossible to ignore what the Chinese are doing here. It is an attempt to wipe out a group of people by a variety of means, in this case much more subtle technological means being adopted by the Chinese, but it’s genocide nonetheless.

Farr emphasized that this is not an “isolated” or “new” human rights violation, but part of a larger policy by China that also extends to other religious minorities, such as Christians, Catholics, and Tibetan Buddhists. “The reality is, they have been developing a policy against religious minorities in China throughout the existence of the Communist Party and the People’s Republic from 1948 and on,” he said. 

He continued: “It’s part of a policy to absorb religion into the Communist Party so that there will be… no more resistance to the Communist Party, because that’s where they know the resistance will happen – it will come from religion.”

Listen to the full interview on Conversations with Consequences.