This week our building will showcase China\u2019s growing crackdown on religion, the press and human rights.<\/p>\n
Sept. 20, 2015 6:42 p.m. ET<\/p>\n
The facade of our building is famous for having a 75-foot rendering of the First Amendment. This week, during Mr. Xi\u2019s visit, something else will hang from our building: traditional \u201clarge character\u201d Chinese language posters demanding freedom in China. We see Mr. Xi\u2019s trip as an opportunity to focus on the ways the world\u2019s most-populous country treats its citizens and the ominous implications for the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
China has succeeded in lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty in a few decades. But China has also intensified its habits of repressing those who show any opposition to the regime\u2019s dictates, and of imprisoning journalists, religious leaders and others who speak out in ways not approved by those in power. Legions of government censors often succeed in what was previously assumed to be impossible\u2014blocking access to forbidden websites and news reports on the Internet.<\/p>\n
Many have hoped that the introduction of market-based economics in China would lead to a freer press. That hasn\u2019t happened. China\u2019s reaction to the recent bursting of its stock-market bubble, and the appearance of central government bungling, was to arrest the messenger. For instance, Wang Xiaolu, a writer for the business publication Caijing, was forced to go through the 21st-century version of the Mao-era \u201cstruggle sessions\u201d and confess on television that his reporting has been \u201csensational.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under President Xi, censorship has increased. Of the 221 journalists imprisoned world-wide that the Committee to Protect Journalists identified in 2014, 44 were in Chinese prisons. This is a jump of 37.5% in one year.<\/p>\n
What is happening to journalists parallels what is happening on the Internet. Freedom House, in its annual \u201cFreedom on the Net\u201d survey, reports that as of 2014 China had the third-worst Internet-freedom record in the world, ahead of only Syria and Iran.<\/p>\n
Having invested vast sums and effort to monitor the Web, China also imprisons activists who make online posts that deviate from official statements. President Xi reportedly has stated that \u201cthe Internet has become the main battlefield in the struggle for public opinion,\u201d and he clearly intends for the state to win that battle.<\/p>\n
The assault on religious leaders and other people of faith has increased under Mr. Xi and may be, at least for Christians, the worst since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and \u201970s. The sheer scope of religious repression is striking.<\/p>\n
Rep. Chris Smith, chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which Congress created in 2000 to monitor human rights in China, noted some of the commission\u2019s stark findings<\/a> in July: 1,200 crosses and 35 church buildings demolished; the religious sites of Uighur Muslims shut down and raided, and study of the Quran banned; the detention of 273 Tibetan Buddhist monks; reports of torture and deaths of members of the Falun Gong; and human-rights lawyers who defend people of faith charged with \u201ccreating chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n