This week Beijing’s Archbishop Joseph Li Shan, who is President of China’s state-controlled Catholic body, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association (CPCA), visits Hong Kong for five days.
This comes just a week after more than 10 Catholic bishops from around the world called for the release of Catholic pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai, who has been in jail in Hong Kong for almost three years and faces the prospect of the rest of his life in prison.
The response of the Hong Kong authorities was to rebuke the bishops who signed the petition, describing their action as “misleading and slanderous” and accusing them of “blatantly undermining” the rule of law and meddling in Hong Kong affairs.
The signatories to the letter included New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Bishop Robert Barron, US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ president Archbishop Timothy Broglio, Southwark’s Archbishop John Williams, archbishops and bishops from Ireland, Lithuania, Australia, Canada and Nigeria, as well as India’s Cardinal Baselios Cleemis Thottunkal.
No doubt Li will receive a much warmer welcome from the Hong Kong government. Far from being a genuine representative of Chinese Catholics or a voice of conscience, he is the Chinese Communist Party’s quisling.
His CPCA, together with the regime in Beijing, has violated the Vatican-China agreement several times by creating new dioceses and appointing new bishops without Vatican approval, yet the Church in Hong Kong will be compelled to welcome him. Indeed, it was Hong Kong’s new Cardinal Stephen Chow (pictured) who invited Li. Why?
The answer can be found, at least in part, in a new report launched this week on the impending threats to freedom of religion or belief in Hong Kong. Titled “Sell Out My Soul”, it was launched by Hong Kong Watch in the European Parliament at an event chaired by former Foreign Minister of Poland Anna Fotyga, and will be rolled out at events in Washington, DC, Ottawa and Westminster in coming weeks.
The Foreword has been written by Hong Kong Watch Patrons Sam Brownback and Fiona Bruce MP – who are also, respectively, the former US Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom and the current UK Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for freedom of religion or belief.
The report’s title was inspired by the well-known hymn Tell Out My Soul by Anglican Bishop Timothy Dudley Smith – and as a reflection on the compromises religious leaders and adherents in Hong Kong are increasingly being forced to make.
As Beijing effectively now directly rules Hong Kong, and has dismantled the city’s basic freedoms and autonomy, religious believers in the city are compelled to compromise their values, erode their ethos and sell out their soul, in order to perhaps protect some limited freedom of worship.
The undermining of religious freedom in Hong Kong is subtle, slow and insidious. It does not involve the dynamiting of churches, destruction of crosses or the incarceration of Muslims in prison camps, as happens in mainland China.
Rather, it involves the creation of a “chill” factor leading to religious leaders themselves making compromises.
Freedom of worship is still intact – for now. Religious believers can still go to church, to the mosque, temple or synagogue, and they can still access religious literature. But freedom of religion or belief in its fullest form, as set out in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is already being eroded.
There are four main ways this erosion of freedom of religion in Hong Kong is taking effect.
The first is in the legislative realm – the impact of repressive legislation, particularly the draconian National Security Law imposed on Hong Kong by Beijing in July 2020, and possible new regulations to come. The Hong Kong government plans to introduce a further security law, invoking Article 23 of the city’s Basic Law which requires the implementation of anti-subversion legislation.
There is talk of a new law to restrict crowdfunding. Already the laws regarding charitable status have been tightened. All these impact religious groups. And there is increasing talk of the establishment of a government department for religious affairs, to vet, license and monitor religious groups.
The second, which flows from this, is the widespread self-censorship among religious leaders. Christian clergy now avoid certain topics in their sermons and will certainly not touch anything that hints of human rights, justice or freedom.
In August 2020, Cardinal John Tong – Apostolic Administrator at the time – instructed all Catholic priests to “watch your language” when preaching, and avoid “political” issues.
Since 2022, diocese in Hong Kong has ended annual commemorative Masses which used to be held in parishes to mark the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.
One Protestant pastor who has left Hong Kong claims his church removed all his sermons from the past 30 years from its website, and that many churches no longer share sermons online.
The Hong Kong diocese’s Justice and Peace Commission has been renamed as a commission on “Integral Human Development” and its previous outspoken human rights advocacy replaced by talk of “patriotism”, “dialogue” and “reconciliation”.
On the surface these sound like good values, but after the turmoil in Hong Kong over the past four years, the idea that “reconciliation” can be achieved without truth and justice is a pipedream. Truth and reconciliation, justice and peace always go hand in hand, as any good Catholic knows. Similarly, “dialogue” should not be an end in itself, but rather a means to the realisation of Christian values.
Not surprisingly, since at least three prominent pastors, including Hong Kong’s 91-year-old Bishop Emeritus, Cardinal Joseph Zen, have been arrested.
One, Pastor Garry Pang, was convicted of sedition and sentenced to a year in jail. Another, Roy Chan, went into exile but his church, which had provided pastoral support and sanctuary to pro-democracy protestors in 2019, was raided by the police and HSBC froze his and the church’s bank accounts.
Of course these cases relate to what may be regarded as “political” rather than “religious” activities, but the individuals concerned were acting according to their consciences informed and inspired by their religious beliefs. The ability of anyone in Hong Kong today to follow their conscience is now severely curtailed.
The third area impacted is in the education sector. At least 60% of government-funded schools in Hong Kong are church-run, but the Chinese Communist Party regime is now dictating the curriculum, ensuring the brainwashing of students by ideological narratives and propaganda, and potentially seeking to infiltrate seats on school boards. This directly threatens the ethos of faith-based schools.
Finally, and this comes back to Li’s visit this coming week, there is Xi Jinping’s campaign of “Sinicization” of religion, and the “patriotism” test.
“Sinicization” of religion is now well established in mainland China, and is getting underway in Hong Kong. Several conferences have been held between both Catholic and Protestant leaders in Hong Kong with Beijing officials and their proxies.
Of course, what “Sinicization” means is not simply healthy inculturation or genuine patriotism, but loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party and the co-option of religious bodies as mouthpieces of Communist Party propaganda.
When Chow was first appointed as Hong Kong’s new Bishop two years ago, people I spoke to had high hopes for him. He was seen as a good compromise candidate – not someone who was so overtly pro-democracy as to be unacceptable to Beijing, but definitely not regarded as in Beijing’s camp either.
Two years on, he seems to be going out of his way to burnish his “patriotic” credentials. When he visited Beijing earlier this year he spoke of the “duty” of “patriotism”. He has regularly praised the Sino-Vatican agreement despite Beijing’s breaches.
On the participation of two bishops from mainland China in the recent synod on synodality in Rome, Chow compared it to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, where “you feel their presence completes the fellowship”. An odd remark. It seems to me it was more akin to the Eye of Sauron infiltrating the fellowship.
In a recent interview, Chow said that the dictators in Beijing “really appreciate” Pope Francis, because “he doesn’t criticise”. Well of course a regime that is committing genocide, crimes against humanity and other grave human rights violations, including torture, forced sterilisation, forced abortion and forced labour, and has dismantled promised freedoms in Hong Kong in breach of an international treaty and threatens Taiwan, likes a global leader who doesn’t call them out for these atrocities.
Chow says that in an audience with Pope Francis in March last year, the Pope said to him: “Do well on China”. He repeatedly expresses his desire to be a “bridge” between the rest of the world and China.
The problem is, any sustainable bridge needs firm pillars – and the pillars of religious freedom are being steadily eroded by a combination of the Chinese Communist Party regime in Hong Kong and the capitulation and kowtowing of the Church. Hong Kong’s people of faith now need people of conscience around the world to speak up for them.