IOPList.Org

Christian Who Escaped Chinese Persecution
Warns US Descending Into ‘Communist-Style of Governance’










The leader of a watchdog group that monitors Christian persecution in China said he’s seeing echoes
of the Chinese Community Party “playbook” in the U.S., and he’s worried it’ll get worse.

Bob Fu, president of the U.S.-based non-governmental organization ChinaAid, said he’s seeing the same
tactics in Western nations that the CCP uses to crack down on churches.

“The similarities are very, very striking between the Chinese Communist way of persecution and the
American leftist way of restriction and even discrimination,” Fu told Fox News Digital.

Fu said he has observed with concern how the left in the U.S. is increasingly exhibiting “dictatorial”
attitudes both culturally and politically by censoring speech, enforcing “woke” culture and not tolerating
dissent. He pinpointed the alleged political weaponziation of federal law enforcement agencies as a
worrisome escalation of such trends.

“It is very shocking and horrible to see American society’s transformation evolving from its
constitutional basis,” Fu said.

Fu was a student leader at his university during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 and became a
Christian in the Chinese underground church decades ago, he said. As recounted in his 2013 book
“God’s Double Agent,” he and his wife were imprisoned in Beijing for leading house churches, which are
Christian congregations that have not registered with China’s official Protestant or Catholic churches.

The couple escaped the country in 1996 and became refugees in the U.S. the next year. He said he
founded ChinaAid in 2002 to provide “a voice for those voiceless persecuted brothers and sisters in China,”
as well as “legal and humanitarian aid to those who are persecuted, imprisoned and tortured.”

Fu, who became a naturalized American citizen and attended Westminster Theological Seminary in
Philadelphia, said some of the tactics used to crack down on churches during the pandemic both in the
U.S. and other Western countries were sometimes straight out of the “Chinese Communist playbook.”

“They only have one playbook,” he said. “I saw the governor of California basically prescribe and order
the church to shut down and say not only when they can worship, but how. The ways that he threatened
to punish those churches and pastors sometimes were word-for-word exactly the same as what the
CCP is using against the Chinese churches.”

Fu noted how former Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti at one point threatened to cut off
the utilities of homes and businesses that defied California’s COVID-19 restrictions.

“Guess what? That’s exactly the same tactic, word-for-word, that the Communist Party has issued over
the years against the churches,” Fu claimed. Neither Newsom nor Garcetti responded to Fox News Digital’s
request for comment by time of publication.

Fu also noted how pastors have been treated in Canada during recent years as a particularly egregious
example of Chinese-style tactics being used to clamp down on churches in a Western democracy, adding
that the country has been engaging in “passive and active persecution” against churches.

“In front of the camera, the police would invade a church during the Sunday worship, kick out all the
believers and basically push the pastor away from the church building and then shut down the whole
church,” Fu said of Canada. “So, that is happening now. I think the church in the West has to be
prepared for something like this to happen and maybe happen more.”

“There are so many unprecedented things that really break my heart,” Fu said. “I feel America is descending
into a Chinese communist-style of governance. The media propaganda is exactly the same as in communist
China, where I was born and educated in the trend.”

Much of U.S. mainstream media, he claimed, has become “the mouthpiece of one party, one ideology,
by twisting and even lying and using all their so-called reports to promote one ideology.”

Fu said Big Tech’s clampdown on speech in the U.S. is also a trend he has witnessed in China, where posts
from his organization have been scrubbed from Facebook.

Following the implementation of its “Administrative Measures for Internet Religious Information and Services”
in 2022, Chinese censorship of online Christian content — including even in group chats — has reached
an “unprecedented” level, according to ChinaAid’s most recent report.

Fu said Christian persecution in China has worsened to a point not seen since the Cultural Revolution.
According to his organization’s report, Chinese Christians are being routinely imprisoned and tortured,
and the government is using the traditional Christian practice of tithes and offerings to trump up fraud
charges in an attempt to “financially suffocate” the house churches.

Multiple house church pastors and elders have been jailed and potentially face years in prison,
and religious citizens in China’s Henan province are required to register with the government’s new
“Smart Religion” app to participate in worship services, according to the report.