The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is waging a war against faith, a war that it could win if we don’t wake up and start fighting. With everything we have.

And this is a war that China must lose.

Because what China is doing — what we are permitting China to do — brings back chilling memories of the Holocaust.

The campaign was fought for many years on the local level. Now it is coordinated at the very top of the Chinese government and with the kind of technology that should make all of us terrified.

Not just on a moral level. Because we care about the Chinese believers who are the victims of horrifying persecution today.

We should be terrified because China’s war on faith can come here. To the United States. I can make the case that it already has.

The Chinese have taken the war to authoritarian countries like Iran and Nicaragua, where surveillance technology enables the persecution of Muslims who object to Islamist repression of women and Catholic priests who offer a creed different from Marxism.

The CCP is also winning here, in free capitalist America, where two huge businesses, Hollywood and the National Basketball Association, have become willing enforcers of Chinese censorship. Censorship that has shielded China’s crimes against humanity — the internment of hundreds of thousands, forced abortion and sterilization, organ harvesting from living victims — from international notice and protest.

The movie industry is in bed with the Chinese because it often relies on the Asian market to make a profit.

The NBA’s star players sell shoes in China. How hypocritical it was several years ago when these incredibly well-paid athletes never uttered a negative word about what was going on in China, while often condemning our own society.

Only one player has called out the Chinese Communists — Enes Kanter Freedom, the third overall pick in the 2011 NBA Draft, whose story I tell in this book. He no longer plays in the league, and that’s because he had the audacity to speak out against China’s oppression. Yes, Black Lives Matter, but what about Chinese lives? Don’t they matter, too?

Look, I’m as fervent a believer in the capitalist system as the next guy, siding with big business throughout my years as a congressman, senator, and governor. That does not mean, however, that we should be doing business with everyone.

Certainly not with a regime that is waging a war against religion and conducting genocide against the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang, the members of Falun Gong, and the Buddhists in Tibet — and persecuting Christians who refuse to put the CCP above the Bible.

With their relentless pursuit of the almighty dollar and cheap products, a number of American businesses are acting as accomplices. U.S. companies’ investment in China, as of 2025, totaled $127 billion. That’s billion with a B. Those companies include Apple, BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and Tesla. Here’s a quote attributed to Karl Marx: “We will hang the capitalists with the rope they sell us.”

China has been waging this war — in one form or another, against one religion or another — for nearly eighty years, since 1949, when Mao Zedong defeated the Nationalist forces, and Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan. Today, the war on faith is being fought more aggressively than ever by a government led by a Mao-like dictator, Xi Jinping.

Let me share with you a few examples of what China has been doing:

Pressuring Christians to replace pictures of Jesus with posters of Xi Jinping
Arresting priests who do not acknowledge the Chinese Communist Party as the ultimate authority. Catholic bishops in China are in prison or have disappeared, or live under house arrest or surveillance
Detaining Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking ethnic group who live in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, in concentration camps — at least one with a crematorium attached, as Ethan Gutmann, a senior fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, reported to Congress in 2022
Harvesting organs from prisoners who are still alive — both Uyghurs and practitioners of Falun Gong — to support the country’s billion-dollar organ export industry
Subjecting Uyghurs to pregnancy tests, forced intrauterine devices, and forced abortions
Demolishing sacred religious sites. Chinese authorities destroyed five thousand mosques over a single three-month period, and 97% of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries are now gone
Forcing teachers to give up Christian beliefs and practices

Time is not on our side. Every day, innocent people in China are being imprisoned, tortured, raped. Killed.

These people of faith are similar to the Jewish refuseniks of the 1970s and ’80s (so named because the Soviet Union refused their request to emigrate to Israel), incredibly brave souls such as Natan Sharansky, who spent nine years in a Siberian prison. While small in number, they challenged the legitimacy of the Russian Communist regime and helped crush the Soviet Union. Or, as President Ronald Reagan rightly put it, “the Evil Empire.”

Some of these men and women have suffered for years behind bars, others enduring physical torture. They lost family members and friends and were subjected to unimaginable assaults on their privacy and their personal integrity. Every story demonstrates the cruelty of the regime that poses the greatest threat to freedom in our lifetime. Even greater than the Soviet Union during the Cold War, something I never thought was possible. But none of this horrific persecution deterred them from fighting for their right, and the rights of others, to practice their faith.

The war is being conducted by the CCP, not by the Chinese people themselves, whom I have admired since my first visit in 1985 (my wife Mary and I are blessed to have a brilliant daughter adopted from China), and led by Xi Jinping, the president of China since 2013 and general secretary of the Communist Party since 2012. It reminds me of the Soviet Union at its worst and even of the Holocaust. In fact, the CCP has killed more of its own people than any regime in history — more than Adolf Hitler’s Germany or Joseph Stalin’s Russia. By far. Let that sink in for a little bit.

For the longest time, I could not understand how so much of the civilized world, armed with overwhelming evidence from eyewitnesses, could be silent while Hitler’s Third Reich carried out the Final Solution against the Jews of Europe.

Now I understand. I understand too well.

Because it is happening again, before our very eyes — in the twenty-first century, no less, in a world where everyone has a smartphone, with access to the facts and the pictures at their fingertips. Facts and pictures from three genocides that China has perpetrated: Uyghurs with shaved heads loaded on trains to concentration camps, Tibetan Buddhist monks in chains, the face of a thirty-seven-year-old woman burned with electric batons for practicing Falun Gong. The consequences for freedom everywhere — and that includes the United States of America — will be dire if we fail to act. I pray that it is not already too late.

Adapted from: China’s War on Faith by Sam Brownback (Author), Michael Arkush. Republic Book Publishers.

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