China Olympics: The Genocide Games

The Olympics open today to historic controversy for its host country: China.

“The most prominent attention that China should gain from hosting the Olympics is exposure and condemnation of its atrocities against Christians, Uyghurs, and other religious and ethnic peoples,” said Wendy Wright, president of Christian Freedom International.

Even as China’s communist government is exterminating the Uyghur people, it is escalating its persecution of Christians. China’s brutality has earned this year’s Olympics the nickname of the “genocide games.”

China has imprisoned church leaders and demolished churches. It bans Bible apps, online church meetings, and children from attending church. It forbids parents and teachers from telling children about Christianity and provokes children to report their parents for being Christians or talking about their faith.

Radio Free Asia reports that Chinese authorities detain Christians in secretive mobile “brainwashing camps” for months or years. Most of the prisoners are taken from house churches and subjected to beatings, verbal abuse, and torture to force them to renounce their faith in Jesus.

“After you’ve been in there a week, death starts to look better than staying in there,” wrote one prisoner.

Last year, seven men were arrested after returning from a Christian conference in Malaysia – to which they traveled legally on their regular passports – and charged with “illegally crossing the border” and “smuggling illegal literature.”

China is rewriting the Bible to “sinicize” Christianity to conform to the Chinese Communist Party’s cruel ideology. One passage that has leaked revises the story of a woman caught in adultery from Jesus freeing her from her accusers to, instead, stoning her.

Christian bookseller Chen Yu was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined $30,000 for “illegally selling foreign published religious materials”.

He wrote to his parents from jail:

“Father and mother, you have to be strong and joyful, live every day to the fullest. As the date for the second trial approaches, my heart is unexpectedly filled with peace. In the past two years, what have I lost? I temporarily lost the times with my family, but I did not lose love for my family; I temporarily lost my freedom, but I did not lose the freedom of thought; I temporarily lost my Sundays, but I did not lose my faith.”

“China demands total obedience to communist leaders and its aspiring empire. But Christians’ highest allegiance is to God as citizens of the Kingdom of God. Only one Kingdom is eternal,” said Wendy Wright.

Please pray for:

• The Olympics to be a platform to expose China’s atrocities and shame collaborators of the genocidal regime.
• Olympic athletes to be courageous and safe.
• Christians in China to be “strengthened with all power, according to His glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy.” Colossians 1:11