Name: How the CCP Dehumanizes Christians in China | Pastor Bob Fu
Uploaded: 2026-03-09T17:53:20.000Z
Description: Pastor Bob Fu was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement and later led an underground Chinese house church. In 1996, he was imprisoned for “illegal evangelism.”

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Pastor Bob Fu was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement and later led an underground Chinese house church. In 1996, he was imprisoned for “illegal evangelism.”

He later fled China and came to the United States, where he founded ChinaAid, a Christian human‑rights organization that documents cases of persecution, provides legal aid, and advocates for religious freedom in China.

In this episode, we dive into the escalation of religious persecution in recent years in China, including the growing dehumanization of Christians.

Echoing Mao Zedong’s targeting of “five black classes” during the Cultural Revolution, in 2012, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders labelled Christian underground churches as one of five new “black classes” or black categories.

Fu says that the CCP’s leadership is determined to destroy the positive image that Chinese people have of Christian believers.

“Xi Jinping wants to play God,” Fu says. “The Communist Party treats these people as a threat to the regime’s existence. The goal is to eradicate Christian faith from the map of China.”

We also discuss a case now at the Supreme Court, Cisco v. Doe, which could have important repercussions for American companies that enable China’s human rights atrocities.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Bob Fu, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Bob, we were talking just a couple of days ago about the persecution of religious minorities in China. And I mentioned that I saw anecdotally what looked to me like an increase in dehumanizing rhetoric against Christians in the Chinese propaganda, so-called media. And when I said that, you said that you’re seeing this as well, which kind of freaked me out, to be perfectly honest. I just want you to explain to me what it is that you’re seeing. This is, in fact, what precipitated this interview.

Yes, Jan. What I have seen also in the context of the dramatic escalation of religious persecution under Xi Jinping, especially in recent years, is that the kind of propaganda also deepens. So that is a new way to see this persecution against religious minorities across the spectrum. So not only really just Falun Gong practitioners since 1999, but now it has reached other religious minorities. We certainly have seen what has been happening toward the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region, and now we have heard and received stories after stories about the mistreatment of Christian house church members, leaders, and the independent Catholic clergy, and even the Tibetans. So I think this is a very serious development that is happening now.

So let me touch a little bit on this, the rhetoric part. The reason I am so concerned with the dehumanizing rhetoric ramping up is that that’s always sort of a prequel to atrocity crimes. We’ve seen this phenomenon for those of us who look at crimes against humanity often. There’s always that part that happens because basically, even in whatever society, whatever totalitarian dictatorship, most people are not psychopaths, and they need to be kind of tricked in their minds into treating someone or a group as less than, or maybe they’re bad, they’re doing bad things, they’re harming society. This is always how it’s portrayed, or they’re less than I am, they’re kind of less important.

And so yes, as you pointed out, right, this is what was done to the Falun Gong in 1999 with massive propaganda being pushed through the system, but also to ethnic minorities, to the Tibetans and Uighurs in particular, who are kind of, you know, demoted in terms of their level of humanity in the rhetoric itself. Can you give me some examples, maybe, of what you’ve seen with Christians in this respect?

Yes, certainly. I mean, what you and I talked about really reminded me of the so-called black categories, back to the 1960s, actually a little earlier, after the Communists took power, they labeled these  five different categories of people. They called the black categories. They are the landlord, the wealthy, the rich, the counter-revolutionaries. They are the bad people, and  the rightists. They are the bad people. The whole world actually witnessed how horrible this was. Those people who were mistreated and really like subhuman beings under these five black categories.

If you were classified as a landlord, like my neighbor in my childhood home when I grew up, who was classified as a former landlord or counter-revolutionary. I remember five or six o’clock in the morning, I always heard the party secretary of my village start shouting out, yelling to my neighbor, saying, get out, it’s time to sweep the street. Then the door opened, and the main street of our village was being swept inch by inch by my neighbor. I even called him grandpa according to the generation gap. So he was really treated like scum, like he did not constitute a worthy existence. In essence, it was like a Communist Party-engineered slavery system.

It goes back maybe 10 years or a little bit earlier, according to a communist party-controlled think tank leader, Mr. Yuan Peng, who was the director of the Institute of American Studies. Under the so-called black categories, the illegal religious or underground religious groups are one of the categories. And also petitioners, of course, political dissidents, and human rights lawyers. There are five different new categories. Basically, he made these five new categories singled out as those people not worthy of being called Chinese citizens and of course for the Chinese Christians, we all know how they have been mistreated.

I remembered even back to 2002 when I received a stack of handwritten testimonies about torture from mostly a group of Christian ladies who were tortured in the most inhuman manner. I mean, those Christian ladies, I think at least I still have that in written form. They used their own blood, you know, finger blood, just fingerprinted and basically testifying how truthful they shared. I mean, from being stripped of their clothes totally naked to like electric shock batons touching them from head to toe, including their private parts, and one lady even described she was taken to a provincial police academy in a dorm, with four or five policemen, half naked, and she was crying out, basically asking the Lord to take her life.

In our Christian faith we rarely hear of any Christians committing suicide, and that is doctrinally not even allowed. But she was tortured so severely, she was asking the Lord to take her life, that she said she would rather be in the presence of the Lord than be tortured that way, and then all of a sudden, an electric shock baton was put into her mouth, and she passed out. Then she was taken to an ER room in the local hospital. Even the hospital nurse started rebuking this policeman and said, what did she do? Did she do anything wrong for this young lady to warrant such torture?

I also read testimonies like that of one Christian lady during her interrogation, where the interrogator specifically put kind of the name of God. I mean, see this is like a purposely deliberate destruction of your conscience by force. They try to remind me, of course, what happened to some Falun Gong practitioners, right? And they want to, during the interrogation, put Mr. Li Hongzhi’s name or picture there.

I have read testimonies, other testimonies of these Tibetan monks who were forced to do the same thing with the portrait and picture of the Dalai Lama, basically to step on and shout a slogan like something uttering hatred toward their spiritual leader. This kind of treatment is in alignment with the similar communist party’s ideology and doctrine. I know you have a book coming out that analyzes from a very deep theoretical perspective why communism is ultimately the source of this kind of evil.

So I’ve seen, even as recently as just in 2025, when Xi Jinping launched the largest wave of persecution against the urban house church movement like the Zion Church. Many of their family members were being mistreated that way too. I mean, one of the house church pastors from Zion Church in Beijing, when he was arrested and put in handcuffs, had his mom, a very elderly lady, in front of him and had a heart attack.

Even in the most ordinary circumstances, you would let the son at least comfort his mom a little bit, who was dying, right? No, I mean, those state security agents did not even allow this pastor to take care of his dying mother. And you have seen the family members go to the Beihai City No.1 and No. 2 detention centers where the 18 arrested are being held. I think this is happening across the board.

Well, let me tell you what’s on my mind, right? And thank you for referencing Killed to Order, my book. Indeed, a big part of it is trying to explain to people the nature of that system and why this forced organ harvesting industry that exists is sort of a feature, not a bug of it, so to speak. But I keep thinking about this, right? This organ harvesting history started immediately after the communists put massive propaganda into the system to dehumanize the Falun Gong practitioners, to make their fellow man hate them and look at them as lower, as I was saying.

And then, when no one really did anything about it for 14 or 15 years, they did the same thing to the Uyghur people. Of course, in an isolated area in the northwest of China under military control, they pushed more of that dehumanizing rhetoric into the system. They have incarcerated millions of them now and started using them in the organ industry. Actually, Ethan Gutmann has a very important book coming out very soon called The Xinjiang Procedure, trying to assess more of the details of how that played out.

But as I’m watching, right, this kind of Niemoller poem comes to my mind. It started, first they came for the Jews, but I wasn’t a Jew, so I didn’t do anything. It kind of goes on like that. And now I’m concerned, to be honest, as I’m seeing, and you’re kind of validating that there’s this increased rhetoric, dehumanizing rhetoric against Christians. And of course, the persecution is very clear.

The whole Zion Church is being rolled up. There are all these leaders still in prison. There are these increased controls on the Catholic clergy. I think I saw that come from China Aid, from your organization. There’s this whole kind of ramping up happening. And maybe it’s time for us to kind of challenge this whole horror show. At the very least, reduce our own complicity in some of these extreme atrocity crimes, lest they start happening to yet another group, right? That’s what I’m thinking.

Yes, it’s almost like if you read the Communist Party rhetoric and terms, you couldn’t help but conclude on the treatment of those that in their eyes are dissidents or evil cult members or now the new term of inciting state subversion of state power in recent weeks against the Early Rain Covenant Church. Seven of them, and at least four are formally arrested under this charge, or the term fraud is used against those Christian leaders in many provinces like Shanxi Province.

In Linfen City just last June alone, they sentenced this one church, the twelve church leaders; I mean, they received 15 years, 10 years, and 8 years. I mean, all of them were sentenced for basically, you know, being peaceful church leaders. And so they are, I mean, the term they often use is mind transformation, or they treat these really peaceful, loving people of faith like little, you know, mice in the lab that they can change their behavior. I mean, the only difference is that these animals they put in the lab are controlled through medicine or other medical means.

The other is of this human being who caves to mind control in the  concentration camp transformation centers all over China. And I think basically they’re doing the same kind of practice and experiment as the Nazis did to the Jews in the 1930s to 40s. Don’t we think there are similarities behind this thinking?

Bob, when you were describing this new classification system of black classes that was created a while back, one thing that struck me might not be obvious to everybody, but you talked about underground religions becoming one of those black classes. And that, of course, refers to the house church Christian groups specifically. That’s kind of their description, as I understand it.

I mean, basically, you’re saying that was kind of the genesis of this particular focus and increased rhetoric and fixation on persecution?

Yes, I think that was the genesis for this targeted campaign by the Chinese Communist Party [CCP].

Why now? Why do you think there’s this increased dehumanizing rhetoric starting to bubble up now?

I don’t want to overly spiritualize it, but there is a spiritual factor. As Christians, it still is a battle between darkness and light. The corruption and darkness of the Chinese Communist Party really could not tolerate a group of peaceful, genuine, loving, caring, bright people of faith. Christians in 2008, when the Wenchuan earthquake happened, were the first group, even though they are being classified as illegal.

They drove their tractors and rode bicycles from all over China to Sichuan province, where the early Roman Covenant Church is located, near Chengdu. Even the Ministry of Civil Affairs actually, in public, praised the Chinese Christians who were the first group of rescuers, with hundreds of thousands of them helping the migrants take care of those orphans whose parents were buried and died, and some started schools for them; some are still living there.

And yet, after a few months, the first group of rescuers to the earthquake areas were targeted again: Christians. So the Communist Party calls it a mind and heart battle. They feel like the generosity, the love, and the care of Christians have successfully changed the hearts and minds of the perception of Christians in the earthquake-affected areas, and that the Communist Party cannot bear that change. They want to basically destroy the positive image of the Christian faith.

Second, I think everything is political in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party. In essence, when Xi Jinping wants to play God, the true triune God of the Bible that those Christians believe in has become at least regarded as infidels, as not truly patriotic, and they must bow to Xi Jinping’s portrait in imposing the church and synagogue or temples. So the Communist Party is not really tolerating the existence of this group.

That’s why I made the conclusion that, unlike the past waves of persecution launched from the beginning of the Communist Party taking power in 1949, this new wave aims to really eradicate the Christian faith from the map of China. But we all know they will fail and fail miserably, just as many Caesars in the Roman Empire tried but failed miserably. Even in the history of the People’s Republic of China, multiple political leaders have tried but again failed miserably. Instead of the demise or destruction of the church, what has happened is they want to try anyway. So I think that’s how I can see or interpret what they’re doing.

Well, it strikes me that there’s this really kind of, I don’t know what we call it, increased insecurity. Like we have, of course, with the Zion Church, it was a fascinating situation, right? Because when COVID happened, they took all of their operations online in a very public way, which is kind of, you know, almost surprising. But what they did was they weren’t like the Falun Gong practitioners, who actively ask people to quit the Communist Party and reveal the crimes of communism or something like that. At the Zion Church, people were just simply practicing their faith in a very  basic way, going to church services and so forth.

And really, as Grace Jin Drexel recently explained to me, they were trying to minimize anything that could possibly be considered a problem by the regime. But that actually wasn’t enough because, in the context of an online church, it spoke to a whole lot of people, and many wanted to join this, right? Even in this extremely careful environment, the regime had to jump in and basically crush it, jail the leadership, and, as far as I can tell, push more of this sort of language and way of thinking that would make the population hate and dislike these people, be suspicious of them, right? This is what they always excel at doing.

That’s right. I mean, in a sense, the Communist Party treats these people as a threat to the regime’s existence. I know that during Hu Jintao’s time, even in public speaking, he mentioned that internet freedom is an existential threat to the Communist Party. To them, if they loosen or allow internet freedom, the regime will face a death sentence. I think now it implies those they call the new black categories; the underground church leaders, and the human rights lawyers, like Gao Zhisheng.

I’m holding this book published by the American Bar Association, which awarded Gao Zhisheng as the best, most courageous lawyer in China for taking up cases according to Chinese law for defending Falun Gong practitioners and Christians in the court of law. This man suffered 10 years of nonstop torture. I mean, any human being could not imagine. Ten years is a record that, after he was released, of course, now he has been under enforced disappearance for another eight-and-a-half years.

This is a real hero for any normal society, but in the eyes of the Communist Party, he is regarded as a cancer. He does not even deserve to have a voice, to have even a basic announcement of whether he is dead or alive to his family members. For eight-and-a-half years already, this man has been missing, and he’s an American citizen. A wife and a daughter have been searching and calling for the basic whereabouts of their loved one called Gao Zhisheng. This is one very real illustration of what’s happening now in China today. If you are classified as a danger to the so-called political stability and regime security, you name it, then you are subject to this kind of treatment.

Yes, Gao Zhisheng, one of the true heroes of freedom and religious liberty and just fighting for the common man. It was heartbreaking. I don’t think we even really know if he’s dead or alive at this point because no one has seen him in so many years.

Yes, he even talked to me right before he last disappeared, forcibly, about some of his tortures, most torturous moments, like in a cave, an underground cave. He was put naked and with three or four electric shock devices torturing him. And he made a very instant prayer, and then he said he sensed an enormous, like a supernatural shield surrounding him, holding him, and an unspeakable peace he felt, and he fell asleep quickly.

He could smell the burning of his skin, but he did not feel any pain physically or mentally at all, and to the point he not only fell asleep but he started snoring because those several interrogators who were torturing him woke him up and rebuked him sarcastically, saying, we are working so hard, like here, wet with sweat, and you are sleeping and snoring.

What happened? Why? And then God soon uttered the words, exactly almost word by word, of John in the New Testament, something like, the one who is inside me is much greater or more powerful than what you have. Something like that, the whole world outside. So there is an exact quote from the Bible, the scripture.

But it also shows to what extent these torturers want to break your nerve. This is how they treat people like Gao Zhisheng, who is called the conscience of China. Essentially, they want to destroy the conscience of China so that a jungle world can be the norm for the Communist Party to operate. It’s incredibly shocking to me how cruelly the communists treat what, in our society, would be considered, you know, the best people, I would think.

You know, something also struck me as you were speaking about this sort of free information being kind of a death knell for the Chinese Communist Party. And that’s very interesting because we actually have the tools. I know because, for example, at The Epoch Times, we have multiple firewall-breaking tools that we use all the time that could facilitate, I think, almost unlimited firewall breaking if there was an interest in that.

And it’s incredibly important how threatening the idea of free speech and free information is to the communist regime because I often say that their ability to disseminate convincing propaganda is probably the thing that every communist regime is the best at of anything because they’ll convince you that it’s a huge success, that it’s a utopian society, that the technological advancement is next level, that economically they’re a powerhouse, whatever it is.

And the reality, of course, is much more complicated and often opposite than the thing that you’ve learned. I actually recently spoke with a researcher that’s been working on a case that happens to be at the Supreme Court right now, Cisco v. Doe, a fascinating case involving the development of what’s called the Golden Shield, of which part of this censorship, what’s called the Great Firewall of China, is a part. OK, let’s run this videotape, and I want to get your reaction to it.

Can, you’re a researcher with the Human Rights Law Foundation, and you’ve been working on this case now at the Supreme Court, Cisco v. Doe, for the better part of 15 years. It’s amazing, actually, how long it’s been going. You’ve found some kind of startling new evidence. Before we go there, this case involves the Great Firewall of China, how it was built, and actually, in fact, the Golden Shield project. Why don’t you actually explain to me how this Great Firewall of China and Golden Shield project are connected and what it, in fact, is for sure?

There’s a very common misconception out there that the Golden Shield is just the Great Firewall of China; it’s just a censorship software. The truth is that It’s not that the Golden Shield is a comprehensive surveillance system that spans across the entire China; it’s built at every single level of public security, from the ministerial and provincial to the local levels. It maintains lifetime profiles of every single person in China. It has your family information, what websites you’ve seen, who you have been dating, where you work, all of that information in a centralized database that allows the Chinese government to monitor and surveil all of its citizens.

But what’s the connection of that with the social credit system?

It’s a part of it. The social credit system collects, you know, information from big swaths of society, crunches that information, generates a score, and that is, you know, that input, that detection system comes directly from the Golden Shield and all of the information that it collects.

Explain to me why this case was brought and how we got to the Supreme Court.

So according to the complaint, the core allegation is that Cisco, an American company from American soil, has helped the Chinese communist government develop, build, customize, and implement a far-ranging surveillance system specifically targeted at the Falun Gong. And that system was, in fact, used by Chinese security to actually identify, arrest, surveil, and ultimately persecute and force-transform those Falun Gong practitioners. So the case has been going on for quite a while now.

It started way back in 2008 when allegations, Cisco internal presentations were found and publicly disclosed, showing that they had targeted Falun Gong in their own internal materials. So Cisco was brought into the U.S. Congress for questioning. We spent about three years or so collecting evidence from both within Cisco, which came from whistleblowers and other people who had knowledge of what was going on in China.

A hearing was held in what we call the motion to dismiss phase in California in 2014. The district court there actually supported Coinbase’s motion to dismiss. We appealed that decision. The Ninth Circuit basically said that we had presented enough allegations that allowed the lawsuit to actually proceed. Cisco appealed that decision, and now it’s in front of the Supreme Court.

In fact, if I can just quickly read a quote from the Ninth Circuit decision: I quote, according to the complaint, the centralization of information and integration of security systems not only helps Chinese security officials with the tracking and identification of individual practitioners but also provides a system through which officials could track the progression of a given Falun Gong practitioner from detection to forced conversion to post-detention and post-conversion surveillance.

So it’s a system that’s not just about identifying and tracking them, but also continues the entire life cycle of, you know, forced conversion in sort of the parlance of the CCP using threats, using information about who they are, who their family members are, who their kids are, whether their kids go to school, to persecute them. And the documents, the evidence that we have provides pretty clear corroboration of that.

You know that this is what Cisco helped the Chinese Communist Party build. It provides corroboration of the sort of interconnected network that conducts this full-scale cross-pan society surveillance, collecting that information, putting it into databases, passing it out to psychiatric hospitals, black jails, and detention centers where Falun Gong practitioners are persecuted with the Falun Gong information databases that Cisco connected to all of these sites of torture. It’s clearly corroborated by some of the other evidence that we have.

Well, and you’ve actually found some new evidence that the specifications of this system, right from the ministry, if I understand this correctly, actually include the same sort of structure for house church Christians and other groups?

Yes, for sure. So the case was brought by Falun Gong practitioners. So, you know, we sort of initially focused on the Falun Gong aspects of the system. But among the thousands and thousands of pages that we’ve been scouring through, we found evidence that a lot of the same systems that have been created to target the Falun Gong also apply to other dissidents. Among the evidence, there’s a Cisco internal document as well. There’s a 2,000-page overview and design specifications for the Golden Shield that corroborates a lot of this, which Cisco built for the Chinese Communist government.

For instance, we found a very specific work stream in the Golden Shield that relates to the underground Christian and Catholic churches, how those users would be identified on the internet, how they would be tracked, how they would be surveilled and monitored, and ultimately how that information would be stored and used by the public security for their purposes. What it means is that this case is not just about Falun Gong. It has much broader implications.

First of all, it affects every other minority, every other persecuted group in China: the Tibetans, the Catholics, the Christians, the Uyghurs, the Mongolians, the democratic activists. It’s a very broad surveillance system that has been created in China with the help of Cisco that really allows them to cast this extremely wide surveillance network over dissidents in China, as well as even folks, you know, what they’re doing outside of China as well.

First of all, it shows this so-called Golden Shield, as your guest said, is not only internet censorship software. It is really beyond that. It is a comprehensive program to target the whole population for absolute control by the Communist Party. It’s the Orwellian software to help realize their Orwellian system.

Number two is, I think I see it’s not only just targeting one group. Of course, I think the system is designed; they can target, you know, a particular group or age group or ethnic group or religious group. But obviously, this technology is applicable to every other religious group, specifically even mentioned about the underground independent house churches, the Catholics, and other groups too.

So I have received reports actually even showing the kind of increasing qualitatively the level of control and monitoring. Grace Jin Drexel, the daughter of the Zion Church, Pastor Ezra Jin, even shared a story with me. She said when she returned to China last time, of course, she was grounded, not allowed to come back to the U.S. for a couple of years, but she experienced it in person. At that time, you know, the Beijing Zion Church, they were gathering together on a weekly basis.

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