We must take a stand
Hi One Eight Catalyst friends! It’s been awhile since we’ve posted a blog on our site, but as we ramp up on ministry for 2020, the goal is to have at least one blog post on our site once a week. We’ll be mainly posting about topics that are around Great Commission fulfillment. For this post, we digress just a little and look back at a topic that dominated the first 12 years of our ministry: China. As those of you who have been interested in our ministry for a while already know, our President, Mike Falkenstine has generally advocated for the Chinese government, especially in the area of religious affairs. Without rehashing past posts and content in past newsletters, Mike has always felt that as long as the ministry we’ve wanted to accomplish was possible using ‘legal and open’ means to do it, we were going to do it. This approach has been a very prosperous and profitable one for us, which has led to more opportunities as we’ve been able to gain the trust of local officials because they’ve seen us as friends.
There is a situation going on in China that we must break from the Chinese government on because of the horrific nature of this situation. The Chinese government has detained up to 1 million ethic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years. The Uighurs and Kazakhs are two of the largest of thousands of ethnic minorities in China and are traditionally ethnically Muslims. A recent leak of over 400 pages of internal documents have been recently shared with The New York Times and has revealed new horrible details of the ethnic cleansing that is happening to China today in these camps. Without recalling all the details, may we recommend you take a few minutes and read this article about what is happening:
Two final thoughts: First, these camps are a larger part of China thinking that they can do what they want when they want to do it, and without much international pressure, they will continue this type of behavior. This hard-nosed attitude reminds us of another story recently where China was in the news. The Houston Rockets of the NBA recently had an employee (their General Manager) who tweeted support for the protesters in Hong Kong. The Chinese government, who was very unhappy by the tweet, cancelled NBA games that were scheduled to by played in Shanghai. It was an interesting situation to watch because the NBA has been working very hard to gain traction in China and sees China as a very lucrative market for their future. After a little capitulating, the NBA had to come out on the side of free speech, given that in the USA, where Houston, TX is located, we still have free speech.
As a communist country where increasingly the Chinese government is flexing it’s muscle internationally, the international community must stand for standards of Human Rights like the freedom of speech and the freedom from arbitrary detention. It’s time that the international community stand up to China and say, ‘We will no longer stand idly by and we will take a stand!’
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