"Rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short.... Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God's commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus" (Revelation 12:12, 17).

If you watch the news, you have probably seen XINJIANG (pronounced "Shin- jeung") mentioned at various times over the past several years. Some people may be shocked that we used the word "Genocide" in the title of this newsletter. That description is not our own. The term has officially been declared against China for their horrific acts in Xinjiang by the United Nations, US Congress, British and European parliaments, and a large number of independent bodies.

In this newsletter we will highlight some of the things being committed against the people of Xinjiang by President Xi Jinping and his Chinese Communist Party. As many as three million people have been systematically destroyed in concentration camps over the last several years. However, our primary concern is for those victims the secular media will never mention — the Body of Christ in Xinjiang.

If this is the first you have heard of the situation in Xinjiang, you can easily search "Xinjiang Genocide" on the internet and find hundreds of articles, videos and other resources related to the sick and demonic events that have unfolded there.

If you are tired of all the conflict and stress that has been affecting society in recent years, we are sorry to let you know that the Chinese Communist Party is now aggressively pursuing its global ambitions. Sensing America is at a weak point in its history, China is setting up military bases from Africa to the South Pacific and across Asia, and their influence is already embedded in every corner of the globe. They have stood up as bullies in the region, challenging anyone who might dare to come and stop them.

Many Westerners don't understand that the foundation of Communism has always been militant atheism. They hate God and those who follow Him, and China longs to eliminate what it considers one of its gravest threats: the Good News about a carpenter's son who lived two thousand years ago. They fear His power to transform people's lives and to gain millions of devoted followers, and they have looked on in confusion as the number of Christians in China has grown from about one million in 1949 when the Communists came to power, to over 100 million today.

Because of their fear and loathing of Jesus Christ, the Chinese Communist leaders have a different view on recent history than most people around the world. If you ask anyone familiar with China what significant event took place on June 4, 1989, they will reply that was the day China crushed the Tian'anmen Square pro-democracy uprising in Beijing by mowing down the protestors with machine guns, and by running tanks over the spines of thousands of their own citizens.

We happened to be at Tian'anmen Square shortly after the massacre, but by then all evidence of the carnage had been erased, with the corpses burnt to ashes and teams with high-powered hoses washing the blood and ashes down the drains. Just days later, the Square was reopened to tourists as though nothing had ever happened.

To the Communist Party, however, something else happened on June 4, 1989, which causes them to tremble. On that very same day, demonstrations started by a group of praying Christians were held in faraway Poland, that saw the people overwhelmingly reject Communism. The movement quickly spread to other Eastern European nations, and at an amazingly rapid pace, the entire Soviet Union came tumbling down!

The Communist Party in China has publicly stated that Christians were to blame for the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, and this explains why they are willing to do whatever it takes to try and suppress the growth of the Church.

As the Scripture quoted at the top of this section teaches, the oppression of Christians in Xinjiang and elsewhere is best understood only when the spiritual force behind such attacks is identified as satantic that must be resisted with spiritual weapons of righteousness.

2017 - The Year Everything Changed in Xinjiang

Tensions have existed in Xinjiang between the Han Chinese and Muslim peoples (especially the Uyghurs) for centuries, but the situation broke into full-scale death and destruction in 2017, when conventional arrests were discarded in favor of mass detainment of every person the Communist Party considered a potential threat.

Although to the outside world the dramatic actions in Xinjiang seemed haphazard and rushed, they were carefully formulated and systematically implemented by the government.

For China, a major tipping point which led to this overwhelming action took place in the leafy city of Kunming in faraway southwest China at about nine o'clock in the evening of March 1, 2014.

On that day, a group of eight Uyghurs (six men and two women), dressed in black and wielding long knives, ran through the crowds of people inside the Kunming train station, slashing men, women, and children at random. By the end of the night, 31 people had been slashed to death and another 143 were injured, many with life-threatening conditions.

The incident in Kunming understandably shocked the nation, and the ability of the Communist Party to protect its own citizens was questioned. President Xi Jinping, who had only assumed office 15 months earlier, called for a focus on fighting terrorism, mobilized civilians to support policing, and set up an all-encompassing initiative called "nets above and snares below".

The subsequent unprecedented crackdown in Xinjiang resulted in up to three million people being interned in concentration camps throughout the region, where they were subjected to brainwashing and "re-education" programs that the Communist authorities cynically describe as "vocational retraining centers."

The Threat to Xi's Vision

A cornerstone of Xi's ascent to the presidency of China in 2013 was his comprehensive plan to make China the greatest military and economic power in the world. The centerpiece of this plan was his 'Belt and Road' initiative, designed to link China to the rest of the world and spur trillions of dollars in trade. Of all the places in China that are key to the implementation of this ambitious plan, none is more vital than Xinjiang, which serves as China's gateway to South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, Russia, and ultimately Europe.

The timing of the Muslim insurgency in Xinjiang, therefore, could not have come at a worse time for Xi's plans. The increase in violence occurred right as the initiative was being launched, with billions of dollars of investment flowing into surrounding countries.

Facing a possible threat to the entire Belt and Road program and China's subsequent plans for prosperity and world dominion, the Chinese Communist Party launched a massive crackdown against the 12 million Uyghurs and other minority groups in Xinjiang.

To start, new laws were introduced in Xinjiang, one of which prohibited parents and guardians from "organizing, luring or forcing minors into attending religious activities or forcing them to wear religious dress or symbols." Citizens were encouraged to spy on their neighbors and to report parents they suspected of raising their children in a religious faith.

Although life for most Han people in Xinjiang continued without much change, the ethnic minority peoples were shattered and would never be the same again.

Tragically, the fledgling churches that had only recently emerged among these minority groups were also decimated, as believers found themselves caught up in the chaos. Many Uyghur, Kirgiz, Kazak, and Hui Christians were lost in the madcap violence that engulfed the region. Communists don't usually care or see any difference between Christians, Muslims, or other religious adherents. They are all the same to a Marxist.

Overwhelming Force

The police and military were given new wide-ranging powers in Xinjiang, aided by hundreds of thousands of facial-recognition cameras, that process everything that goes on in the region. Police were granted authority to stop and search anyone on the street and demand to see their phones or other electronic devices. If any questionable emails or texts were found, or the person had visited religious websites, they were immediately taken into custody.

Next, every person in Xinjiang who had a passport was ordered to hand it over to the police, and to apply for permission if they wanted to leave the country.

Locals in Xinjiang identified 48 "evil bans" which the government implemented as reasons for arresting people and sending them for "re-education." The list included "traveling abroad, knowing someone who has traveled abroad, watching foreign videos or movies, fasting, praying, attending religious seminars, downloading foreign software, not submitting voice recordings to the government, and speaking in a native language in public."

By the end of 2017, a glimpse into the scale of China's plans emerged with news that in addition to implementing a national facial recognition database, the government was creating a DNA database of every adult in Xinjiang. Human Rights Watch reported:

"Chinese authorities in Xinjiang are collecting DNA samples, fingerprints, iris scans, and blood types of all residents in the region between the ages of 12 and 65.... Compelled DNA sampling of an entire region or population for purposes of security maintenance is a serious human rights violation in that it cannot be justified as necessary or proportionate."

One of the dozens of massive concentration camps in Xinjiang where between one and three million people have been forcibly detained and tortured. China calls these "vocational retraining centers."

"Aden Yoq"

Awareness of the scale of the crackdown in Xinjiang gradually dawned on the rest of the world. Visitors to many cities and towns reported how entire neighborhoods had been boarded up and were largely devoid of people, while grandmothers were left to take care of children whose parents had been suddenly taken away. Satellite images appeared on Western news websites, showing how dozens of massive secure facilities, surrounded by barb-wire and high walls, had been quickly constructed throughout the region. Many camps were so large that they were able to house tens of thousands of detainees.

As the world struggled to come to terms with developments in Xinjiang, the estimates of the number of people incarcerated in the camps increased markedly, with the US Department of Defense stating the number was "at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens" in May 2018.

If the ethnic minority population of Xinjiang thought the preceding years were as bad as things could get, 2018 commenced with the Chinese constitution being altered to appoint Xi Jinping 'President for life', and the concentration camps were filled to overflowing. The few survivors to emerge from the camps have told of merciless torture, non-stop brainwashing about the glories of the Communist Party, rape and forced sterilization of women, and killing. The government also built hundreds of "orphanages" throughout the region to house the children of parents that had been killed. According to local media reports, just one county near Kashgar built 18 new orphanages in 2017.

The Chinese Communist Party did not limit their suppression to adults. Under direct command from Beijing, hospitals in Xinjiang were ordered to perform late-term abortions on minority babies, and in many cases newborn babies were killed as soon as they were delivered. A hospital worker, Hasiyet Abdulla, described the carnage:

"They wouldn't give the baby to the parents—they kill the babies when they're born. It's an order that's been given from above, printed and distributed in official documents. Hospitals get fined if they don't comply, so of course, they carry this out.... There were babies born at nine months who we killed after inducing labor. They did that in the maternity wards because those were the orders. Babies born alive were taken from their parents, killed, and then discarded like trash."

Dr. Joanna Smith Finley of Britain's Newcastle University commented: "It's not an immediate, shocking, mass-killing-on-the-spot-type genocide, but it's a slow, painful, creeping genocide.... A direct means of genetically reducing the Uyghur population."

So devastating were the effects on society that the Turkic phrase adem yoq ("everybody's gone") was commonly heard throughout the villages and towns of Xinjiang. When asked how a person's family was doing, the answer was often: "adem yoq."

Muslim marriages were outlawed, and in June 2018, as part of the plan to transform Uyghurs into patriotic Chinese citizens, 40 Uyghurs from Kashgar, Aksu, and Hotan were arrested and tortured in concentration camps after they refused to participate in a Chinese Dragon Boat Festival. Muslim men were banned from growing long beards, women could not wear veils in public, and homeschooling was outlawed.

Arbitrary arrests of people with no connection to terrorism at all continued to occur across the region. For example, in December 2017 a Kazak man, Jierebaike Yelimaisi, was sent to a concentration camp simply because he had traveled abroad for heart surgery.

In the first few months of the crackdown, over 100 Christians were sent to camps throughout Xinjiang. As the Body of Christ was numerically small among the ethnic minorities, this wiped out most of the Church leadership in one swoop. A pastor's wife said, "I don't know where my husband is right now, but I believe that God still uses him in prison. Sometimes I am worried that he doesn't have enough clothes to keep warm. I am afraid it will affect my children too."

The situation became very real to us when a key house church figure in Xinjiang vanished when she visited a hotel in Urumqi and was asked to insert her ID card into a machine at the entrance. The moment she did so, according to witnesses, security officers appeared and took her into custody. She has not been heard from since.

Normally, when we announce a new China book, we tell readers about the evangelists we support among unreached people groups in that province, and invite people to participate if they feel the Lord wants them to pray and be involved. When it comes to Xinjiang, however, the situation is extremely grim.

Over the years we have supported dozens of evangelists in Xinjiang, including Uyghur, Kazak, Kirgiz, Hui and other church leaders from ethnic minority groups who were reaching their own people with the Gospel. Now we are supporting no evangelists at all in Xinjiang. Those we previously worked with have been killed, sent to Communist concentration camps, or are otherwise missing and unable to be contacted.

We have, however, printed and delivered over 250,000 Bibles to Chinese house church believers in Xinjiang through our China Bible Fund. The project continues, despite overwhelming challenges, and we invite you to help our Chinese brothers and sister access God’s Word while the opportunity still exists. Each full Bible costs $3 to print and deliver.

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