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BEIJING: China criticized Pope Francis on Tuesday (Nov 24) for a passage in his new book in which he mentions the suffering of China’s Uighur Muslim minority group.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said Francis’s comments “had no factual basis.”
“People of all ethnic groups enjoy all the rights of survival, development and freedom of religious belief,” Zhao said in a daily briefing.
Zhao did not mention the camps in which more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Chinese Muslim minority groups have been held. The United States and other governments, along with human rights groups, say the prison-like facilities are intended to divide Muslims from their religious and cultural heritage, forcing them to declare allegiance to the ruling Communist Party of China and its leader, Xi Jinping. .
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China, which initially denied the facilities existed, now says they are centers intended to provide job training and prevent terrorism and religious extremism on a voluntary basis.
In his new book Let Us Dream, to be published on December 1, Francis listed the “poor Uighurs” among the examples of groups persecuted for their faith.
Francis wrote about the need to see the world from the peripheries and margins of society, “towards places of sin and misery, of exclusion and suffering, of sickness and loneliness.”
In those places of suffering, “I often think of persecuted peoples: the Rohingya, the poor Uighurs, the Yazidi, what ISIS did to them was truly cruel, or the Christians in Egypt and Pakistan killed by bombs that exploded while praying in the church. “Francis wrote.
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Francis has refused to call out China for its crackdown on religious minorities, including Catholics, to the dismay of the Trump administration and human rights groups. The Vatican last month renewed its controversial agreement with Beijing on the nomination of Catholic bishops, and Francis has been careful not to say or do anything that might offend the Chinese government on the matter.
China and the Vatican have had no formal relations since the Communist Party cut ties and arrested Catholic clergy shortly after taking power in 1949.
