Bob Fu of ChinaAid Speaks to YCT about Christianity, Communism

Tuesday, March 19, Trinity University’s Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) hosted Bob Fu. Fu is the founder and president of ChinaAid, a non-profit, Christian-based organization that advocates for human rights and religious freedom in China. ChinaAid gives financial and moral support to Christian Chinese families who have been persecuted by the Chinese government. His main goal is for Chinese Christians and other religious groups to express their religion with ease and without persecution from the Chinese government.

To begin his speech, Fu gave a short backstory about his earlier life and how ChinaAid came to be founded. While attending university in Beijing, he participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square student and intellectuals demonstrations. During which Fu and his girlfriend at the time, now his wife, Heidi, converted to Christianity. Soon after the Tiananmen Square Massacre, he was imprisoned in China for identifying as a Christian. It was these incidents in his life that highlight his history of fighting for freedom and democracy in China.

Bob Fu is not the only one to have been imprisoned for his religious beliefs. Even today, many Chinese Christians are being imprisoned for their faith. In fact, one who expresses his or her faith is considered a political dissident, which can warrant imprisonment.

“Hearing that from the point of view of someone who grew up under a regime like China was shocking,” said Daniel Mitchell, a junior at Trinity University.

However, it is not only Chinese Christians who are being persecuted for their faith. “One to three million Muslims are being put into concentration camps by the Communist Party,” explained Fu.

The Uyghurs, a majority Muslim ethnic minority from Xinjiang province, are being torn from their homes and sent to concentration camps by the Chinese Communist Party.

Fu further explained that the amount of Christians in China actually grew after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. He predicts that there will be over 200 million Christians in China within the next 20 to 30 years.

“It was interesting to see Fu’s predictions of the numbers regarding the amount of future Chinese Christians,” said Ian Kavanagh, a senior at Trinity University who worked at ChinaAid this past summer.

Fu is optimistic about the growth of the amount of Christians in China, he predicted there will soon be more than 200 million Chinese Christians. “Sooner or later, they [Chinese government] will realize that imprisoning these Christians will not be a sustainable policy,” he said.

Fu believes that imprisoning people for their faith will eventually become unsustainable because Chinese prisons “will not able to hold every single Christian in China.”

Even though religious persecution continues in China, Bob Fu will not give up. Today, he continues as president of ChinaAid to advocate for religious freedom and basic human rights in China. ChinaAid continues to support persecuted families in need and educating those who are not familiar with this issue.

Photo courtesy YCT.

“Commie Cookies” in Coates

If you were walking through Coates Student Center on October 16 around lunch time, you probably noticed members of the Trinity chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas (YCT) passing out fortune cookies with “fortunes” regarding Mao Zedong and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. Cookies stated facts about Mao’s reign in the form of fortunes- “you will kill 60 million people” or “you will starve innocent families.”

YCT Chairman Isaiah Mitchell had the idea for the event. “We love to talk about human rights violations until communism’s legacy enters the discussion. I wanted to remind people about the bloody history of communism in a fun way, just because people remember a joke better than a pamphlet,” Mitchell said. A post on the YCT-Trinity Facebook page stated that the purpose of the table is to “raise awareness about Mao Zedong, who founded the People’s Republic of China 69 Octobers ago.”

According to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s 2017 annual report on U.S. attitudes towards socialism and communism, 58 percent of millennials preferred either socialism, communism, or fascism to capitalism, but 69% of them were unable to accurately define socialism and communism. With this table event, YCT hoped to spread awareness about undeniably evil acts- like Mao’s responsibility for the deaths of over 60 million people.

Photo by Maddie D’iorio

With support for far-left ideologies like communism, socialism, and fascism on the rise among college students, informing students about the actual legacy of these governments is more important than ever, according to Senior Chinese Language major Ian Kavanagh, who has spent time living and studying in both Taiwan and mainland China. “Communism results in mass starvation, genocide and misery,” Kavanagh said, adding that in communist China, “over 100 million people have died since the inception of the state, including over 40 million unborn children.” 

Reactions from students were mixed. Some left-leaning students were skeptical about the “angle” that YCT was taking. Mitchell acknowledged that while the organization is ideological, the aim is to inform students about the atrocities Mao committed, believing that the humanitarian and economic record of communist regimes speak for themselves. 

Next year, Mitchell hopes that the club will be able to repeat the event on the exact anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, October 1. Next year will be the 70th anniversary. He also hopes that student organizations at other schools will adopt the event in order to reach more students.