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SPECIAL SERIES:Religious Liberty Around The World

For five months in a Chinese detention center, the pastor had no name. He was T07. His senior pastor, Wang Yi, was T01.

“They just made me reduce my name to a number,” Pastor Ding Shuqi of Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church said of his imprisonment following the CCP’s crackdown on the church in 2018. Ding was speaking in public for the first time since arriving in the United States last year.

Fellow inmates warned him that if the detention center kept no record of his name, he could die inside and no one outside would ever know.

“I don't know if that was true,” he said. “But it felt true.”

Chinese police had detained Ding during raids on church gatherings multiple times until he was able to escape to the United States last year. But the persecution against his church, a prominent Reformed Presbyterian underground Christian church based in Sichuan province, hasn’t stopped.

Just days before, Ding said Chengdu police arrested an elder and another member of his church for organizing a reading group for elderly neighbors. Ding said the book was called “Walking Through Suffering.” In China, he said, reading an unauthorized Christian book with others is labeled “organizing illegal religious activity.”

Ding was one of more than a dozen speakers at a gathering at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., last week organized by the International Religious Freedom Summit and its partners. The event, “CCP Oppression in America and China,” was deliberately scheduled days before Chinese President Xi Jinping’s arrival for White House talks with President Donald Trump.

The talks, set for Thursday, are expected to focus largely on trade and artificial intelligence. Top religious freedom advocates also want Trump to press Xi on the plight of several religious freedom prisoners.

“The Chinese government is at war with faith, and they’re at war with us,” said Sam Brownback, former Kansas governor, senator, and former U.S. ambassador for international religious freedom who co-chairs an annual religious liberty summit. “We respectfully ask [Trump] to bring up the topic of religious freedom in his upcoming summit with President Xi. We ask that the people incarcerated in China because of their faith be set free.”

During Xi’s visit, the advocates aren’t just talking about the need for China to release several prisoners of conscience.

On Wednesday evening as Xi arrives in Washington, D.C., another group involved with religious freedom advocacy, the Human Rights Foundation, plans to project large-scale images of eight prisoners of conscience in China onto prominent buildings and locations in Washington and call for their release.

The images featured include: Joshua Wong, a student and activist who has been imprisoned twice under Hong Kong’s National Security Law; Owen Chow, a legislator and activist, imprisoned in the “Hong Kong 47” national security case; Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur professor serving a life sentence for his advocacy for Uyghur rights; Gulshan Abbas, a........

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