Interview: What Beijing Fears Most
September/October 2026During his three and a half decades in public service, Sam Brownback earned the unusual distinction of being the only American to have served as a U.S. congressman, U.S. senator, state governor, and U.S. ambassador. And it was perhaps in that final role—as ambassador at large for international religious liberty—that Brownback finally found his true calling.
For three years, starting in 2018, Brownback worked to strengthen the influence of “religious freedom diplomacy” within the halls of the State Department and the U.S. diplomatic corps. And by many measures, his success was astonishing. At the State Department, Brownback led what he called a “global religious freedom movement.” He convened massive annual religious freedom ministerials in Washington, D.C., attended by high-level government delegations from more than 100 countries along with more than 1,000 leaders of civil society organizations. He was also a key player in forming the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, which now counts 32 countries as members.
Since leaving the State Department in 2021, Brownback has continued his role as international religious freedom advocate, although now in a private capacity. He continues to speak and write about religious liberty issues, and he founded the annual International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, D.C.—now in its sixth year—which draws hundreds of advocates, faith leaders, and government officials from around the world.
Brownback’s most recent book, authored with Michael Arkush, is called China’s War on Faith. It takes a deep dive into the Chinese Communist Party’s campaign against religious believers, and what this reveals about the global struggle to protect religious conscience.
Liberty editor Bettina Krause, together with Alan Reinach, president of the Church State Council, recently interviewed Ambassador Brownback for their weekly podcast Just Liberty. While the conversation has been edited for length and clarity, you can listen to the entire interview on YouTube at @LibertyMag_1906 or by searching for “Just Liberty” on your podcast platform of choice.
Bettina Krause: When you served at the U.S. State Department, you traveled the world, visiting different countries where religious freedom is being violated. So, why, in this new book, are you focusing exclusively on China?
Sam Brownback: All roads lead to Beijing. When you’re looking at persecution or the enabling of human rights abuses in many different places, much of this couldn’t happen without a complicit Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party may not be directly operating it, but they’re encouraging it.
It’s such a central tenet of Communism that you must control people of faith—of any faith. And the Chinese Communist Party spreads its tentacles into the authoritarian sphere of influence that China has around the world. We’re seeing police states developing within many different authoritarian regimes today, and much of the surveillance technology they’re using was beta tested, developed, and deployed by the Chinese Communist Party.
Alan Reinach: What is it about freedom of religious conscience that presents such a challenge for totalitarian governments?
Brownback: Totalitarian regimes cannot stand any allegiance that’s higher than the government, period. They say, “Look, we are the decision makers. We are the authority.” They’ve found, over the years, that people of faith will stand up and fight—and, when pushed, they will actually put their faith above even their own lives. That is just such a core challenge to a totalitarian state, and particularly to a Communist state that is officially atheistic.
This is why I argue that America’s commitment to religious freedom as a cornerstone human right is a strategic asset—and it’s one that we should be using in this era of global expansion of totalitarian movements. Eighty percent of the world’s people have some kind of faith orientation. So this is a value that’s important to the vast majority of the world’s population.
Reinach: Several decades ago a Roman Catholic cardinal in the Philippines, the perhaps inappropriately named Cardinal Sin, was instrumental in leading the opposition against Ferdinand Marcos, which ultimately resulted in the overthrow of Marcos. I’m not a China expert, but if I were sitting in Beijing, I would take a lesson from that. I would become very suspicious of any kind of organized power, such as religion, that can pose an institutional threat to the government.
Brownback: This threat is even more specific to Communism. I think, for instance, of the fall of the Soviet Union and the role of Pope John Paul II, who was Polish. He shows up in Poland behind the iron curtain, and says, “Be not afraid,” to a Polish population that’s historically Catholic but hadn’t been to Mass in decades. He says, “Be not afraid,” and the people who were afraid—who were shaking in their boots—were the Communist leaders of Poland. And before long, it was done. It was over. They had lost power.
I believe that the Chinese Communists have studied that model and that fall. They’ve studied the Jewish refuseniks and what they did to undermine the authority of the Soviet Union; they’ve studied the evangelicals and what they contributed, as well.
Communism seems to have about a 70-year life expectancy in many countries, and the Chinese communists, I think, are trying to extend this. And one of the key groups they need to control is people of faith.
Krause: I visited China some 15 years ago now with a group of church leaders, and we met with Chinese Communist Party leaders who were part of the so-called Three-Self Movement, which is kind of the umbrella organization for Protestant Christianity in China. What is it like to be a Christian believer today within the Three-Self Movement?
Brownback: This Three-Self Movement in China is a top-down, government-controlled church. Now it is a church, in that there are people within it who do have fundamental beliefs in the Bible and God. But the church structure itself is forced to answer to the government. It cannot ever be critical of the government, and the church leadership must be vetted and controlled by the government. And even the church’s teachings must comply with government demands.
During the past several years the Chinese Communist Party has been rewriting and revising portions of the Bible so that it’s more in line with their view of Christianity. This is an officially atheistic organization rewriting Holy Scripture! And more than this, they also believe they have the right to appoint the next dalai lama—the leader of Tibetan Buddhism.
This is really about controlling religion and religious expression, and to control folks whose ideas may be more in line with their faith than with their allegiance to the government.
Reinach: Most of the stories American Christians hear about persecution or repression in China involve Christians. But there are other faith groups that are suffering as badly or even worse. Is that right?
Brownback: Christians don’t have it near as bad as, say, the Falun Gong, which is kind of a blended spiritual movement of Buddhism and Taoism. I often described Falun Gong as the type of spirituality that a grandma in China used to practice—it’s a kind of fusing together of ideas from various Eastern religions, and it wasn’t treated as a problem. But then in the 1990s a guy came along and blended these ideas together officially to create a new religious movement, and it just took off. Within seven years there were some 90 million adherents.
Well, the Chinese Communist Party came down like a ton of bricks on the Falun Gong. They even began a program of forced organ harvesting—an attempt to literally try to wipe this movement out. That’s why I say that China is engaged in a genocide against Falun Gong.
And of course the Communist leaders also want to control the Tibetan Buddhists. There was one party secretary, Chen Quanguo, who was originally the party chairman over Tibet, and he worked to subdue the Tibetan Buddhists. Well, Chen Quanguo was then moved over to Xinjiang Province to deal with the Muslims there, which were a bigger and more difficult religious population. And in Xinjiang, Chen established a diabolical police state, which included concentration camps housing more than a million people. Even if you weren’t in one of these camps, you were being constantly tracked by cameras and other surveillance technology. This was something that really scared me when I first saw it, because it provides a model for authoritarian regimes elsewhere. Our modern era of technology provides a level of surveillance that these regimes could never have dreamed of a generation ago.
Krause: You mentioned earlier “organ harvesting” as one measure the China Communist Party has taken to subdue some religious populations. But this sounds almost unbelievable. When you served as ambassador for international religious freedom, did you have to be “educated” into the realities of religious freedom abuses? And did you ever think, This sounds too horrific to be true?
Brownback: I had those questions and doubts for a decade. When I was in the Senate, these Falun Gong practitioners would come up and tell me about these things. And I’d say, “Yeah, I hear you.” And they would give me their evidence, and I would reply, “OK.” But it just sounded so diabolical that I could not believe that people could imagine and implement such a system—something that would make a medieval executioner blush. But I kept talking with people and seeing new data. I interviewed a gentleman who had an organ harvested—part of his liver. I looked at the forensic medical reports. And you have to say, “Yes, it’s happening.”
And then in 2020 Sir Geoffrey Nice from Britain led an investigation into what was taking place. They went through the numbers of organs that are harvested and transplants taking place annually in China. And they concluded that you can’t do those numbers of transplants without having some sort of forced system in place.
Reinach: I’m almost afraid to ask: What happens to folks when they take the organs? Are they taking enough to kill them?
Brownback: In almost all situations, yes. Falun Gong practitioners are given a death sentence on some sort of treason charge, and so their eyes, heart, lungs, liver, kidney, and multiple organs can be harvested. A kind of “organ tourism” developed for a while where you could sign up for a kidney, for instance, and schedule it—show up at a certain place, and they would get you a kidney.
They extended this practice within the Chinese Muslim population and then advertised this in the Muslim world as “halal organs” available for transplants. Israel, I believe, was the first country to ban organ tourism to China. And praise God, they did that.
I’ve talked with those in the Muslim world, and asked, “Why don’t you guys speak out more about what’s going on in Xinjiang? Because this is a predominantly Muslim population.” And they won’t and they haven’t. They say that the Chinese play rougher than we do.
But China is the only country I know of in the world where you cannot legally name a child Muhammad. There are 50 or so majority Muslim countries in the world—why should they follow the lead of a nation that bans the most popular male name in their own country? Shouldn’t that tell you something?
I want to say one other thing here. I love China and the Chinese culture. My wife and I adopted a young girl from China 25 years ago, and she’s a wonderful member of our family. This is not about China or its culture. This is about the Chinese Communist Party and a dictatorship that they want to use to run the world.
Krause: Ambassador, are there connections between what’s happening in China and what’s happening within other repressive regimes around the world?
Brownback: Well, the unfortunate thing is that technology can easily be exported to other countries. And you can use this technology to find a needle in a haystack. You can find the one guy or the one woman out there who’s organizing a Bible study or is leading a worship group. You can do key word searches on these things. There are many different listening and tracking devices that can find the word “Muhammad” or “Lord” or “Allah” or “God” within trillions of names and data points and to pinpoint who that person is. And you can find not only the person who’s originating these conversations but also the network of people they’re talking to.
In China they’ve started developing individual “social credit scores”—marking down your social credit if you went to the mosque, for instance. It also affects the people that you then talk with, and they get caught in the same lower social credit score. And this can keep you from getting the housing you want or your child getting into a particular school.
Reinach: It strikes me that George Orwell lived and died too soon, because his vision of the totalitarian society doesn’t begin to deal with the reality that we’re seeing today.
Brownback: I can’t argue with you on that—but it gets worse. All these electric cars now, particularly coming out of China—these can be watching devices if you’ve got them plugged in and connected right. I don’t know if you saw recently, but there are some electric lawn mowers that have sensing devices in them. I don’t want to see a spy behind every lawn mower, but we need to understand that there’s just too much capacity, combined with too much desire for information and control.
Krause: What makes these challenges so resistant to diplomatic efforts? Why haven’t we made more progress on improving human rights in China?
Brownback: For a long time many people at the highest levels of our government had a complete disregard for anything religious. They didn’t think religious people were particularly helpful. Many believed that religion, in fact, was a cause for many wars and conflicts, so they thought, Let’s get away from religion!
They couldn’t see that most people have a faith orientation, and you have to address that if you’re going to be able to connect with them and their culture. Most cultures are built on a set of religious values, whether that’s the Indian culture built on Hinduism or the Islamic culture in Muslim-majority countries. I think the U.S. just didn’t want to get into that space. But once we started to, it was clear that this approach starts to address a lot of issues. And so you get breakthroughs such as the Abraham Accords, which come out of a theological approach to the underlying issues that people can identify with. They understand, “Well, I’m in the family of Abraham.” You connect with people, and bring them along with you, when you go to the very roots of their beliefs.
Reinach: My perception has been that, as a nation, we sometimes emphasize human rights in our foreign policy, to a greater or lesser extent, but the more consistent theme is economic policy or other types of policy interests. That makes advocacy for human rights and religious freedom a tough uphill battle. Is that fair?
Brownback: Completely. Until the past 10 to 15 years, that was completely true. It was a useful thing, once in a while, to use human rights as a talking point. But we rarely talked about religious freedom. Then you started hearing people say, particularly in the first Trump administration, “We’re going to make religious freedom a cornerstone human right.” The theory being that if you can get this one thing right, you can then build around that—freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and other rights. The human right of the soul is the one that’s closest to who you are as a person. And that approach did start gaining some traction.
We’re always best when we lead with our values, and religious freedom is a bedrock value—one that happens to go right to the heart of the Chinese Communist Party. I contend that the CCP fears religious freedom more than they do our aircraft carriers or even our nuclear weapons, because this is a value that gets at the core of their control mechanisms.
Krause: We’ve been talking about these things from a 30,000-foot level. What about someone here in America who’s thinking, Well, that’s happening over there. There’s nothing I can do to respond here. What would you say?
Brownback: I’d disagree with them. I’ve seen movements start—even a fifth-grade class in rural Colorado started a global movement to get people interested in these issues.
But people can also pray. They can pray about changes that need to take place. They can speak up to their legislators. They can stop buying as many Chinese-made goods, if these things are going to keep being used to finance these dictatorial governments and build up a military that’s confronting ours.
I believe, in the long term, we need to prepare ourselves to break apart the world economically into a China sphere and a U.S. sphere. We’re going to have to build our own supply chains in reliable places. I think we also have to show people the differences between these two systems and force them to choose which one they want to go with.
As the head of the Tibetan government in exile once told me, either we will change China or China will change the world. It’s going to be one of those two. And China’s got a pretty good head of steam, and I think they’re much tougher than the Soviets ever were.