A family of six who are linked to the heavily persecuted Early Rain Covenant Church in China has been granted political asylum in America after they fled from China to Taiwan. Liao Qiang and his five family members escaped to Taiwan during a trip to Thailand in 2019 and temporarily stayed in the northern city of Hsinchu while waiting for their U.S. asylum application to be processed.
Liao's daughter Ren Ruiting recounted to Radio Free Asia how they traveled to Taiwan, believing they would be protected by refugee laws, but it turned out that they could not stay in the country after all. She said that the family "went along with the arrangements" and waited for the asylum arrangements to be done in order to leave the country.
Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen, while proud of the country's human rights records, is wary about accepting political asylum applications from Chinese nationals as it may start a massive influx of applications. The country's absence of legislation on refugees has forced those who seek refugee status to seek out workarounds if the government allows a person to stay on the island instead of issuing a blanket residency.
Ren shared that church members thought they would be able to lay low and be left alone after the holidays, but the Chinese authorities were relentless in their raids of the Early Rain Covenant Church and its members. She said, "It became clear after I arrived in Taiwan that it would be impossible to go back."
Ren added that Early Rain Covenant Church leaders and members are "still under very close surveillance...with no sign of any relaxation at all." She also got word that her comments to international media has caught the attention of Chinese authorities, who are now threatening to detain her if she went back to China. Liao and his wife, and Ren and her husband, as well as Liao's two younger sons are soon resettling in the U.S. after being granted asylum.
Ren admitted that she had already observed the contrast between communist China's government and the democratic government of Taiwan. For her, President Tsai's public apology during the fatal train crash in April impacted her because she had "never seen the CCP apologize for anything."
"This is the free world, and governments need a humble attitude to run this country," Ren said. China instead has an attitude of retribution for any negative comment on the CCP. The country often engages in smear campaigns, especially towards Western nations and media.
Recently, the CCP launched a campaign against the Uyghur Tribune in London, during which Uyghur survivors recounted the human rights abuses they experienced under CCP rule. CCP representatives denied their allegations and accused them of being "actors."
Reuters reported in April that China and Myanmar have the worst records for violations of religious freedom, as per the Religious Freedom in the World Report, which was released by the Vatican-backed charity, Aid to the Church in Need International (ACN).
"The apparatus of repression constructed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in recent years is...fine-tuned, pervasive, and technologically sophisticated," the report said, citing that the worst offenses were committed in China's Xinjiang, "where the atrocities have reached such a scale that a growing number of experts describe them as genocide."
