Beijing, China – 16 January 2022: Preparations for the Beijing Winter Olympic Games 2022. A big statue on Tien’An Men square being decorated.
As the 2022 Winter Olympics are about to open in Beijing, the Pew Research Center has released key findings on U.S. and international views of China.
Among those, they find that the “level of government restrictions on religion in China have been classified as ‘very high’ every year since 2007, according to an annual Center study of such restrictions around the world. In 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, various sources estimated that more than a million people were arbitrarily detained by government authorities and subjected to human rights violations in the Xinjiang region.”
If you’d like to better understand the methodology and findings of Pew’s global studies on religious restrictions, please check out the TEDx Talk by Brian Grim from 2013 in Vatican City when he lead the initiative at Pew. Those data are part of what led him to found the Religious Freedom & Business Foundation (RFBF) in 2014, seeing that business can be a powerful force supporting interfaith understanding, religious freedom and peace, as was summarized in a co-publication released by the UN Global Compact and RFBF that same year.