On the eve of Xi Jinping's visit to the United States, the Washington Forum focuses on religious freedom and cross-border pressure: Kim Jong-il, Fujitsu and others.

On the occasion of Xi’s visit to Washington on September 24, a forum on religious freedom in China, religious persons in custody and overseas pressures entered the diplomatic agenda of the U.S. capital. On September 16, several advocates of religious freedom, members of Chinese family churches and former U.S. officials held the “Communist Party of China’s oppression in the U.S. and China” forum at the Washington Bible Museum, and the organizers made clear that they wanted to bring religious freedom and related cases into the scope of the upcoming U.S.-Chinese leaders’ talks.

The event was organized by groups such as the Religious Freedom Institute, the International Religious Freedom Summit and ChinaAid. Participants included former U.S. Ambassador for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback, Beijing Zion Church Pastor Kim Ming, ChinaAid founder Fou Hichai, and representatives from Uighurs, Human Rights and Hong Kong Initiatives.

Talk about overseas pressure from cases within China

ChinaAid reports on the event showed that the discussion was not focused only on the restrictions on religious activity within China. Several participants extended the topic to surveillance, harassment, public opinion attacks or cross-border pressure, as described by overseas Chinese communities, scholars and initiatives, and generalized these phenomena as “transnational repression.”

Yang Fengeng, a professor of sociology at Pudong University, said at the meeting that his research papers on Chinese religion were restricted in Chinese academic databases, and that some Chinese scholars no longer publicly cite their names; he also said that he encountered overseas cyberbullying and Wikipedia articles being manipulated.

In recent years, the U.S. Department of Justice has publicly prosecuted persons suspected of monitoring, threatening or suppressing dissidents in the U.S. on behalf of the Chinese government in several cases, while the Chinese government has long denied the overarching allegations of “transnational repression” and has accused some U.S. agencies of politizing law enforcement, foreign affairs and diplomatic activities.

For the first time since Kim’s release tomorrow, he has been a focus of human rights issues before the summit.

Kim, the founder of the Beijing Zion Church, recalled his detention and a massive operation against the Zion Church in October 2025.ChinaAid said about 30 church leaders and members were taken away at the time.Kim was released to the United States in July this year after nine months of detention, but eight church members are still in detention, and relevant human rights groups refer to them as the “Zion Eight.”

Kim said in Washington tomorrow that he hoped that U.S. and Chinese leaders would discuss trade, technology and security issues, as well as religious freedom and individual cases of detainees.

This is not the first time this kind of case diplomacy has appeared.The Associated Press has also this week that the U.S. Congress held another hearing on U.S. citizens detained in China before Xi’s visit to the United States.Sylvia Zin, the wife of scholar Min Zin, who was detained in China on suspicion of endangering national security, called on Trump to submit her husband’s case to Xi; and Hong Kong media founder Li Ching’s family also used the same diplomatic window to seek attention.

30 organizations jointly put political prisoners and cross-border issues on the agenda before the summit

On September 14th, 30 organizations sent an open letter to Xi Jinping calling for human rights measures before their visit to the United States, including the release of those they found to be prisoners of conscience and the cessation of what they called transnational repression.

Such an open letter is not legally binding, but its political role lies in using the media and diplomatic windows visited by the head of state to present the originally dispersed religious, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and overseas pressures.For the initiative groups, Xi Jinping's state visit provides a node for increasing the visibility of issues; for the U.S. and China, whether to include these cases in formal talks depends on their respective diplomatic agenda and negotiations.

Human rights issues are in parallel with economic and trade negotiations, not replacing one another.

The public focus of Xi’s visit to the U.S. remains on trade, rare earth, artificial intelligence and security issues.The Trump administration is also facing pressure from Congress, religious freedom organizations and families of detainees, hoping to raise human rights cases in high-level talks.

This also represents a real tension in the visit: on the one hand, Washington hopes to reach enforceable arrangements with Beijing on tariffs, key minerals and AI rules; on the other hand, multiple political and social groups in the United States have called on the government not to mitigate human rights cases through economic and trade negotiations.

Therefore, the importance of this forum is not that it can directly determine the agenda of the summit, but that it shows that religious freedom and cross-border pressure issues in U.S.-China relations still have an independent political mobilization space. With the date of Xi’s arrival in Washington approaching, whether a particular case will enter the formal or informal talks between the leaders of the two countries will be an indicator of the actual weight of human rights issues at the summit.