On the eve of Xi’s visit to the United States, the U.S. Parliament puts the “list of detainees” on the table: religious, Uighur and U.S. citizens are exposed.

Two days before Xi Jinping arrived in the United States,The Chinese Commission for Congress and Executive Authorities (CECC) held a “face of oppression” hearing in the Senate on September 22.Unlike the macro-themes of trade, AI, and Taiwan, the hearing puts the names of specific victims under Chinese rule in front of the summit: detained American citizens, members of the Zion Church, Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and advocates who suffered family pressure and harassment after speaking abroad.

Tomorrow at the hearing.Eight members of the Church of Zion were still detained after their release. In October 2025, Chinese police launched operations against the Church of Zion, with several pastors and fellow workers being controlled. Kim was released in July this year, while others were still unreleased. For religious groups, this means that the national strike is not directed at a single pastor, but can continue to spread across the network of organizations.

Another witness, Rushan Abbas, spoke about his sister Gulshan Abbas.The CECC has previously listed Gulshan Abbas as a key political prisoner case.And she said she was sentenced to 20 years in prison.Rushan Abbas has long believed that his sister’s arrest was linked to his public criticism of Xinjiang’s policies overseas.The Chinese government denies the existence of systematic persecution in Xinjiang, but for family and initiators, the most realistic question is whether a person speaking in the United States will let relatives still in China suffer the consequences.

The hearing also involved U.S. citizens Nelson Wells Jr. and Dawn Michelle Hunt, who have been long detained in China. Families have asked the U.S. government to bring the case directly to Trump and Xi’s talks. For those families, “Sino-U.S. relations stability” could hardly make sense if it wasn’t transformed into lawyer meetings, family contacts, public evidence and release progress.

The CECC said in its hearingsThe topics include the persecution of Christians, Falun Gong practitioners and Uighurs, as well as threats, surveillance, legal harassment, pressure on relatives and cyber attacks against foreign initiatives, which means that the U.S. Congress has put human rights repression in China within the same policy framework as overseas cross-border repression: the former controls people inside China and the latter tries to spread fear outside China.

Kim’s release tomorrow also provides an important fact: freedom in highly politized cases, sometimes not entirely determined by open judicial proceedings, is influenced by diplomatic negotiations and political pressure. If a pastor can be released because of high-level diplomatic intervention, while other persons in the same case continue to be detained, the judicial independence of the case itself will be further questioned.

The value of this hearing is not to repeat the slogan “human rights are important” but to restore the oppressed from statistics to specific names, sentences and family relationships.

Xi Jinping faced not only the national banquet, trade and diplomacy of the chief, but also a list of specific victims.For these families, the real criterion for measuring whether the summit is meaningful is not what the joint statement wrote, but whether someone in these names after the meeting got a lawyer, re-connected, left prison, or no longer retaliated for the voices of relatives abroad.