Trump should make Xi pay for silencing Americans

Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping is set to visit President Donald Trump at the White House in late September. The two leaders have plenty to discuss, but most issues remain stuck.The tariff truce from November 2025 continues while Washington continues to secure critical mineral exports from Beijing. Similarly, the recently announced Boards of Trade and Investment have not yielded any deliverables, and China’s purchases of American soybeans and jet engines have fallen short of expectations. Both leaders are also expected to discuss artificial intelligence safety, but serious questions persist about the probability of both sides agreeing to — and abiding by — anything substantive.There is one exception to this trend: political prisoners. When Trump went to China this past summer, he asked Xi to release several political prisoners, including Apple Daily newspaper founder Jimmy Lai and Pastor Ezra Jin, a Christian minister who was imprisoned in China. Within months of the president’s request, Jin was reunited with his family in the United States. It was a rare and impressive breakthrough on a notoriously difficult issue with the CCP. Trump should move human rights cases with China to the top of his list when he meets with Xi next month. Beijing is particularly sensitive on this topic, given its long-standing domestic oppression. It has delivered higher standards of living, but only alongside censorship, intimidation, arbitrary arrest and detention, and death. The CCP, an officially atheistic party, views organized religion as a unique threat to the perpetuation of its single-party dictatorship. This is the case for all religions — including Christianity, as Jin’s case so visibly displayed.It is also true for the Uyghurs, an ethno-religious minority in Xinjiang. The CCP has moved to stamp out Uyghur identity entirely. Indeed, it is carrying out a genocide in Xinjiang, China’s westernmost region. Slave labor, torture, rape, and death have defined life for millions of Uyghurs for years now.Of course, America cares about religious liberty all around the world. Attacks on faith are an affront to America’s most cherished values. As John Quincy Adams once said, America is “the well-wisher to the freedom … of all.” It becomes personal for America, however, when foreign governments harm U.S. citizens in their zeal to oppress their own people. That’s what happened with Jin’s case: his daughter and son-in-law, both U.S. citizens, appealed to Trump, and he rightly championed their father’s cause with Xi.It is also the case with Gulshan Abbas, a Uyghur who has been detained for over eight years in China and is serving a 20-year sentence. Less than a week after Gulshan’s sister spoke at our think tank (Hudson Institute) about the CCP’s oppression of Uyghurs, the Chinese government arrested Gulshan. Beijing’s ploy was brazenly transparent: use loved ones in China to silence free speech in America. Whenever any foreign government targets the ability of Americans to exercise their First Amendment rights, elected officials should stand up and defend the Constitution.Not only is she a peaceful, 64-year-old doctor with no history of political activism, but Dr. Abbas also has 24 American citizen family members, including her two brothers and a sister, as well as her two daughters and a number of grandchildren. Many of them have directly advocated at the highest levels of the U.S. government to secure the release of their mother, sister, and grandmother. What started as an act of transnational repression against adult American citizens is now affecting innocent American children.Unfortunately, time is running short. Dr. Abbas suffers from serious health conditions, including high blood pressure, severe osteoporosis that often leads to immobilization, and an eye condition that requires annual monitoring to prevent permanent blindness. Given her age, her health, and the amount of time she has served, the CCP could easily release her on humanitarian grounds.EL SAYED’S INSANE CIRCUMCISION ANALOGYTrump should move securing the release of Gulshan Abbas to the top of his list when Xi meets with him in Washington. It’s a powerful pressure point for the president to leverage, and it is the only right response to Beijing’s unacceptable efforts to silence American citizens. The president should also consider the numerous other political prisoners in China: U.S. citizen Min Zin (whom Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently determined is wrongfully detained in China), the eight remaining Zion Church leaders, and Jimmy Lai.As long as the CCP rules China, human rights concerns will continue to pervade Washington’s diplomatic relations with Beijing. Better to elevate them and exploit a key weakness for Xi than to ignore them and leave leverage on the table.