Last weekend, Chinese Communist authorities formally shut down Shouwang Church. The influential house church in Beijing made international headlines in 2011 when officials kicked the Christian believers out of their building and arrested them as they worshipped outdoors.

March 10 marked the 60th anniversary of the failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule that forced the Dalai Lama to flee to India. Around the world, Tibetan supporters held rallies on Sunday with calls to “free Tibet.” Supporters also gathered in Dharmsala, India, home to the Dalai Lama and his government-in-exile.

“Tibet belongs to Tibetans,” exiled Prime Minister Lobsang Sangay said to the gathering. “Sixty years of the occupation of Tibet and the repression of Tibetans is too long.”

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers and a coalition of religious rights groups pushed the U.S. government Monday to take action against Chinese officials responsible for religious persecution, particularly against China’s minority Uighur population.

This past Sunday in China, members of Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church gathered inside living rooms for worship as they’ve done since the Chinese government shut down the church and arrested its leaders in December. But this week, police showed up at two homes, forcing everyone—children, the elderly, and pregnant women—into police buses and taking them away to the local station.

The Chinese Communist Party is not only silencing voices domestically, by censoring online comments and detaining Chinese Twitter users, but it’s also trying to silence critics overseas. Most recently, we’ve seen attempts to silence dissent in Canada and Sweden.

Most Muslim countries have remained silent since reports began circulating last year about the Chinese government’s detention of 1 million Muslim Uighur minorities in Xinjiang, China’s semi-autonomous region in the Northwest. Many of those same countries have close trade ties with China. 

Yet on Saturday, Turkey condemned China for holding hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in re-education camps, where they face “torture and political brainwashing.” The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the reintroduction of internment camps a “great shame for humanity.”

In a dramatic turnabout rarely seen in formerly communist Eastern Europe, the Bulgarian parliament passed a law protecting the liberties of the country’s religious minorities on the final day of its 2018 session.

The original version of the bill threatened to restrict the rights of religious groups representing less than 1 percent of the population—which included at least 100 of the country’s growing evangelical churches. How the turnaround happened—through eight weeks of prayer vigils and organized protests—is a lesson for other threatened believers.