A law that keeps a list, and updates it every year.

The International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 created a standing mechanism, not a one-time gesture: a Country of Particular Concern designation for governments that engage in or tolerate systematic religious persecution. China has been redesignated a Country of Particular Concern in every review since the mechanism was created, covering house-church Christians, Falun Gong practitioners since the movement was banned in July 1999, Uyghur Muslims, and Tibetan Buddhists.

The designation shows up in individual cases. In Li v. Gonzales, the Fifth Circuit reviewed the asylum claim of a Chinese house-church organizer; the US Commission on International Religious Freedom took the unusual step of writing to the Attorney General to object to the initial denial. The claim is a matter of public record, and USCIRF's intervention is the kind of specific, named act this site looks for.

The State Department's 2023 International Religious Freedom Report gives the mechanism's clearest number: Chinese authorities imprisoned 755 Falun Gong practitioners in 2023, up from 446 the year before, and arrested 3,457 people over the same period. That is a documented year-over-year count, not an estimate.

Sources: the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998; US Department of State, 2023 Report on International Religious Freedom, China chapter; Li v. Gonzales (5th Cir.); USCIRF public correspondence on the case. "Tens of thousands" of Chinese religious asylum grants, cited in an earlier internal draft, could not be confirmed from a disaggregated primary source and has been removed.