Xi Jinping Is Targeting China’s Christians

Pastor Wang Lin of Zion Church was detained in the dead of night while travelling to the southern city of Shenzhen. Other figures in the church – which has dozens of branches across China – went into a state of high alert, frantically trying to figure out what this would mean for their community of around 5,000 members.

Zion Church is among China’s independent churches that are not approved by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, rejecting Beijing’s authority over its teachings. Since 2018, President Xi Jinping has overseen a tighter crackdown on unapproved religious practice, especially against certain religions, such as Christianity and Islam, associated by the party with foreign attitudes and beliefs.

The arrests may herald a stepping up of persecution. In the first few hours, it was unclear if Wang was the only one targeted, or whether more arrests would follow. Grace Jin Drexel, the daughter of prominent Zion Pastor Jin Mingri, watched the events unfold from her home in Washington, where she received a message to pray for the detained pastor.

She told Foreign Policy: “The next morning, my mom just so happened to be planning to visit me and my family in Washington, D.C. We were talking about when she was going to arrive, but she also told me that she has lost contact with my father.”

The pair began to fear for Jin’s safety. To start with, they reasoned that he, along with other church leaders, might be preoccupied with an “all hands on deck” effort to secure Wang’s release. But on a Zoom meeting with Zion’s U.S.-based interim leader, they soon found out that pastors were getting harassed by the authorities all over China – from Beijing to Shenzhen and from Shanghai to Guangzhou.

Within 24 hours, numerous pastors were rounded up across the country and transported to the city of Beihai, Guangxi. “That’s when we realized that this was going to be the crackdown,” Grace said. “The amount of effort that the state government used to transport all these leaders from across China to Beihai just showcases the level of coordination and intensity.”

While some of those detained have now been released, many senior figures, including Jin, remain in Chinese custody. “We have not had any direct communication with the those that are detained. Not even phone calls, not even letters. We are only able to talk through lawyers very sporadically,” Drexel said.

It is not yet known what charges Jin might face – but a common tactic is to charge unapproved clergy with fraud. Drexel said: “How they [the CCP] levy this fraud charge is that they say that you go around collecting tithe, but you’re not seen as a pastor by us, so you are a fraudster. And that is how they justify the fraud charge.”

Christianity in China goes back to at least the seventh century, when Nestorian Christian missionaries first reached the country, but grew considerably as Western churches targeted the country for conversion from the 19th century onward. Christianity was heavily persecuted under Maoism, but it received some relief in the 1980s, when a public keen for new ways of life flocked to churches old and new.

Jin became a Christian in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing—where he was a student at the time. “He lost faith in the government,” Drexel said. “And so he became a Christian and very quickly started leading in the church.”

He was initially ordained in the early 1990s in a state government approved church, where he would preach to his congregations for the next decade. But his ministry was suffocatingly managed by Communist Party authorities.

“All the decisions, all the sacred decisions that we think of that, like how many people get baptized, they were ultimately decided by the Chinese Communist Party, which has a very different agenda to the church leadership,” Grace said. “In every single decision, you were made aware that you’re not serving Christ as our Lord and King, you are constantly weighing between two masters.”

Jin founded the independent Zion Church in 2007 after returning from a stint studying in the United States. It coincided with a broader urban church movement in China, as more and more worshippers emerged from the shadows and started practicing in the open. Theologically, Zion describes itself as aligned with orthodox Protestant Christianity, although denominational divides do not always map neatly on to Western understanding.

“I don’t think my father’s church was necessarily the leader of that movement, but we definitely grew with that movement, and the church grew to be one of the largest churches in Beijing,” Drexel said. “In 2018 our size was extremely sizable. And even on the Chinese version of Google Maps, you could press ‘find church’ and you can get there.”

While such churches were not officially approved, they were largely tolerated through the 2000s and early 2010s. Some groups, such as the controversial Eastern Lightning church, were classified as cults and persecuted. Much of the time, however, local authorities would sometimes demand measures such as the removal of public crosses, and they monitored congregations closely. But as long as the church steered away from political confrontation often they adopted a live-and-let live policy on the ground.

But in 2018, the situation for China’s burgeoning Christian community began to deteriorate. Previously religion was managed by thewell-established State Administration of Religious Affairs bureau, which had working relationships withmany unauthorized religious leaders and a number of officials who were quiet believers in different faiths despite regulations stating that Communist Party members must practice no religion themselves. That year, however, SARA was absorbed into the wider United Front, a much more ideologically rigid department charged with the control of civil society, and many of the original officials were forced to retire or moved to other positions.

Under the leadership of Xi, Beijing has launched a renewed crackdown on religious worship under the guise of Sinicization. This repressive drive has seen the CCP target what it considers to be “foreign” religions in the country, forcing adherents to line up with the values of the ruling Communist Party.

This persecution has been seen most viscerally in China’s genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang – which has seen a mass campaign of repression and incarceration against the region’s Muslim minorities. Beijing insists that this is a “re-education” program, but survivors have reported torture, forced labor and even involuntary sterilization. But Christians have also been targeted, with other independent churches such as the Early Rain Covenant Church also facing substantial repression. The Catholic Church in China has also found itself in Beijing’s crosshairs, with worshippers loyal to the Vatican forced underground.

Jin’s arrest has been met with widespread condemnation internationally, with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly calling for his release.

“This crackdown further demonstrates how the CCP exercises hostility towards Christians who reject Party interference in their faith and choose to worship at unregistered house churches,” Rubio said.

But Beijing’s relentless crackdown on religion has continued at pace. Last year saw China bring in new rules prohibiting religious content from being shared online outside of approved platforms.

“They see religion now as an enemy of ideology,” Grace said. “And so that then there no longer can be this gray area. And you can see this increasing wiping away of the gray area that you had in the past.

“I think in the early 2000s there was a there was a feeling of general opening up, not just for religious communities, but for civil societies as well. But since 2018 that was a strong signal that that era has been over.”