‘Is this real?’: wife of detained pastor describes anguish as China cracks down on unofficial churches | China

TThe knocking came at 2am. Hiding at a friend’s house in a suburb of Beijing, Gao Yingjia and her husband, Geng Pengpeng, ran downstairs to meet the group of plainclothes men who said they were police officers. Their son, who was about six years old, was sleeping upstairs, and Gao and Geng wanted to minimize the commotion. They knew their time was up.

Two months later, Gao is accused of “illegal use of information networks” in a detention center in China’s southern Guangxi province. His arrest was part of the biggest crackdown on Christians in China since 2018. This raised alarm in the US government and human rights groups, and some analysts described it as the death knell for unofficial churches in China.

“We both knew there were risks as Christians in China,” said Geng, who fled abroad for safety with his son. “But honestly, you can never be fully prepared.”

Gao is the senior pastor of the Zion Church, one of China’s most prominent underground “house churches” with thousands of members nationwide. His arrest and that of more than a dozen church leaders followed months of mounting pressure on the network. But the crackdown is not limited to Zion, raising fears of a nationwide attack on Chinese Christians.

More than 100 people were detained in a raid on Christian groups last week in the city of Wenzhou in China’s eastern Zhejiang province, Human Rights in China said on Sunday. The US-based NGO said pressure on Christians in Wenzhou had been increasing for months following a dispute over hanging the Chinese national flag at a local church.

Now Geng is grappling with a series of impossible choices: Should she return to China to be closer to her husband but risk arrest herself? Should he stay in Thailand, a country that has relaxed visa policies for Chinese citizens but has a history of complying with deportation requests from Beijing? Should he go somewhere else? Early in his religious journey, he sometimes felt like his prayers would hit the ceiling and come back down again. Now his faith is firm, but he awaits guidance: “Sometimes I wonder, is this real?”

The most prominent pastor detained in the latest raids is 56-year-old Jin Mingri, also known as Ezra Jin and the founder of Zion. He was detained along with Gao and nearly 30 priests and church members in October. 18 of the priests were formally arrested and faced long prison sentences.

Following their arrest, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned the crackdown and called for the release of the church leaders. He called on the Chinese government to “allow all people of faith, including church members, to engage in religious activities without fear of punishment.”

There are five officially recognized religions in China: Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism, but religious activities outside officially sanctioned institutions are prohibited. Christians in particular have long gathered in unofficial house churches to worship away from the eyes of the state.

Founded in 2007, Zion operated openly in a converted nightclub in Beijing for years. But in 2018, the church’s physical site was forced to close due to a nationwide crackdown on unofficial Christian gatherings, leading to Wang Yi, the leader of another house church, the Early Rain Accord, being sentenced to nine years in prison for inciting destruction.

This pressure prompted Zion to move to a hybrid model that combines large online sermons with small in-person gatherings; His followers resorted to creative methods to avoid detection, such as renting a tour bus to worship together on the go.

“After 2018, all of this [unofficial] Churches went underground and tried to find ways to bypass the tightened controls. Ian Johnson, author of The Souls of China, a book about China’s religious revival, said Jin’s church was one of the most successful churches to achieve this. He said that with the arrests in October, the government wanted to “make it clear to everyone that this is unacceptable.”

In September, China introduced new rules banning unlicensed religious groups from preaching online. China’s leader Xi Jinping chaired a high-level meeting of the Communist party where he called for the “Sinicization of religions.”

But pressure on Chinese Christians increased throughout the year. In May, pastor Gao Quanfu of the Light of Zion church (a separate organization to Zion) and his wife were arrested. Around the same time, several members of the Golden Lamp Church, an evangelical network, were reportedly given long prison sentences on fraud charges. Over the summer, more than 100 Zion members were questioned by police, forcing some branches to close.

Johnson said “the writing has been on the walls of all these churches since the 2000s” and that the latest arrests are “the final nail in the coffin.”

By some measures, the pressure is working. According to official estimates, about 3% of China’s population identifies as Christian; This level has remained stable for more than a decade, despite efforts by churches to increase their numbers. But given the increased risks of publicly identifying as Christian, this figure may be an underestimate. Another survey in 2018 found that 7% of Chinese believe in some form of Christian god.

Jin had unwavering faith in Zion’s call. His daughter, Grace Jin Drexel, who lives in the United States, said she was confident the church would continue to grow after the 2018 crackdown. Indeed, in the years that followed, the core membership grew from 1,500 to 5,000, and online sermons doubled that number.

But it has been clear for months that this year will be difficult for the church. A few weeks before the crackdown, senior pastor Sean Long, now the interim leader, asked Jin if he was considering the possibility of his imminent arrest. Jin replied: “Thank goodness, a new wave of revival will follow.”

China’s public security ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

Additional research by Lillian Yang