In October 2025, Chinese security forces launched one of the most coordinated crackdowns on Christianity seen in decades. In a single overnight operation, plainclothes and uniformed police fanned out across at least seven cities — Beijing, Shanghai, and five others — simultaneously detaining nearly 30 pastors, preachers, and congregation members of Zion Church, one of China's largest unofficial Protestant congregations with roughly 5,000 members nationwide. The operation's centerpiece was the arrest of Zion's 56-year-old founder and senior pastor, Ezra Jin Mingri, snatched while traveling in the southern city of Beihai. Church members describe watching the dragnet in real time, realizing from the speed and geographic reach that this was no ordinary raid — the CCP had been planning it for months. The detained were held incommunicado, with families receiving no information about their whereabouts and lawyers allowed only sporadic contact. The typical charge, applied with cynical precision: fraud. The government's logic is that since it does not recognize these pastors as legitimate clergy, collecting tithes from a congregation constitutes fraudulent solicitation. Within weeks, authorities escalated further — raiding another unofficial church in Wenzhou in December 2025, arresting approximately 100 members over five days, and surrounding the building with hundreds of armed police and bulldozers. In January 2026, they hit again, raiding the home of the current leader of Chengdu's Early Rain Covenant Church and taking him into custody. The crackdown is part of Xi Jinping's years-long "Sinicization" campaign — a program designed to remake every religion in China into an ideological arm of the Communist Party, rewriting scripture, banning unauthorized Bibles, demolishing crosses, and ensuring that Chinese Christians worship the Party first and God second.
Commentary: The CCP's approach to Christianity is simple and efficient: worship however you like, as long as what you're worshipping is us. Any congregation that insists on placing God above the General Secretary gets labeled a fraud operation, its pastors hauled away in the night, and its building surrounded by bulldozers — all perfectly legal under laws the Party wrote for exactly this purpose. It's religious freedom, Beijing-style.
📰 https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/03/25/china-churches-crackdown-xi-zion-jin-mingri/
⚠️ This content was researched and written with AI assistance and may be fully AI-generated. All facts are sourced from the linked article and corroborating reporting from Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
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