The Registered Pulpit

In the early hours of July 4, 2026, Pastor Jin Mingri, known in English as Ezra Jin, landed in Los Angeles. He had spent nearly nine months in detention in Beihai, a port city in China’s Guangxi region, and he had not lived with his wife and children in eight years. Al Jazeera and NPR reported that President Trump had raised his case with Xi Jinping at their Beijing summit in May. Christian Daily International called the release part of a humanitarian arrangement between the two governments.

Eight of his church’s leaders did not get on that plane. As of mid-September 2026, all eight were still being prosecuted in Beihai on charges of fraud and illegal business operations, charges that stem from their church’s ministry and its sale of online religious courses. Their names are Wang Lin, Yin Huibin, Gao Yingjia, Wang Cong, Wu Qiuyu, Wang Zhong, Lin Shucheng, and Liu Zhenbin (ChinaAid; Barnabas Aid).

The first three parts of this series covered Nigeria, Pakistan, and Iran. China belongs beside them because the worst persecutors of Christians are not all Muslim, a point the overview in the Your Muslim Neighbor series made in one paragraph. This article is the long version. The Chinese Communist Party does not ban Christianity. It licenses it, and it punishes whoever preaches without the license.

How the Party licenses a church#

China’s constitution promises “freedom of religious belief,” and the state recognizes five religions: Buddhism, Daoism, Islam, Catholicism, and Protestantism (Pew Research Center). Protestant churches may register through the Three-Self Patriotic Movement; Catholic churches through the Catholic Patriotic Association. Congregations that refuse are called house churches or underground churches, and authorities treat their gatherings as illegal.

The revised Regulations on Religious Affairs, in force since February 1, 2018, tightened that system. According to the State Department’s 2018 religious freedom report and the Library of Congress, they allow authorities to fine a landlord 20,000 to 200,000 yuan for renting space to an unregistered group. They restrict religious schools to the five state associations, require approval for religious travel abroad, and, for the first time, regulate religious activity online. A house church that meets in an apartment makes the apartment’s owner a lawbreaker too.

Registration buys legality, not freedom. In 2018 the official Protestant bodies adopted a five-year plan for the “sinicization” of Christianity, which called for research into the parts of the Bible compatible with “core socialist values.” Sinicization means bringing a faith into line with Party ideology and the Party’s version of Chinese culture. The follow-up plan, presented in December 2023 for 2023 to 2027, puts heavier weight on loyalty to the Party itself; ChinaAid’s reading is that registered Christians are now told to love the Party, not only the country.

The legal net has widened every year since. The Measures on Internet Religious Information Services, issued by five agencies including the Ministry of State Security and in force since March 1, 2022, require a government license to post religious content online and ban online broadcasts of worship. On September 15, 2025, the State Administration for Religious Affairs published an 18-article online code of conduct for clergy that took effect immediately. It bars preaching, livestreamed worship, online courses, and fundraising outside approved platforms, bans online outreach to minors, and reaches clergy from Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and abroad whose content reaches mainland audiences (Religion Unplugged). Then on March 12, 2026, the National People’s Congress passed the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, effective July 1. Its Article 46 directs religious groups and venues to “persist in the direction of sinicization.” The US Commission on International Religious Freedom concluded in May 2026 that these laws turn a Party policy into national law.

When the crosses came down in Zhejiang#

Wenzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang province south of Shanghai, is about 15 percent Christian by CNN’s count. On April 28, 2014, bulldozers flattened its Sanjiang Church, a building that had taken 12 years and 30 million yuan to build (CNN). Officials said it was an illegal structure four times its permitted size. Church members, who had occupied the building for weeks to protect it, said they had first been told that only the cross would come down.

Sanjiang opened a provincial campaign. Under the banner of “Three Rectifications and One Demolition,” a zoning and beautification drive (CECC), authorities removed crosses from more than 1,500 churches between 2014 and 2016, and monitoring groups’ running tallies reached 1,700 to 1,800 by early 2016 (CSW timeline; UCA News). A peer-reviewed study in the Review of Religion and Chinese Society found that the campaign was abruptly and quietly halted in April 2016, and its title calls the campaign a failure.

Keeping children out of the pews#

In April 2018, weeks after the new regulations took effect, the official Catholic bodies in Henan province ordered churches to suspend all religious activities for minors, including summer camps and children’s attendance at services, on pain of closure (America magazine). Banners reading “Minors are prohibited from entering the church” went up on church doors.

The national regulations bar religious teaching in schools; Bitter Winter’s analysis notes they do not spell out a blanket ban on children entering a church. The ban spread through local notices, provincial rules, and enforcement. Pew summarizes the result: religious education for minors, including Sunday school and religious camps, is banned, and schools promote atheism. The 2025 clergy code closed the online route to children as well.

Wang Yi and Early Rain#

On December 9, 2018, police in Chengdu detained Wang Yi, pastor of Early Rain Covenant Church, along with about a hundred members of his congregation. On December 30, 2019, the Chengdu Intermediate People’s Court sentenced him to nine years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegal business operations” (Christianity Today; USCIRF victims list). His expected release date is December 2027 (ChinaAid).

ChinaAid reported in 2023 that his wife, Jiang Rong, had seen him for the first time in three years. The church has not dissolved. On June 14, 2026, about 70 government personnel halted an Early Rain service in Jiangyou, Sichuan, and held 33 believers, several children among them, for hours while pressing them to sign pledges to stop worshiping (Voice of the Martyrs).

Zion Church and the charges that changed#

Jin Mingri founded Zion Church in Beijing in 2007, and it grew into one of the largest unregistered Protestant networks in the country (Al Jazeera). Beginning October 9, 2025, police directed from Beihai detained Jin and nearly 30 pastors and members across several provinces, including Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Shandong, and Guangdong (International Christian Concern; Human Rights Watch).

The case since then is a lesson in how the licensing system turns into criminal law. On November 18, 2025, authorities formally arrested 18 pastors and co-workers on suspicion of “illegal use of information networks” (Church in Chains). A church that preaches online without a license is, by that charge, a criminal enterprise. On June 18, 2026, when the legal limit on investigative detention ran out, nine were released on bail, and prosecutors reportedly replaced the original charge with fraud and illegal business operations against the rest. Jin’s release in July left eight.

Their trial was set for August 14 to 18 and then delayed after defense lawyers said they had not been given enough time to read the case files (ChinaAid). Two of the eight, Wu Qiuyu and Wang Zhong, pleaded guilty in exchange for a proposed suspended sentence; Church in Chains reports that Wu did so to get home to her children and that Wang suffers from severe coronary heart disease (Church in Chains). In September, one of their lawyers, Wang Xiahong, fled mainland China with her husband and two young children and reached Taiwan, after authorities told her firm to dissolve or be shut down (AP via Religion News Service).

One pastor was freed because a president asked for him by name. My conviction is that this should encourage American Christians and shame us in equal measure: named advocacy works, and eight people whose names few Americans know are still waiting.

The Vatican deal and the bishops left outside it#

Catholics live under the same system with one added complication. In September 2018 the Holy See and Beijing signed a provisional agreement on the appointment of bishops. Its text has never been published. It was renewed in 2020 and 2022, and on October 22, 2024, the Vatican extended it for four years, to October 2028. Pope Leo XIV has kept approving bishops under it (National Catholic Register).

Underground bishops, ordained with Rome’s approval but never recognized by Beijing, have paid for the arrangement. Bishop Joseph Zhang Weizhu of Xinxiang has been detained since May 2021, his whereabouts unknown. On December 5, 2025, a new state-approved bishop was ordained for Xinxiang after the Vatican accepted Zhang’s resignation; authorities barred Zhang from the ceremony (UCA News). Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of Wenzhou was arrested again in March 2025 for celebrating the Mass that opened the Jubilee year. Human Rights Watch reported in April 2026 that authorities are pressing underground communities into the official church and have installed cameras inside some official churches. One exiled Catholic from Inner Mongolia told HRW that believers began staging fake wedding gatherings “just to be able to come together and pray.”

Defenders of the deal, including the Vatican, argue that it ended decades of bishops ordained without papal consent and gives Rome a voice it lacked. Critics answer with Zhang’s empty chair.

The larger atrocity, and the people it falls on#

A Christian writing honestly about China has to say this plainly: the Party’s harshest religious repression falls on Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists. In August 2022 the UN human rights office concluded that China’s detention of Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in Xinjiang “may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity,” as Amnesty International quotes the assessment. The 2026 ethnic unity law makes Mandarin mandatory in schools from preschool upward and, according to the International Campaign for Tibet, enforces the assimilation of Tibetans. The house-church pastor and the Uyghur imam face the same Party, the same license, and the same demand that God answer to it.

None of this is a verdict on Chinese people. The Christians in this article are Chinese. So are the lawyers who defend them and the church members who stood inside Sanjiang to keep it standing. The target of the critique is a Party-state that claims authority over conscience.

What holds up, and what doesn’t#

Established: the 2018 regulations, the sinicization plans, the 2022 online measures, the 2025 clergy code, and the 2026 ethnic unity law are published texts. Wang Yi’s sentence, the Zion arrests, and the Zhejiang demolitions are documented by multiple independent sources. USCIRF has recommended China as a Country of Particular Concern every year since 1999, including in 2026.

Contested: the Party says it is enforcing zoning, fraud, and licensing law, not persecuting belief, and officials made exactly that case about Sanjiang. The Zion charges show why the defense fails: the conduct being prosecuted is preaching and teaching. The count of crosses removed in Zhejiang varies by source, from more than 1,500 to about 1,800. The Vatican agreement’s net effect is disputed among Catholics.

Fails: “Christianity is illegal in China.” Registered churches operate legally, under control. “China has banned the Bible” and “the Party has published its own rewritten Bible” also go beyond the record; what is documented is a plan to reinterpret Scripture in line with “socialist values.” Say what the documents say.

Pray#

Ordered by the council to stop teaching in Jesus’ name, Peter and John answered, “we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:20).

• For the eight Zion Church leaders in Beihai, by name: Wang Lin, Yin Huibin, Gao Yingjia, Wang Cong, Wu Qiuyu, Wang Zhong, Lin Shucheng, and Liu Zhenbin. Pray for Wang Zhong’s heart, and for Wu Qiuyu’s children.
• For Wang Yi, in a Sichuan prison until at least December 2027, and for his wife, Jiang Rong.
• For Early Rain’s members in Chengdu and Jiangyou, who keep gathering, and for the children detained with their parents in June.
• For Bishop Joseph Zhang Weizhu, missing since 2021, and Bishop Peter Shao Zhumin of Wenzhou.
• For Uyghur and Tibetan families living under the same laws, and for Chinese officials, that some would refuse to enforce them.

Stand up this week#

Ask your US representative to speak publicly for Wang Yi. The House’s Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission runs a Defending Freedoms Project page for Wang Yi through which members of Congress formally advocate for a named prisoner. Find your representative, call the office, and ask whether the member will take up Wang Yi’s case through the project and also name the eight Zion Church leaders in Beihai.

Go deeper#

• USCIRF, China’s Codification and Escalation of the “Sinicization of Religion” (May 2026). The US statutory commission’s analysis of the new laws, covering Christians, Uyghur Muslims, and Tibetan Buddhists together.
• China Law Translate. English translations of the regulations themselves, so you can read the primary text instead of a summary.
• Human Rights Watch, “China: Pressure on Catholics Escalates” (April 2026). A secular organization’s interviews on underground Catholic life under the Vatican agreement.
• ChinaAid case pages. An advocacy group’s running record on Wang Yi and the Zion case. Useful for current status; read it as advocacy.