One pastor was at an airport in Shanghai. Another was in the rural outskirts of Beijing. Another was at home in Guangxi, in southwestern China.
In early October, they were all detained, alongside nearly 30 other pastors and church members across China, as the police rounded up people affiliated with Zion Church, one of the country’s largest unofficial Protestant congregations.
It was the most wide-ranging crackdown on Chinese Christians in years, according to activists and supporters. And many fear it is just beginning.
The detained members included people who had been Christians since childhood, and others who had joined the church recently. They ranged in age from their 30s to their 50s, and included lawyers, physicists and music students.
So far, 18 of the detainees have been formally arrested. The police have provided little information about the investigation, other than issuing the families of those arrested one-sentence notices listing only the suspected crime and where the person is being held.
The most prominent of those arrested was the church’s lead pastor, Jin Mingri, who also goes by the name Ezra. He founded Zion in Beijing in 2007 as an unregistered evangelical church.
Chinese law guarantees freedom of religion, but in reality, the governing Chinese Communist Party requires religious groups to register with the government and submit to strict political controls. Those who do not want to do so — including by some estimates, tens of millions of unregistered Chinese Christians — have to worship underground.
That has become especially difficult under China’s current leader, Xi Jinping. As he has tightened control over Chinese society, major underground churches have been shut down, including Beijing Zion in 2018.
Some churches, like Zion, have moved largely online instead. But the government is cracking down on that, too. The charge that the Zion members are being accused of, “illegally using information networks,” broadly targets the sharing of so-called illegal or criminal information online. The government has moved recently to classify unauthorized religious activities under that label. It issued new regulations in September that online preaching may be done only through the licensed websites and platforms of officially registered faith groups.
Dr. Jin had helped turn Zion into one of the most successful online churches, according to members. He still met church members offline, but he also gave sermons online, using platforms like YouTube or WeChat. There are hundreds of videos on Zion Church’s YouTube page featuring members singing hymns and putting on Christmas shows.
When the coronavirus pandemic forced many unofficial churches to stop in-person services, Zion, with its established online presence, grew rapidly, according to Dr. Jin’s daughter, Grace Jin, who lives in the United States. More than 100 small groups met every Sunday across dozens of Chinese cities, she said.
But the government surveillance followed. In the past three years, officials stepped up the pressure on Zion. Before his arrest, Dr. Jin said in a series of video conversations with Grace and her husband that church staff members had been detained or groundlessly accused of offenses like bribery or disorderly conduct.
Dr. Jin’s family said it had decided to record those conversations because it was concerned that a bigger crackdown was coming and wanted to keep a record.
The authorities also frequently disrupted church gatherings, like one in July in the city of Zhongshan, in southern China.
At least seven men in police uniforms stormed in during a Sunday service in an office building, alongside multiple men and women in plainclothes who later identified themselves as police officers or employees of the religious affairs bureau, according to videos. One officer in a white T-shirt said that they suspected the group, which included children, was holding an illegal gathering.
As worshipers tried to leave the room, officers demanded that they first register their personal information. A uniformed officer filmed people on his phone as they filed out.
Then, in October, officials cracked down, just as Dr. Jin and his family had feared.
On Oct. 10, Sun Cong, a Zion Church pastor, was at a guesthouse on the outskirts of Beijing at a retreat for older church members. Around 10:30 p.m., as the group was getting ready for bed, multiple men in plainclothes and one uniformed police officer appeared, according to Mr. Sun’s wife, Gu Xiaoyu. They handcuffed Mr. Sun as other attendees demanded to know what he had done wrong.
Then a group of eight officers took Mr. Sun, still handcuffed, to his home in Beijing. They rang the doorbell at nearly 1 a.m., demanding that his wife let them in.
Once inside, the police began searching the home. They copied files from Mr. Sun’s laptop and rummaged through books of Christian literature, Ms. Gu said. When Ms. Gu asked if they had a search warrant, they filled one out on the spot, she said.
Similar raids were happening across China. That same day, Dr. Jin was arrested at his home in Guangxi. Around 2 a.m. on Oct. 11, the police also arrived at a house in Beijing where Gao Yingjia, another Zion pastor, and his wife, Geng Pengpeng, were staying with friends. (The couple had left their own home after hearing about the arrests, Ms. Geng said.)
The police took Mr. Gao away while Ms. Geng remained behind with their 5-year-old son, she said. When she returned to her own home the next morning, she found the front door ajar and the electronic lock had been dismantled and replaced.
Her home had been searched by the authorities. More than a dozen of her diaries were missing, she said, as well as some religious and philosophy books, the couple’s laptops and their bank cards.
Since October, the raids have continued. More than 20 police officers broke up a Thanksgiving gathering of Zion members in Beijing and took away one member, according to a statement from the church on X. Several of the arrested pastors’ relatives have fled overseas, including Ms. Gu, Mr. Sun’s wife. She said by phone that she did not dare return to China, even though it meant uprooting her three young children.
“In the current religious environment in China, especially with the waves of persecution of Christians, we had some mental preparation,” she said, choking up. “But when it really happened — and even now, even though two months have passed — my heart still hurts.”
Vivian Wang is a China correspondent based in Beijing, where she writes about how the country’s global rise and ambitions are shaping the daily lives of its people.
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