When the power cut out and his signal dropped, TJ knew something was wrong.
Seconds
later, the banging started on his front door. Terrified, he stood as
still as possible with his wife and three-year-old daughter, hoping they
wouldn’t be noticed.
But the Chinese police officers broke down the door, shoved his wife and child into a separate room and began to question TJ.
“They
grabbed my clothes and grabbed my hands so I couldn’t move. I could
hear my daughter crying so much in the room next door but I couldn’t go
to her, I couldn’t hug my wife,” he told The Telegraph.
TJ knew
what his family’s crime was: being Christian and worshipping a God that
was not Xi Jinping. In China, following a church that is not
state-controlled is punishable.
The Chinese leader is intensifying
Beijing’s crackdown on Christians amid a wider purge of top officials,
showing signs of an increasingly paranoid leader.
The country
officially recognises five religions, including Protestantism and
Catholicism, but this only extends to churches that are fully
state-controlled, where congregation is expected to sing patriotic songs
before every service and affix Mr Xi’s portrait above the pulpit.
Many Christians such as TJ, who withheld his full name for
security reasons, and his wife have chosen to join unofficial churches –
or underground churches – where they can preach the gospel away from
the government’s oversight.
But attending these places of worship carries its own risks – not least because they are seen as traitors.
TJ
last saw his wife when she was taken to a police station along with
their phones, some books and artwork, and she has yet to be released. He
still doesn’t understand why he was not taken too.
Under
Mr Xi’s iron-tight grip, China has expanded its nationwide suppression
of Christians during the last decade, arresting more than 10,000 people,
according to Bob Fu, the founder of ChinaAid, a charity for victims of
persecution in the country.
In the most recent crackdown, armed
police stormed the Early Rain Covenant, an influential underground
church, and detained more than 30 members last month.
Mr Xi’s ruthless campaign against these underground churches aims
to ensure the survival of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and remove
any threat to his power.
Mr Fu said: “It’s the emperor playing
God. [Mr Xi] wants to be exclusive, he doesn’t want to have anything
treated or worshipped more superior than him.”
TJ is one of six
Chinese Christians who spoke to The Telegraph who have either been
directly targeted by the CCP or have close relatives that are
incarcerated.
They described police officers showing up at their
homes unannounced in the middle of the night. Friends being rounded up
and questioned by authorities, sometimes for weeks on end.
Loved ones
being convicted on trumped-up charges such as “using superstition to
undermine the law” and detained indefinitely in crammed, dirty cells.
And lawyers were targeted and suspended from practising law for
defending Christians.
Knocks at the door
Jun
Yang, a pastor with Zion Church, one of the largest underground
churches in China, knows all too well about the risk of living as a
Christian in China.
Nearly
30 members of his church, including Qu Qiuyu, his wife, and Ezra Jin
Mingri, the church’s leader, were detained in October last year during
one of the largest raids against Christians in recent years.
Mr Jin was released in early July, but many of those detained remain in prison.
a converted
nightclub in Beijing but was forced to move to a decentralised, hybrid
format 10 years later after the mass arrests of Christians across the
underground church network and restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic
forced many of the church’s sessions online.
The church’s membership has grown from 1,500 in 2018 to around 5,000 followers now, since the church adopted the hybrid format.
Mr
Yang and other Zion Church members who spoke to The Telegraph said the
arrests in October were not a complete surprise. Police had been
harassing church members for months before the arrests and had been
coming up with incriminating information about the church leaders.
In Mr Yang’s case, they were trying to pin corruption charges on him.
“The
police reached out to church followers, even took them back to the
police station for questioning. They asked them about donations to the
church, whether such donations went into my pocket to buy apartments, or
if I had misused them in any way,” he said.
“They were trying to look for excuses to see if they could set a trap for me,” he added.
Mr
Yang was visiting South Korea when they raided his family home.
Officers arrested his wife and hauled her away in front of their two
young children.
Gao Yingjia, another pastor from Zion Church, was also targeted in the October 2025 raids, using similar tactics.
His
wife, Geng Pengpeng, told The Telegraph that they had been awoken at
1.30am by loud knocks on the door. The police stormed in, handcuffed her
husband and took him away.
“We both knew something like this
might happen,” said Ms Geng. “All of our rental [church] locations were
shut down and sometimes they would take someone to the detention centre
for a week or 15 days.”
Neither Ms Geng nor Mr Yang has spoken to their spouses since they were detained.
For
Mr Yang, while he counts himself lucky in some ways, he would do
anything to go back in time. “If there was the chance, I would rather be
the one arrested than my wife,” he said.
But as much as he wants to see his wife and children, he knows he may never get the chance to return to China.
“I am on the wanted list of religious practitioners so if I return to China I would be arrested,” said Mr Yang.
A threat to the throne
While
Christians have long been treated as outsiders in China, when Mr Xi
came to power in 2012, he piled on policies to further assimilate
Christians and other religious groups in the country.
In 2015, he
launched a “Sinicisation” campaign, which forced all religious and
ethnic groups to assimilate and prioritise loyalty to the CCP over
individual religious beliefs.
The same Sinicisation policy has been used to imprison and torture Uyghur Muslims in what has been characterised by many human rights organisations as genocide.
In 2018, Beijing rolled out a five-year plan to target Christians,
which included censoring sermons, controlling church donations,
supervising Bible translations and including “Xi Jinping Thought” in the
curriculum of seminary schools.
They also systematically closed
underground churches and demolished houses of worship as part of the
campaign against worshippers outside the state’s control.
Those who agreed joined China’s two official churches – the
Catholic Patriotic Association and the Protestant Three Self Patriotic
Movement – while the rest remained part of the underground church
network.Today, there are an estimated 44 million members of the
state-sanctioned church and around 115 million unregistered Christians,
which are expected to double by 2030.
“My dad was approached many
times about the [Three Self churches], and he said no, just like many
others because they’re fake churches, to put it bluntly,” said Gao Pu,
the son of Gao Quanfu, the incarcerated founder of the Light of Zion
Church (different from Zion Church), and Pang Yu.
Experts note that Mr Xi’s Sinicisation campaign and the registered churches aim to remove any threat to the Communist Party’s stronghold over the country.
“On
paper, the CCP is still an atheist entity so there’s an element where
they fear what they cannot control and don’t understand – or don’t want
to understand,” explained Mr Gao.
“Anybody that’s possibly out of
their control, they tend to crack down on them very, very fast. They
learnt the lessons from the past,” he said, referring to the 1989
student uprisings that were met with violent responses by police at
Tiananmen Square.
Weaponising the court
Under the Sinicisation policy, Chinese police have arrested Christians and isolated them in detention.
Many
of those arrested, including Mr Yang and Ms Geng’s spouses, were
initially charged with the “illegal use of information networks”, a law
that broadly covers any communication connected to “illegal or criminal
acts”.
Typically, the charge carries a maximum sentence of three
years, but is often combined with additional charges that can carry up
to life imprisonment.
Authorities have also accused Christians of
“using superstition to undermine the law”, for which the sentence can
range from three years to an “indefinite imprisonment”.
However,
in some of the cases described to The Telegraph, including those of Ms
Geng’s husband and Mr Gao’s parents, authorities adapted the initial
charges to fraud instead.
“They change to fraud because it’s much
easier for them to slap a number on there and give a sentence, which is
actually very heavy,” said Mr Gao.
He told The Telegraph that he
did not know how long his parents would be in prison. While they could
face more than 10 years, he hopes, given their age – both are in their
late 60s – they will be released after only three years.
For Mr
Yang’s wife, the charge was updated to illegally operating a business,
which carries a longer sentence. However, Mr Yang has no idea how long
the sentence will be.
Part of the uncertainty around sentencing is because of a lack of fair legal representation.
Several
people who spoke to The Telegraph said that the government had revoked
the licences of lawyers who had been hired to represent Christians.
Zhang
Kai, whose law firm was working with many of the Zion Church members,
including Mr Jin, had his licence revoked recently because he allegedly
“disrupted order in the court”.
Several other lawyers at his firm were also forced to step down, including those working on Mr Yang’s wife’s case.
The
Chinese government has previously targeted lawyers who have taken on
politically sensitive cases, with some suspended and others thrown in
prison.
Between 2017 and 2023, at least 30 human rights lawyers
had their licences revoked, according to Frontline Defenders, the Irish
human rights organisation.
In response to The Telegraph, a
spokesman from the Chinese embassy in the UK said it “manages religious
affairs in accordance with the law”.
They added that “anti-China forces” had used the guise of
religious freedom and human rights to engage in “political manipulation,
made sweeping generalisations, maliciously maligned China’s ethnic and
religious policies, and fabricated and disseminated disinformation”.
They
also said that “judicial organs in China handle cases strictly in
accordance with the law and fully safeguard the lawful rights of
criminal suspects and defendants throughout judicial proceedings”.
For those watching from a distance as this reality unfolds, it is hard to imagine the circumstances improving any time soon.
Ren Ruiting, a member of the Early Rain Covenant Church who fled to the US following the 2018 crackdowns, said that even thousands of miles from China, she still felt the watchful eye of the CCP.
“If
I speak out, they’ll know immediately and they have some way to make me
feel bothered and make me feel bad,” said Ms Ruiting.
Like Mr Yang, she doesn’t think she will ever go back to China.
“Once
Xi Jinping is still the chairman in China, I don’t think anything will
be better and if the persecution is not better, that means we cannot
have our church and we are in danger anytime.”
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Across a number of churches, they have found bags of gold and silver coins stuffed as donations into collection boxes, mischievously hidden under kneelers, or even in one instance under the cross on an altar.
Their total value, around £70,000, has been a lifeline for volunteers and vicars alike who are facing huge bills just to keep their historic buildings in good repair and open for services.
We may be charmed by the story of this Good Samaritan, and indeed we would do well to follow his example if we care about the future of our local churches – even if we do just park a more conventional £20 note in the collection plate instead of a bag of gold sovereigns.
Yet it should not take a host of Good Samaritans to save our impoverished churches. There is treasure enough to look after our churches, treasure which until recently belonged to them but was taken away. It is time for this treasure to be given back.
It was once the case that individual parishes had their own not inconsiderable wealth. Generations of locals and benefactors, stretching back to the Middle Ages, had endowed them with church lands (known as “glebe”) and investments that helped (along with the “tithe” taxes) to pay for the employment of a priest and the running of the parish church. This endowment also usually included the vicarage for the priest’s accommodation.
This local control of wealth and responsibility for paying priests was economical. The absence of central control also allowed clergy to be independent-minded and responsive to local needs.