Posted on 11/01/2025 3:26:21 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Beijing’s nationwide wave of raids on independent churches marks an escalation in the CCP’s war on faith unseen since the days of Mao’s Red Guards
When police stormed homes across nine provinces on the night of Oct. 9, 2025, it marked more than just another chapter in China’s decades-long persecution of faith. It was the beginning of what human-rights observers are now calling the most sweeping coordinated crackdown on Christianity since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The target: Beijing’s Zion House Church, the largest and most influential urban house church network in China’s modern history.
For 40 years, since the end of Mao Zedong’s bloody Cultural Revolution, China’s unregistered Protestant and Catholic congregations have operated in a precarious gray zone—technically illegal but often tolerated. That uneasy equilibrium shattered in October.
Zion Church’s founder and senior pastor, Rev. Mingri “Ezra” Jin, was taken from his home in Beihai, Guangxi Province. Within hours, police swept through multiple cities, arresting at least 22 pastors, preachers, and lay leaders, including Pastors Wang Cong, Yin Huibin, Liu Zhenbin, and Sun Cong. Two detention centers in Beihai now hold 13 women and nine men; others have been placed under house arrest or disappeared into China’s labyrinth of “residential surveillance” facilities.
The scale of this campaign is staggering. Zion Church was not a small underground fellowship. It was a sprawling network of more than 5,000 members across 40 cities and roughly 100 congregations, sustained by an online devotional program that attracted more than 10,000 daily participants before its digital presence was erased by authorities.
The message to Catholics is this: ‘Submit to the party’s “patriotic” authority, as sanctioned by Rome.’ The message to evangelicals is ‘Disappear.’
By any measure, Zion was China’s most dynamic Protestant Christian movement—a living symbol of how urban believers, professionals, and intellectuals could...
(Excerpt) Read more at tabletmag.com ...
This has been going on for decades.
Chicomms doing what they do.
Well. In Syria Assad protected Christians, the very people who disseminate this article supported his enemies who are now in charge and exterminate Christians on a mass scale.
China persecutes all religions with equal gusto. Remember Tibet?
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