Free Republic

The Trump administration has condemned the imprisonment of Wang Yi, pastor of one of China's best-known unregistered house churches, calling it another example of “Beijing's intensification of repression of Chinese Christians and members of other religious groups.” Wang, founder of the 5,000-member Early Rain Covenant Church in China's southwestern city of Chengdu, was among dozens of the church's members and leaders detained by police in December 2018, most of whom were subsequently released. On Monday, the pastor was sentenced to nine years in prison on charges of inciting subversion of state power, part of Beijing's crackdown on unregistered religious groups....

A court in China has sentenced a well-known pastor to 9 years in prison for the crime of subverting state power. Pastor Wang Yi was arrested last December along with his wife and 100 members of his church. Most were eventually released but Wang Yi’s wife was kept in jail for six months and now lives in seclusion watched constantly by government minders. Wang Yi may be a government target, in part, because he was well known within China even before his conversion to Christianity in 2005: Before Wang Yi became a pastor, he was a respected intellectual and...

China on Thursday demanded President Donald Trump veto legislation aimed at supporting human rights in Hong Kong and renewed a threat to take “strong countermeasures” if the bills become law. Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act undermined both China’s interests and those of the U.S. in the semi-autonomous Chinese city. “We urge the U.S. to grasp the situation, stop its wrongdoing before it's too late, prevent this act from becoming law (and) immediately stop interfering in Hong Kong affairs and China's internal affairs,” Geng said at a daily news briefing. “If the...

As some of you may have heard, around a 100 congregants in Chengdu China came up missing a few nights ago after police detained them. Among those taken away was Pastor Wang Yi, who in 2004 was named “50 Most Influential Public Intellectuals of China” by Southern People Weekly. He is not an obscure backwoods pastor. According to Wikipedia, Wang Yi met with President George W. Bush at the White House in 2006, with other Chinese human rights attorneys, to discuss religious freedom in China. He returned to Washington, D.C. in 2008, to attend the Conference for Global Christians in...

FULL TITLE: China Conducts Overnight Raid Against Christians, Detains More Than 100 People, Including A Prominent Pastor Tweet We in the West tend to take our freedom of religion for granted, forgetting that not everyone in the world can enjoy worshiping God freely, out in the open. In fact, in Communist countries like China, being a Christian is a violation of the law and can get you tossed in prison, a reality 100 believers experienced after overnight raids in the nation on Sunday. The raids are said to be part of a crackdown on “unregistered religious organizations.” According to members...

The United States will remain the world’s leading power for a long time, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Friday, but he stressed global affairs should not be dominated by one country. Wang made the remarks during an interview with the Qatar-based broadcaster Al Jazeera, ahead of the seventh ministerial conference of the China-Arab States Cooperation Forum in Doha last week, and the transcript of the interview was released on Thursday night. When asked whether China, the world’s second largest economy, had prepared to replace a declining US as global leader, Wang replied “from what we know about the country,...