Christians in China
Continued translation — Narrative reportage style (UK)
Three decades earlier, a hymn-writer named Xiao Min had composed a song called “Five O’Clock in the Morning in China.” In the comparatively permissive years that followed, the song became something of a refrain for rural house churches experiencing revival: sung in kitchens and courtyards, passed on in whispers, even used as a private signal among believers. Today, Li Yingqiang speaks of “Five o’clock in the Afternoon in China” as marking the beginning of the house-church experience’s next thirty years. In 2018, when the national Christian bodies announced the formal implementation of a five-year plan to “advance the Sinicisation of Christianity” (2018–2022), a new phase of pitched contest between church and state began. To Li, the gist of the Sinicisation campaign was not merely cultural adaptation but a project of tameing—of bringing the church into political compliance; he saw it as tantamount to assimilation, even to erasure. The prayer meeting, he hoped, could be a means of drawing together and sustaining pastors and house churches willing to stand in that era.
“China’s civil society is almost barren today. If the church—an organic and important part of that society—can continue to be active, preserve its vitality and grow under hardship, then serving time in prison for the Lord remains extremely significant. When you confront systemic injustices, some people have to pay a price for social transformation.” Li told those who would listen. For him, the stakes were not the rights language of earlier human-rights campaigns, nor the exercise of power; they were the gospel itself: “The community of Christians who sit in prison for faith is a distinct form of conscience witness. It not only shakes the prison; it should stir the conscience of society.”
A spark of legal defence
In the autumn of 2002, in a printing works outside Beijing, machines ran late into the night. Over the next two years, stacks and stacks of Bibles—stamped with the words “not for sale”—and some fifty other Christian titles were dispatched free to believers around the country.
For Cai Zhuohua, a pastor of a village house church in Beijing and a man then in his thirties, the printing was not a commercial venture but a response to what he saw as a sacred calling: to put Scripture into the hands of Christians who had no other access; to introduce advanced theological writing into Chinese so that better-informed discussions might reduce misinterpretations among ordinary believers.
Yet the state treated Cai’s self-funded distribution as something else entirely. In China, the publication, printing and distribution of the Bible have long been monopolised by the state-controlled Amity Printing Company, working under the umbrella of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the China Christian Council; Bible distribution is channelled through the official system and cannot circulate in the state publishing or retail networks.
In September 2004, Cai, his wife Xiao Yunfei and his brother-in-law Xiao Gaowen were arrested one after another. More than 200,000 books held in a warehouse were seized as “illegal publications”, and some ¥80,000 of living expenses were characterised by prosecutors as proceeds of “illegal business operations.” The following year, Cai was sentenced to three years for “illegal business operations”; the judgement notably did not state that the material he had printed was religious literature. To many observers the case read as the economic criminalisation of a religious question.
The Cai case became widely known as “China’s first house-church case.” A group of eight rights lawyers led by constitutional scholar Fan Yafeng assembled to defend him—names included Gao Zhisheng, Zhang Xingshui, Jin Xiaoguang, Teng Biao, Xu Zhiyong, Chen Yongmiao and Wang Yi. (Three of those lawyers were later prevented from appearing in court for procedural reasons.) With the internet and international organisations amplifying the debate, the house-church—long subterranean—was propelled into public view, and the freedom-of-religion issue became a prominent strand of the wider rights movement.
Courtroom records kept by Teng Biao show that Zhang Xingshui led the defence by arguing that secular law should not trample religious freedom. The judge, You Tao, repeatedly interrupted such arguments as “irrelevant”; at one point a juror announced he would withdraw from deliberations if the lawyers continued in that vein. Gao Zhisheng protested loudly, reminding the judge and jurors that they had legal responsibilities to listen calmly to defence submissions.
Cai himself retracted confessions made during interrogation and testified that police had coerced him: “People from state security told me spreading the Bible is a religious matter that will be linked with politics—it’s serious. They wanted to recast it as economic.” The trial, and the legal team that rallied around Cai, were widely discussed: for many, they signalled a citizen-society willing to challenge the limits of state control over religious life.
In 2005, Asiaweek named fourteen Chinese human-rights lawyers among the year’s most influential figures, praising their courage in using constitutional law and the internet to protect citizens’ rights. Five of the lawyers had taken Cai’s case; Gao Zhisheng and, later, Wang Yi converted to Christianity following involvement in human-rights work. The presence of Christians among the rights lawyers that year became a notable feature of the movement.
Fan Yafeng himself was an activist with a background in the 1989 student movement. Later a legal scholar, he told an audience in the United States that he harboured a “double mission”: the Christianising of Chinese culture and the democratisation of Chinese politics. That is why he combined legal activism with pastoral work for house churches. Fan organised and produced a “Christian Rights Defence Handbook”—108 questions covering doctrine, the religious-affairs regulations, church property, criminal procedure, administrative law and remedies. He printed 15,000 copies for house churches nationwide and published the handbook online via the Holy Mountain Church website he founded in Beijing in 2004.
In the view of the handbook’s authors, this material fundamentally altered house-church attitudes toward legal defence, asserting that Christians should actively engage in China’s democratic development. In the years that followed, rights lawyers with Christian backgrounds appeared across many high-profile cases—the Xiaoshan case in Hangzhou, the Arimjiang case in Xinjiang, the Linfen case in Shanxi and the Zhejiang crosses disputes. They offered legal aid, publicised cases, analysed and commented on developments, researched freedom-of-religion jurisprudence and called for domestic and international support. A division of labour emerged: lawyers defended in court, campaigners told the stories, churches and foreign networks amplified the pressure.
“China’s future democratic mainstream ought to generalise the house-church experience, to expand the church’s rights-defence model across society,” Fan Yafeng once argued. For him, participating in rights defence would awaken democratic consciousness and open a public sphere beyond the state.
Two decades after the Cai case, Yang Hui leafed through Wang Yi’s defence speech as if touching a faint afterglow from that early civic surge. “Cai’s case was indeed an expression of an active civil society,” he said, noting that more than a hundred articles could still be found online about it. Yang believed Wang Yi’s defence had pinpointed the constitutional problem with the regulation that prosecutors used to justify the “illegal business” charge—the State Council’s publishing-management rules—and that this was the case’s sharpest legal insight.
Yang Hui, once a Christian lawyer in Xiamen, had represented sensitive matters including the 12/9 Early Rain case and the case of the “twelve Hong Kong people.” In 2021, local authorities fined him heavily for selling second-hand books online; he challenged the fine in an administrative suit and, in the process, became more focused on publishing regulations and “illegal business” type cases.
When Yang tried to change offices and refused to supply certain additional materials, his licence to practise was suspended in 2021. After attending the first-instance trial in the Wang Honglan case in Inner Mongolia, he agreed as a citizen-defendant’s agent to act for Ji Guolong on appeal; the Hohhot Intermediate People’s Court, however, disqualified him on the grounds he had not proved a friendship with the defendant.
“Cai’s case represented a civil society bravely pressing to abolish publishing censorship; the Inner Mongolia case—the defendants lawfully obtaining Bibles from legitimate retail channels before reselling them at low price—was not a matter for publishing censorship at all. The authorities arrested them nonetheless. That shows two totally opposite trends.” Yang’s comparison was tinged with regret.
Rural encirclement of the cities
Li Yuecheng (formerly of the Golden Lampstand Church in Linfen) is widely seen as one of the earliest Christians to champion legal defence for house churches. Many parishioners found his turn to legal and policy study surprising. “Why are you studying law and religious policy all of a sudden?” they asked him. “Isn’t Scripture enough for us?”
Li explained that many Christians shied away from legal action because they felt it conflicted with biblical calls to “take up the cross” and “submit to governing authorities.” Others feared being implicated or branded as opponents of the state.
In previous generations, leaders such as Ni Tuosheng, head of the Local Church movement, emphasised obedience to secular authority. Suffering and calumny were interpreted as part of the cross. Even those arrested in the 1956 “anti-rightist” purges associated with Ni’s movement did not seek redress in the 1980s.
Li admired the basic courage and fidelity to belief of fundamentalist leaders, but he believed that an avoidance stance—retreating from public life and refusing to engage politically—was no longer adequate. He pointed out that the habit of submission made more sense only where church and state are properly separated; that is, where rulers do not overstep into religious affairs.
The house-church phenomenon in China, he noted, can be traced back to the 1950s. After 1949 the state insisted that religion break with ‘imperialism’. In 1950, under the leadership of comparatively liberal Protestant figures, the Three-Self Declaration appeared, initiating the “Three-Self Patriotic Movement”: churches were to be self-governing, self-supporting and self-propagating, and to accept the leadership of the new state. In 1958, during a campaign of “united worship,” many churches closed and denominations were forcibly merged. Fundamentalist leaders such as Wang Mingdao saw the movement as unbelieving and refused to participate; they were subsequently denounced as “counter-revolutionary” and imprisoned.
Under their influence, underground house churches multiplied, particularly during the Cultural Revolution when religious practice was banned and the registered Three-Self churches were dissolved. House churches became repositories of faith.
Religion scholar Zhang Tan has described the early house-church growth as “rural encirclement of the cities.” Missionary work in the countryside often took place at night; one evangelist from Henan told how meetings were held so late that they had to avoid not just people but dogs—because a dog’s bark could draw militia. Preachers fled barefoot through fields, emerging with bleeding feet.
After the Cultural Revolution, the 1980s and 1990s saw relative liberalisation. House churches revived first in rural areas—Henan, Anhui, Shandong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang’s Wenzhou region were particularly fertile. These grassroots churches emphasised prayer, healing, exorcism, prophetic dreams and charismatic experiences. Their often patriarchal governance centred on charismatic leaders and stressed other-worldliness rather than political engagement.
At the same time, the aftermath of June 4 and the collapse of dreams of rapid political liberalisation led many student-exiles and overseas activists into the Chinese church network. The early 1990s saw a “Christian culture fever” in Chinese intellectual circles: translators and scholars introduced Western theology, showing how Christian roots might help explain modernity’s crises. This produced a layer of “cultural Christians”—people who embraced Christian values intellectually, sometimes without baptism.
Fan Yafeng recalled his own experience: disillusioned after 1989, he found in church a community that was passionate, loving and hopeful. Whereas he had previously passed through existentialism, Marxism and Confucian-Buddhist thought in search of meaning, Christianity finally offered him spiritual clarity.
Wang Yi personified another strand: a ‘post-70s’ public intellectual who had taught constitutional law at Chengdu University and made his mark on early internet forums. Pressures on outspoken critics nudged him toward faith; he found humility in prayer. A dramatic moment came in 2005, when he fell from a ladder while reaching for a book, was stitched and bed-bound for a month, and for the first time prayed aloud and sang a hymn. The enormous bookshelf that toppled in the accident became, to him, a symbol of intellectual pride and its limits.
Scholars note that the state’s toleration of churches has always been conditional: missionaries must not hand out tracts on the street or proselytise outside approved religious venues. That red line—religious activity confined to approved places—remains the baseline rule. The “three determinations” policy also requires clergy to be approved by the United Front Work Department and forbids religious activity across administrative regions. Those constraints have driven most churches out of the public square.
Wang Yi argued that, across the past half-century, house churches have been primarily preoccupied with survival. Fear has become a basic life experience for them.
A number of observers recall the shrinking space for open religious discussion. In 2011, the scholar Gao Chenyang attended a house-church Bible-study meeting in Chengdu. The room held a dozen people. Whenever a middle-aged man spoke, his remarks were tangential, and on one occasion he explained it away as part of some research project—Gao later learned the man was a pastor who had learned to be guarded in public to protect himself. Such self-protective role-play is common.
From visibility to claims for legitimacy
In 2003 Wang Yi saw the history of house churches anew after watching the documentary “The Cross—Jesus in China.” He showed it to friends; they left the viewing shaken by the cultural impact of faith. They were sceptical of claims that there were then some sixty million Chinese Christians—more than the Communist Party membership—but the film drew attention in the West. The New York Times book Jesus in Beijing further alerted international audiences to the existence and scale of China’s house churches.
Wang Yi has argued that 2003 marked a turning point: house churches were emerging from the underground and moving toward public engagement—toward a socially engaged evangelicalism. The 2008 Sichuan earthquake became for many Christians the “year zero” of volunteerism: believers poured into rescue and reconstruction, bringing practical help as well as spiritual comfort. Wang Yi and his wife’s small living-room Bible group formally became a church in the weeks after the quake.
Urbanisation and the influx of graduates and professionals searching for community helped spark a new wave of urban house churches. Returned students brought foreign worship styles back to China; the internet made prominent sermons available instantly. Urban churches tended to be more organised and concerned with societal transformation, rather than solely with personal salvation. Reformed theology—emphasising social engagement and public responsibility—attracted professionals who formed study groups and networks around law, business and other professions. Rural churches migrated to cities and adopted more institutional governance.
Zhao Tian’en, a figure influential in the rise of Reformed churches on the mainland, promoted the slogans “evangelise China, make the church a kingdom force and Christianise culture,” urging believers to leave the shadows and build churches in the cities. From 2003 to 2015 a wave of church planting produced hundreds of urban congregations and, in some cases, assemblies of thousands. The Golden Lampstand at one point claimed tens of thousands of adherents and could rival the registered Three-Self churches in size. But political suppression and difficulties in governance soon slowed and reversed much of that expansion.
Wang Yi has acknowledged that his own conversion was linked to cases he had investigated—the Cai case and, earlier, the South China Church “cult” case, which in its heyday had 50,000 adherents. The leader of that church, Gong Shengliang, was arrested in 2001 and initially sentenced to death on multiple charges including “using a cult to destroy state facilities,” but international outcry and evidence of coercion at trial led to the removal of some charges at appeal; Gong was eventually given a life term for rape. Independent investigations suggested some criminal conduct by Gong, though questions remained about the political dimensions of the prosecution. The episode reinforced for Wang Yi the danger of closed systems that can lead to misrule and abuse.
As Early Rain Church sought a public path from the outset, Wang insisted on openness. Ian Johnson, then a New York Times columnist who later won a Pulitzer, remembered Early Rain in 2011 buying the nineteenth floor of an office building for worship. Congregants attended in name-badges and formal dress: “They did not sneak in through a back door; they were proud to come,” Johnson wrote, impressed by the church’s public stance even as its leaders acknowledged the risk of arrest—sermons were routinely recorded and could be heard by anyone, believer or policeman alike.
In 2009 the church first encountered suppression. Local authorities in Chengdu interrupted worship on grounds of fire-safety non-compliance; the Qingyang District civil-affairs bureau declared Early Rain an unregistered civic organisation and banned it. The church applied for administrative review and, though the review recommended correction by the district bureau, the dispute petered out without resolution. Wang Yi wrote a prayer letter telling the congregation they would not retreat to private homes; they would continue to worship publicly where possible. He applied for registration as a church in Chengdu; his application was refused.
Another example of the public-identity drive was Beijing’s Shouwang Church. After the 2006 Religious Affairs Regulation Shouwang repeatedly sought registration and challenged the rule that clergy must be approved by the Three-Self movement. The church argued the state was wrongly defining its social role and that churches had a legitimate right to pursue legal status. Yet their efforts met resistance: a landlord rescinded an office lease under pressure from authorities, and despite raising funds the church could not take possession of a purchased building. From April 2011 they staged prolonged outdoor services, holding hundreds of gatherings over the years; congregants were frequently detained and their pastor, Jin Tianming, was kept under a kind of house arrest for nine and a half years.
Wang Yi repeatedly visited Jin. On one occasion plainclothes officers and unidentified men ringed Jin’s building, setting up cots to maintain a round-the-clock watch. Wang Yi was prevented from entering and had to shout across the human barricade. He threw a book of pastoral letters over the heads of those blocking the doorway. “Not only did I visit them—they also visited me,” Wang Yi later wrote. “They stayed in their rooms and visited the whole house-church of China.” In a later essay titled “Who Is Jin Tianming to You?” he recalled that “he sat in my prison.”
After the 12/9 Early Rain arrests, Jin Tianming issued a public letter of support for Wang Yi’s stance on church–state relations, urging others to repost and engage. Online censorship led many to repost his letter as inverted screenshots; Jin gently asked people to avoid that practice. He closed his letter with a quip: “Let my position be upright.”
For scholars of Chinese Christianity, the trajectory from opening up to demanding legal recognition has been fraught with unpredictable risks. The 2010 Lausanne Conference episode is a telling example: the global evangelical conference was to be attended by Chinese delegates; hundreds applied to travel, but many were blocked from leaving the country, leaving two hundred empty seats in Cape Town.
The large-scale cross-demolition campaign in Zhejiang province between 2014 and 2015 further symbolised the hardening of church–state relations. The campaign affected more than a thousand churches—many of them registered—and at least four hundred churches in Wenzhou saw their crosses forcibly removed. The action provoked domestic and international outcry.
Some researchers note that, on paper, the Zhejiang urban-renovation actions—“three reforms and one demolition” targeting old neighbourhoods, old factories and illegally built structures—were legally justified; religious buildings made up only a tiny percentage of those demolished. But the official language calling for “effectively curbing the over-heating, over-proliferation and disorder” of religious activity revealed an intention to restrain Christianity as a specifically conspicuous target. The demolition plans stipulated measures to “solve the problem of oversized and illuminated religious symbols such as crosses” and forbade lighting crosses outside special religious festivals; they singled out crosses along major roads for removal or relocation from roofs to facades, with staged follow-up removals. Believers complained that even ground-level crosses were later taken down again.
Pingyang county—part of the Wenzhou area—saw particularly fierce resistance. On the night of 20 July 2014, hundreds of police forcibly removed the cross from Suoyouji Church, sparking violent clashes in which more than sixty congregants were injured. Pastor Huang Yizi led believers in demanding an explanation from the authorities and was soon labelled an organiser of the protests—and arrested days later. His church’s cross was removed shortly afterwards.
Zhang Kai, a Christian lawyer who represented Huang’s case, was branded by local media as a mastermind of the Wenzhou protests, accused of organising plaintiffs across a hundred churches, instructing congregants to wear matching clothes and gather in public to resist removal, and even coordinating foreign media attention. Zhang Kai himself became one of the targets in the wider crackdown on lawyers: he was taken during the “709” mass detention of human-rights lawyers on 10 July 2015. Although briefly released, he was detained again and later forced to give a televised confession before being released; his case became a symbol of the heavy-handed treatment of rights lawyers. Despite the ordeal, Zhang continued to defend religious cases when possible.
“Unlike the earlier pattern of repression focused mainly on unregistered house churches, the cross-demolition campaign struck registered churches under the Three-Self system on an unprecedented scale,” said Xing Fuzeng, a former professor at the Divinity School of the Chinese University of Hong Kong who had researched the Zhejiang campaign. Several pastors he interviewed told him the events pushed them toward “de-Three-Self-ising”—a desire to disentangle from the official bodies.
The incident also prompted the China Christian Council and the Three-Self Patriotic Movement to issue public criticism of the demolition policy as “highly inappropriate” and to call for an immediate halt; under pressure, they later issued an apology to the provincial government. The leader of the Zhejiang Christian Association who spoke out, Gu Yueshe, faced charges of “misappropriation of funds” and was detained two years before being exonerated. That episode underscored the shrinking space for independent Christian voices inside even the state-sanctioned religious structures.
A harsh winter for “Sinicisation”
To many religious scholars and believers, the 2014 Zhejiang campaign marked the prelude to a harsher winter. From that year the slogan “Sinicisation of religion” gained traction: first in academic circles, then at the 2016 national religious conference and finally enshrined at the 19th Party Congress in 2017. In February 2018 a revised Religious Affairs Regulation came into force, and in March the national Christian organisations announced a five-year implementation plan for Sinicisation. For believers, the air turned unmistakably colder: the policy shift signalled a move from “development with restrictions” to “active reformation.”
“Sinicisation is not primarily cultural assimilation but political domestication,” said Yang Fenggang, a sociology professor at Purdue University.
Until 2017, religious policy in the post–Cultural Revolution era had been shaped largely by two documents: the 1982 policy paper “Basic Views and Policies on Religious Issues in the Socialist Period” and the 1991 circular on religious work. The 1982 text, drafted in a context favouring order, stated that religious gatherings in private homes were “in principle not allowed but should not be forcibly banned,” suggesting a pragmatic tolerance coordinated through patriotic religious personnel. The 1991 notice introduced the idea of “managing religious affairs according to law,” while still claiming not to interfere in normal internal religious activities. These ambiguities left house churches a degree of policy space.
The 2017 revision to the Religious Affairs Regulations removed much of that space. Lawyer Fang Xiangui—who had been detained for 107 days in a Zhejiang case and later released on bail—argued that the new regulations established comprehensive state control over religion and disallowed the existence of churches outside government oversight. Clergy and venues must be registered and their finances are subject to rigorous oversight. “The new era’s method of persecuting churches is legislative: make the grey areas clear, so punishments have standards and the law provides cover,” Fang said.
The repression of house churches became increasingly criminalised. Charges that had previously been administrative—penalties for public order or fines—were replaced by criminal accusations: fraud, illegal business operations, forming cult organisations, illegal border crossings and other severe charges. Cases such as Wang Honglan in Inner Mongolia, Xu Feng in Harbin and the Linfen Golden Lampstand fraud case illustrate that trend. The 12/9 Early Rain case was a decisive escalation: Wang Yi, a leader, was sentenced to nine years for “inciting subversion of state power” and “illegal business operations.”
State-controlled religious venues were required to fly the national flag and to display banners proclaiming “Love the Party, Love the Country, Love Religion.” Li Yingqiang observed wryly that some believers considered that a minor betrayal—“just a flag or a leader’s portrait”—but argued that idolatry was not to be minimized: “Yahweh is jealous; worshipping idols is betrayal.”
Wang Yi wrote that the house-church tradition of refusing state religion had become the “focus and pain—and joy—of his life.” In 2015 Early Rain issued a “reaffirmation of our stance on house churches: 95 theses,” coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of Wang Mingdao’s public refusal to join the Three-Self Movement—a document that many regarded as a new milestone for house-church conviction.
Even as the climate hardened, Early Rain remained outspoken. It continued to run initiatives such as petition groups, support for conscience prisoners, protests against forced abortions under the family-planning policy and annual June 4 prayer meetings—actions that courted controversy within the church itself as being “political” or “showy.” These internal tensions led to a split in 2017.
“Our June 4 prayer meetings are not meant to show off how bold we are,” Li said. “We take those wounds to God from a gospel perspective because no one else will speak about them.” He insisted the aim was pastoral and spiritual, not political.
“No need to adopt grand political rhetoric”
The Cai defence team has since fragmented. Fan Yafeng lost his research post at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences for having been involved in the Linfen case; he and his family were repeatedly summoned and their home searched in 2010. Fan was detained for nine days around the time Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, and thereafter kept under informal house arrest.
Gao Zhisheng, who defended Falun Gong adherents and campaigned against abuses, has endured repeated abduction and torture and disappeared in August 2017. Others who took on sensitive causes—including Li Heping and Yu Wensheng—have been imprisoned or otherwise harassed. Xu Zhiyong, a law scholar and friend of the evangelising crowd for many years, was jailed multiple times for civic activism.
An article in the overseas People’s Daily in July 2012 accused the United States of using “internet freedom” and rights lawyers, underground religions and dissidents to “penetrate” grassroots China—a modern-day parallel, in some commentators’ eyes, to a “new black five categories” line of thought from the Cultural Revolution.
Li Yingqiang was among the earliest to sense the chill. When his Liren Library was shut down under political pressure in 2014, he warned colleagues that “winter has come.” From work in civic think tanks and public education to founding Liren University, Li had originally hoped to cultivate seeds of liberalism and constitutionalism. After his conversion in 2008 he found himself increasingly torn: he joked that he had once been a “missionary for liberalism” leading people away from God. He left public civic life and devoted himself to pastoral work and Christian education.
Xu Ming (a pseudonym) described a similar shift. Once active in Christian rights research and organising legal seminars for Christian lawyers, he had hoped for Christian politicians in the future. But by 2010 the official clampdown on a rural policy report he co-authored ended his career and damaged his networks. He became disillusioned with the optimism of some rights pioneers, who had perhaps mixed political ambition with sincere reform fervour.
As a lawyer he learnt to moderate his tone. He now saw representing religious cases as a market choice—an avenue for doing accompaniment and consolation rather than grand political ambition. In a 2011 interview with a friend, Wang Yi acknowledged he had once assumed an almost messianic self-righteousness in his civic activism, but that his conversion had humbled him. Friends noted a change from arrogance to modesty.
“Civil disobedience is not aimed at changing the world; it is a witness to another world,” Wang Yi wrote in a prepared essay titled “My Statement: Civil Disobedience of Faith,” published after his detention. He stated plainly that he had no intention of changing China’s systems or laws; his act of disobedience was a religious testimony intended to disturb human sin and testify to Christ’s cross.
A 2023 Pew Research Center assessment on religion in China suggested that Christian growth stalled after 2010: aggregated survey data and official figures showed a fall in self-identified Christian adults from 23.2 million in 2010 to 19.9 million in 2018, and a drop in participation in “organised religion” from 40 per cent to 35 per cent. Critics pointed out the difficulty of surveying religion in an increasingly hostile environment; Yang Fenggang suggested the numbers may understate resilient believers who are willing to declare their faith in public even as repression grows. For him, that persistence was itself a hopeful sign.
Observers note that despite the “winter,” new baptisms continue. The desire to gather is so persistent that some churches conduct a form of guerrilla worship, frequently shifting meeting places. If the police or religious affairs officials discover them, the gatherings can be broken up; leaders face detention or fines. Yet many Christians insist on the commandment not to stop meeting.
After the 12/9 arrests Early Rain had to abandon two decades of organisational work in doctrine, governance and property, returning to the atomised, small-group, underground reality. Under pressure from public-security threats the church resisted changing names or cutting ties with Wang Yi. “One step back, two steps back—holding the faith often loosens first in trivial ways, then erodes until you have nothing left to hold onto,” Li wrote in a pastoral letter explaining why maintaining visible protest sometimes matters. “The persecutor’s goal is not to make us ‘reasonable and lawful’; it is to make us abandon many crucial parts of our faith.”