China Sentences Wang Yi, Christian Pastor, to 9 Years in Prison

The founder of one of China’s largest unregistered churches was given a lengthy sentence for what the government called subversion of state power.
By Paul Mozur and Ian Johnson
Wang Yi and his wife, Jiang Rong, at their home in Chengdu, China, last year.

HONG KONG — A secretive Chinese court sentenced one of the country’s best-known Christian voices and founder of one of its largest underground churches to nine years in prison for subversion of state power and illegal business operations, according to a government statement released on Monday.
Wang Yi, the pastor who founded Early Rain Covenant Church, was detained last December with more than 100 members of his congregation as part of a crackdown on churches, mosques and temples not registered with the state.
While most of Mr. Wang’s parishioners, including his wife, Jiang Rong, were eventually released, Mr. Wang never re-emerged from detention.
As part of his sentence, he will also be stripped of his political rights for three years and have 50,000 renminbi, or almost $7,200, of his assets seized, according to the statement.
Mr. Wang had become known for taking high-profile positions on politically sensitive issues, including forced abortions and the massacre that crushed the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989.
A lawyer by training, Mr. Wang was a well-known blogger before converting to Christianity in 2005. Just a few months later, he was selected to meet President George W. Bush at the White House as part of a program to reach out to Chinese Christians.
More recently, he emerged as a critic of Xi Jinping, China's dictator, who ushered in more authoritarian policies and abolished term limits.
“Pastor Wang Yi was just sentenced to 9 years in prison for proclaiming the gospel,” read a statement posted to a Facebook page run by church supporters, which added, “May the Lord use Pastor Wang Yi’s imprisonment to draw many to himself and to bring glory to his name.”
The government in November sentenced another church leader, Qin Defu, to four years in prison for the charge of illegal business operations.
While the charge of inciting to subvert state power reflects Mr. Wang’s political views, the illegal business operations highlight a more widespread and troubling problem for the government: Early Rain and hundreds of other unregistered churches across China are no longer just small, underground gatherings of believers in people’s homes, but are large, sophisticated organizations.
At its peak in 2018, Early Rain had more than 500 members, a seminary that trained clergy from across China, a kindergarten and elementary school, and a bookstore — none of which were registered with the government.
Mr. Wang’s arrest is part of a broader effort to subdue all social organizations that operate independently of the government.
In 2017, the government passed a law sharply curtailing the rights of nongovernmental organizations. That same year it enacted new regulations on religious life.
In both cases, groups were ordered to register with the government and cut all foreign ties.
Around the same time, the government began a policy of detaining more than a million Muslims in massive concentration camps.
Compared to the country’s 20 million Muslims, most of whom are ethnic minorities, Protestant Christianity is practiced by 60 million ethnic Chinese, who are often white-collar professionals living in the country’s heartland.
The vast majority of China’s independent churches have been untouched by the recent crackdown, but observers said the attack on high-profile churches was a signal to others to reduce their size and avoid politics.
In addition to closing Early Rain, the government last year shuttered Zion Church in Beijing and Rongguili in Guangzhou.
“The government is worried about the development of these churches,” said Ying Fuk-tsang, the director of the Divinity School at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
“They think there are too many, and they are going against the bigger ones to solve the problem in this fashion.”
Mr. Wang, who founded Early Rain in the city of Chengdu, rejected the idea that his church should avoid political issues in order to operate unmolested by the authorities.
In a 2017 sermon on the issue, he shared a quote that he attributed to Hermann Hesse, saying it was “better to harm your body 10 times over than to harm your soul once.”
In a statement posted on Facebook, the church said that Mr. Wang had committed no crime and had always supported the separation of church and state.
“He has taught that even when the church is being persecuted, Christians should be willing to submit to the government’s physical restrictions of them as well as to the deprivation of their property,” the statement said.
“He has never said or done anything that amounts to ‘inciting to subvert state power.’”

Hurting the Feelings of the Barbarians

The Netherlands’ New Year greeting did not go down well in China

By Jane Li

Pastor Wang Yi and his wife, Jiang Rong, at their home in Chengdu, China, last year.

 

It was supposed to be a good wish to ring in the new year but for Chinese there were bad vibes about the message posted on a popular Chinese social network by the embassy of the Netherlands in Beijing.

The message, which emphasized the importance of human rights, contained a screenshot of the Chinese court document (link in Mandarin) that sentenced Wang Yi, a Chinese Christian pastor, to nine years in prison.

The message was posted by the embassy on its official Weibo account on New Year’s Day. 

“One of the wishes for 2020 that the Netherlands has is for all countries globally to implement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights unconditionally,” it said. 

“Today, we would like to reiterate the article 18 of the declaration: everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

The attached screenshot was about Wang Yi,  a Christian pastor who founded Early Rain Covenant Church, one of China’s largest underground churches. 

Wang was sentenced to nine years in prison for subversion of state power and illegal business operations on Dec. 30. 

Wang, who was known for his open criticism of Chinese dictators including Xi Jinping, was detained in December 2018, along with his wife and a dozen other churchgoers and church leaders.

The post received hundreds of responses from Chinese, who accused the Netherlands embassy of interfering in another country’s domestic matters.

China’s state-owned newspaper the Global Times also weighed in.

The Netherlands embassy told Quartz that the Weibo message was in line with government policy.

 “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of the pillars of the international legal order. It represents the universal recognition that basic rights and fundamental freedoms are inherent to all human beings, regardless of nationality among other things. The Constitution of the Netherlands requires the government to promote the development of the international legal order,” the embassy said. 

“It is therefore not surprising that one of the Embassy’s well-wishes for the world is that all governments act in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so that all people can enjoy the rights and freedoms to which they are entitled. The universality of human rights means that human rights are the same everywhere for everyone, and not specific to any state,” it added.

The embassy also made reference to a policy paper published last year by the Dutch government on China. 

The paper makes explicit reference to the “deteriorating” human rights situation in China and also states that “The Netherlands regularly calls China to account for this through bilateral and multilateral channels.”

China has tightened restrictions on religious freedom under Xi, initiating crackdowns on underground churches and rolling out harsher punishment for those who do not comply with regulations.

This Chinese Christian Was Charged With Trying to Subvert the State

By Ian Johnson

Wang Yi and his wife, Jiang Rong, at their home in Chengdu, China, last year. They have been detained since December.

BEIJING — In 2006, three Chinese Christians traveled to Washington to ask President George W. Bush for his support in their fight for religious freedom.

One of them had converted to the faith only a few months earlier: Wang Yi, a 33-year-old lawyer from the southwestern city of Chengdu.
But Mr. Wang had already become such a prominent Christian that organizers made sure he went to the White House. 

A nationally known essayist and civil rights lawyer, he would soon found a 500-member church that was independent of government control, along with a seminary, an elementary school and even a group to aid the families of political prisoners — all illegal but which he accomplished by sheer force of will.
Today, Mr. Wang, now 45, is back in the spotlight, this time at the center of an intense crackdown on Christianity. 

His Early Rain Covenant Church and others like it are popular among China’s growing middle class and have resisted government control, testing the ruling Communist Party’s resolve to bring China’s churches to heel.
“He saw an inevitable fight with the government because of it trying to control the churches,” said Enoch Wang, a pastor based in the United States who has met Wang Yi many times. 

“He knows that sooner or later they’ll come for you and so there’s no point in trying to hide.”
That was one reason Wang Yi has in recent years become a vocal critic of Xi Jinping’s moves toward authoritarianism.
Last December, he and 100 church members were detained. 

Although most have been released, Mr. Wang, his wife and 11 others are still being held incommunicado without access to a lawyer.
The charges against Mr. Wang and his wife — inciting to subvert state power — typically result in lengthy prison sentences. 

The same charge was used to sentence Liu Xiaobo, a dissident, to 11 years in prison in 2009. 

He was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and died in custody in 2017.
According to church members who were detained and subsequently released, the police are also investigating Mr. Wang and two junior pastors for economic crimes such as whether they broke Chinese law by publishing books and DVDs without government approval.
Many congregants who have been released have lost their jobs and housing over their church membership. 

Others have been sent back to their hometowns or had their bank accounts frozen. 

Mr. Wang’s 11-year-old son now lives with his 74-year-old grandmother.
The crackdown is part of a broader effort to subdue China’s fast-growing religious groups. 

This includes detaining a million minority Muslims in internment camps in China’s far west, a drive that has drawn international condemnation.
But while Islam is practiced by about 20 million non-Chinese minorities in largely far-off provinces, Protestant Christianity is followed by about 60 million ethnic Chinese in China’s economic heartland. About half worship in churches that raise their own money and run their own affairs.
In the past, many of these were called underground churches, but over the past decade, some have become public megachurches. 

Run by well-educated white-collar professionals in China’s biggest cities, the churches own property and have nationwide alliances — something anathema to the party, which tightly restricts nongovernmental organizations.
Also targeted in the crackdown were the 1,500-member Zion Church in Beijing, which was closed in September, and the Rongguili Church in Guangzhou, which attracted thousands of worshipers each week.
Unlike the old underground churches, these independent churches wanted to be public.
“They want to be the city on the hill,” said Fredrik Fallman, a professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden who studies contemporary Chinese Christianity. 

“But this is the basic fear of the Communist Party — people organized independent of the party in a structured way.”

Pastor Wang, second from right, met President George W. Bush at the White House in 2006 with other prominent Christian activists.

Since Xi took power in 2012, the party has ramped up efforts to promote ideas such as the glory of traditional China and respect for authority.
Christians like Mr. Wang have challenged this top-down ideology. 

Many are interested in socially engaged models of Christianity, especially the Protestant denomination of Calvinism.
“Traditionally, Christians in China were mainly concerned with saving people’s souls,” said Yu Jie, an exiled essayist who helped convert Mr. Wang in 2005. 

“But Wang Yi and others like us, we don’t think the world is hopelessly corrupt. We want to improve it, and so there’s an emphasis on issues like public service and justice.”
Born in 1973, Mr. Wang grew up in the rural Chinese county of Santai. 

He met his wife in elementary school — and wrote in an essay that he was immediately infatuated with her.
He was 16 when the government crushed pro-democracy protesters near Tiananmen Square in Beijing. 

That event shaped his life, pushing him to a career in law and an interest in justice.
All of this meant his church was unusually active in sensitive areas.
It set up a group that helped the families of political prisoners by regularly visiting them and paying their children’s college tuition. 

The church also helped fund a homeless shelter and protested the ubiquitous use of abortion in Chinese family planning.
Mr. Wang, a pastor, also held prayer services for the victims of the June 4, 1989, massacre of the Tiananmen protesters. 

In one widely circulated photo, he is wearing his pastor’s collar and holding a sign that says, “June 4. Pray for the Country.”
He also became a sharp critic of  Xi, especially after presidential term limits were lifted last year, allowing him to serve a third term and to potentially rule for life.
In response, Mr. Wang circulated a message calling Xi a “usurper” who was “not amending the Constitution but destroying it.”
Some in his congregation objected to his overtly political message. 

Two years ago, another pastor left Early Rain to start his own church, criticizing some of Mr. Wang’s statements as stunts. 

But others in the church thought they were necessary.
Mr. Wang’s bluntness made him one of the most polarizing figures in Chinese Christianity. 

When the government began reducing the public face of Christianity in one province by tearing crosses off the steeples of even government-run churches, Mr. Wang expressed no sympathy for the churches affected. 

Instead, he said their pastors were wrong for serving in churches controlled by the government.
Mr. Yu, the writer, said he wondered if his old friend was wise in confronting the government so openly.
“As a pastor, you do have a responsibility to protect your members,” Mr. Yu said. 

“Given the conditions in China, it’s something one can consider.”
But Mr. Wang had long anticipated his detention over the question of state control.

In a 2017 sermon, he asked his congregation what he should do if the government demanded even limited control over their church: Should he agree and avoid persecution, or resist?

He joked that some people might ask him if he couldn’t make a few compromises.
“We’ve got an 80-year-old grandma at home and we just had a child!” he said, anticipating the argument.
But then Mr. Wang argued against this sort of accommodation.
“In this world, in this crooked, depraved and perverse world, how do we demonstrate that we are a group of people who trust in Jesus?” he said. 

“It is through bodily submission, through bodily suffering, that we demonstrate the freedom of our souls.”

President Trump vs. Evil Empire

Religious freedom is a growing theme of President Donald Trump’s confrontation with Beijing, and it's resonating with Christian leaders.

By NAHAL TOOSI

Vice President Mike Pence infuriated Beijing when he gave a speech in October warning that China had become a dangerous rival to the United States. 

While he focused on familiar issues such as China’s trade policies and cyber espionage, Pence also denounced the country’s “avowedly atheist Communist Party.”
Citing a crackdown on organized religion in the country, Pence noted that Chinese authorities “are tearing down crosses, burning Bibles and imprisoning believers.”
“For China’s Christians,” Pence said, “these are desperate times.”
Pence’s remarks, which also addressed the repression of Chinese Buddhists and Muslims, illustrated how religious freedom is a growing theme of President Donald Trump’s confrontation with Beijing, which some foreign policy insiders warn could develop into a new Cold War.
It is a subject that resonates in the U.S. heartland, some Christian leaders say — parts of which, including rural areas, are disproportionately at risk of fallout from Trump’s trade fight with the Asian giant.
The issue has gained new resonance with Beijing’s arrest this month of a prominent Christian pastor and more than 100 members of his congregation.
The arrests have drawn close coverage from evangelical outlets such as Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), whose website published an open letter by the jailed pastor, Wang Yi, declaring his “anger and disgust at the persecution of the church by this Communist regime.”
Days after the arrests, Trump’s ambassador for international religious freedom, former Republican Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback, decried the crackdown and said that in the weeks since Pence’s speech, religious freedom concerns “have only grown.”
While China’s religious persecution draws less media attention than issues like soybean tariffs and cyber espionage, it is closely tracked by conservative Christian activists and outlets like CBN, where a typical headline recently reported: “Chinese Government Destroys Christian Church, Bills Pastor for Demolition.”
In September, Providence Magazine, which covers U.S. foreign policy from a Christian perspective, wrote that in 2018 China’s religious repression has reached “a sustained intensity not seen since the Cultural Revolution.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly criticized China on such grounds.
In a report on international religious freedom released earlier this year, the State Department noted that throughout China there were reports of “deaths in detention of religious adherents as well as reports the government physically abused, detained, arrested, tortured, sentenced to prison, or harassed adherents of both registered and unregistered religious groups for activities related to their religious beliefs and practices.“
Religious activists note that Pence, Brownback, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other top Trump aides are people of faith with genuine concerns about religious freedom. 

But even they acknowledge the subject happens to be a potent political message for religious conservatives and may help rally them behind Trump’s confrontational China policy.
Some religious leaders even hear an echo of history: Cold War-era denunciations of godless Soviet communism by past U.S. presidents, notably Ronald Reagan.

“In the great heartland of America, where there tend to be higher levels of people who care about faith, reminding people that a regime — whether then the Soviet Union or today’s communist China — rejects God and has an official policy of atheism is helpful in getting them to understand why our government is taking certain actions in the foreign policy area,” said Gary Bauer, a longtime conservative Christian leader whom President Trump appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.
“Evil empire” was the famous label then-President Reagan applied to the Soviet Union in 1983. 

Less remembered is the fact that Reagan was addressing the National Association of Evangelicals.
Reagan vowed at the time that the Soviets “must be made to understand: … We will never abandon our belief in God.”
President Trump himself rarely addresses religious freedom or human rights, and when it comes to China he focuses mainly on Beijing’s trade practices. 

But his administration — backed by an evangelical base that stood for President Trump in 2016 and continues to support him enthusiastically — has strongly emphasized international religious freedom.

Earlier this year, for instance, the State Department hosted a first-ever gathering of foreign ministers devoted to the subject. (China was not invited and was targeted in a joint statement signed by a handful of countries, including the U.S.)
“This administration is putting this in the matrix of all of our policy,” said Tony Perkins, another prominent Christian conservative who serves on the religious freedom commission and is close to the White House. 

“It’s more than just the throwaway line.”
Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, has also assailed Beijing for religious persecution, including at a September speech at the Values Voter Summit in Washington, an event affiliated with the Perkins-led Family Research Council.
During an appearance, Pompeo decried “an intense new government crackdown on Christians in China, which includes heinous actions like closing churches, burning Bibles, and ordering followers to sign papers renouncing their faith.”
Like Pence, Pompeo also dwelled on the plight of China’s Muslim population, particularly ethnic Uighurs from the Chinese colony of East Turkestan. 

A State Department official recently testified before lawmakers that up to 2 million Muslims are now confined to concentration camps in China.
“Their religious beliefs are decimated,” Pompeo told Values Voter Summit attendees.
The Chinese government, which often casts Uighur Muslims as potential "terrorists", says the camps are designed to teach vocational and life skills. 

But the State Department official, Scott Busby, said the goal is “forcing detainees to renounce Islam and embrace the Chinese Communist Party.”
While evangelical groups active in Washington tend to focus primarily on the persecution of Christians in China and elsewhere, some make sure to point out that they care about religious freedom for all faith groups, including Muslims. 

In a past interview with POLITICO, Brownback stressed that he also wants to protect people’s right to have “no religion at all.”
The Trump administration may unveil a set of human rights-related sanctions targeting officials in a range of countries in the coming weeks. 

Some China observers are hopeful the list will include Chen Quanguo, a top Communist Party official said to have orchestrated the anti-Muslim crackdown and to have had a role in repressing Tibetan Buddhists.
“It’s a critical moment,” said Bob Fu, a U.S.-based pastor and founder of ChinaAid, a group that advocates for religious freedom in China.
Brownback did not offer comment for this story, and a spokesman for Pompeo did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

A White House spokesperson said of Pence that “religious freedom throughout the world is a top priority for the vice president and the administration as a whole.”
Bauer predicted that evangelicals and other voters in the U.S. heartland will continue to support President Trump even if he expands his trade war with China. 

The administration, cognizant of the potential pain for its supporters, has taken some steps to cushion the blow, such as offering farming subsidies.
By retaliating against particular U.S. industries, such as soybean farmers, China is trying to pressure the administration. 

“I think China will fail in this effort and support for the Trump-Pence policies will remain strong,“ Bauer said.
When it comes to pleasing the religious right, the Trump administration has been willing to make some dicey moves.
This past summer, to the shock of the foreign policy establishment, Trump imposed economic sanctions on two Cabinet officials in Turkey — an important U.S. ally and fellow NATO member — due to the questionable imprisonment of an American pastor, Andrew Brunson.

Brunson, whose cause was championed by evangelicals, was eventually freed and the sanctions lifted.
How far the administration will push Beijing on religious freedom could come down to the president himself and what China is willing to do to assuage his concerns on trade.
Trump, after all, has been willing to drop talk of human rights issues when it seems he’s making progress on other fronts — that's what has happened in his dealings with North Korea.
The Chinese in particular are highly sensitive to their global image, and, like the Soviet Union, China cannot be ignored.

Beijing's crackdown on religion clouds holiday season for China's faithful

By Joshua Berlinger

Hong Kong -- It's a Christmas battle for the hearts and souls of the Chinese people.
Despite being officially atheist and having a long and antagonistic relationship with religion, the ruling Communist Party is presiding over a boom of Christianity in China.
There are an estimated 72 million to 92 million Christians in the country -- the second-largest faith group after Chinese Buddhists, according to US-based NGO Freedom House.
Some experts claim that China could even become the world's largest Christian country in less than two decades.
Yet on December 9, authorities detained more than 100 Protestant worshipers from the Early Rain Covenant Church in the city of Chengdu.
The church's pastor, Wang Yi, was arrested on allegations of "inciting subversion of state power," according to US-based Christian advocacy group ChinaAid.

Neither China's National Religious Affairs Administration nor local authorities in Chengdu responded to CNN's requests for comment on the case.

Then US President George W. Bush meets with Christian activist Wang Yi (middle) in 2006.

The arrests cap a year-long crackdown on religion in China. 

Dozens of predominantly Protestant Christian churches ruled to have been built or run illegally have been torn down across the country throughout 2018.
Elsewhere, in the western region of East Turkestan, a growing campaign of repression against the predominantly Muslim Uyghur ethnic group has provoked international condemnation.
Analysts and civil rights advocates say Beijing is intensifying its campaign against worshipers seen as an ideological threat to the party's monopoly on power.
"We are now entering a new era of repression toward two of China's five religions, which is different than what we've seen over the past 40 years," said Ian Johnson, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author of "The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao."

Religion with Chinese characteristics
China is officially an atheist state, and religious practice is under tight government supervision and surveillance.
There are only five state-recognized faiths: Chinese Buddhism, Islam, Catholicism, Protestantism and Taoism.
Worship and religious activity are supervised by state-sanctioned organizations. 

The government appoints major religious leaders and decides where places of worship can be built.
Detention of 100 Christians raises concerns about religious crackdown in China

Worshipers must "uphold the principle that religions in China must be Chinese in orientation and provide active guidance to religions so that they can adapt themselves to the socialist society," according to a government white paper on religious freedoms published earlier this year.
The reason for these restrictions, Beijing claims, is that "foreign religions" such as Catholicism and Protestantism have "long been controlled and utilized by colonialists and imperialists."
China's fractious relationship with organized religion has a long history. 

In the mid-1800s, charismatic cult leader Hong Xiuquan declared himself the brother of Jesus Christ and launched a civil war against the ruling Qing dynasty.
At its height, his Taiping Heavenly Kingdom controlled huge swaths of China before it was eventually defeated by Imperial forces.

A demolished house church is seen in the city of Zhengzhou in central China's Henan province in June.

Local spiritual and religious movements have also been subject to brutal crackdowns.
In 1999, China banned and moved to eradicate the Falun Gong spiritual movement, a faith combining traditional marital arts practices with new-age beliefs. 

At its height, the Falun Gong claimed millions of followers -- and its influence worried the government.
Restrictions on worship help Communists mold religious institutions to their liking, or co-opt them altogether.
Christianity and Islam, Johnson said, are seen as particularly threatening because the party views them as having "strong foreign ties." 

"(That's) even though both religions have long roots in China and are very much localized," he added.

'Country of particular concern'
Outrage grew worldwide in 2018 over the treatment of Muslim-majority Uyghurs in East Turkestan, with hundreds of thousands have been imprisoned in massive concentration camps.
The clampdown on Uyghurs led the US State Department to designate China a "country of particular concern" regarding religious freedom. 

It comes after Chinese officials banned Uyghurs from growing long beards, wearing veils in public places and home schooling their children in 2017.
UN wants access to China's East Turkestan 're-education camps'

"My particular concern now for China is they've increased these actions of persecution against the faith community," Sam Brownback, Washington's ambassador at large for international religious freedom, said earlier this month. 

"China isn't backing away from the religious persecution; it seems to be expanding. This is obviously very troubling."
Former detainees have reported torture and brainwashing inside the detention centers, including forcing inmates to repeat Communist Party propaganda praising Xi Jinping.

A person wearing a white mask with tears of blood takes part in a protest march of ethnic Uyghurs asking for the European Union to call upon China to respect human rights in the Chinese East Turkestan colony in April.

In an interview with Reuters in November, China's ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, said the camps were trying to turn the Muslim-majority inmates into "normal people."
Chinese authorities have refused to grant international monitoring groups and diplomats access to East Turkestan.
While other communist regimes have also been hostile to religion, Johnson said the crackdown on Christianity and Islam was less about the faiths' practices and beliefs and more about the China's ability to control them.
"Under Xi Jinping, the government has further tightened control over Christianity in its broad efforts to 'Sinicize' religion or 'adopt Chinese characteristics' -- in other words, to ensure that religious groups support the government and the Communist Party," Human Rights Watch said in a statement calling for the release of Wang Yi, the Chengdu pastor, and his fellow believers.


China, Vatican deal a 'betrayal'
While some Christians worship legally in government-approved churches, many others attend unregistered underground services.
State-sanctioned Catholic churches are run by bishops chosen and ordained by Beijing, not the Vatican. 

These churches do not recognize the Pope as the ultimate authority in Catholicism, nor does the Holy See recognize Chinese-selected bishops as legitimate.
Opposition grows to controversial deal between Beijing and the Vatican

After decades of chilly relations, the two sides reached a landmark provisional agreement in September that would see them jointly approve China's bishops, a deal that could help lead to the restoration of diplomatic ties between Beijing and the Holy See.
It has drawn swift opposition in Catholic circles. 

Cardinal Joseph Zen, the former bishop of Hong Kong, called it an "incredible betrayal" of the Catholic faith in an interview with Reuters.
Republican US Sen. Marco Rubio, himself a Catholic, asked how the Vatican could justify ceding religious authority to a secular government.
"They are giving a government (an atheist one) influence in choosing bishops which (the Church says) are regarded as transmitters of the apostolic line. How does secular (and atheist) interference in that decision not break that line?" Rubio said on Twitter.
It remains unclear how the Vatican deal will affect Protestant churches like Early Rain, but critics believe it comes from the same playbook as the arrests in Chengdu -- it's all about control.
"This goes back to a broader effort by the government to crack down on anything that can be construed as civil society -- in other words, groups like religious organizations, or NGOs, that are outside government control," Johnson said.