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.”

In China, they’re closing churches, jailing pastors and rewriting scripture

China’s Communist party is intensifying religious persecution as Christianity’s popularity grows. A new state translation of the Bible will establish a ‘correct understanding’ of the text.

 By Lily Kuo in Chengdu

Rush hour in the centre of Chengdu, home to the Early Rain Covenant Church, which has just been closed. 

In late October, the pastor of one of China’s best-known underground churches asked this of his congregation: had they successfully spread the gospel throughout their city? 

“If tomorrow morning the Early Rain Covenant Church suddenly disappeared from the city of Chengdu, if each of us vanished into thin air, would this city be any different? Would anyone miss us?” said Wang Yi, leaning over his pulpit and pausing to let the question weigh on his audience. 

“I don’t know.”
Almost three months later, Wang’s hypothetical scenario is being put to the test. 

The church in south-west China has been shuttered and Wang and his wife, Jiang Rong, remain in detention after police arrested more than 100 Early Rain church members in December. 

Many of those who haven’t been detained are in hiding. 

Others have been sent away from Chengdu and barred from returning. 

Some, including Wang’s mother and his young son, are under close surveillance. 

Wang and his wife are being charged for “inciting subversion”, a crime that carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.
Now the hall Wang preached from sits empty, the pulpit and cross that once hung behind him both gone. 

Prayer cushions have been replaced by a ping-pong table and a film of dust. 

New tenants, a construction company and a business association, occupy the three floors the church once rented. 

Plainclothes police stand outside, turning away those looking for the church.
One of the officers told the Observer: “I have to tell you to leave and watch until you get in a car and go.”

Wang Yi, pastor of the Early Rain church, who was arrested and detained three months ago, along with his wife. 

Early Rain is the latest victim of what Chinese Christians and rights activists say is the worst crackdown on religion since the country’s Cultural Revolution, when Mao Zedong’s government vowed to eradicate religion.
Researchers say the current drive, fuelled by government unease over the growing number of Christians and their potential links to the west, is aimed not so much at destroying Christianity but bringing it to heel.
“The government has orchestrated a campaign to ‘sinicise’ Christianity, to turn Christianity into a fully domesticated religion that would do the bidding of the party,” said Lian Xi, a professor at Duke University in North Carolina, who focuses on Christianity in modern China.
Over the past year, local governments have shut hundreds of unofficial congregations or “house churches” that operate outside the government-approved church network, including Early Rain. 

A statement signed by 500 house church leaders in November says authorities have removed crosses from buildings, forced churches to hang the Chinese flag and sing patriotic songs, and barred minors from attending.
Churchgoers say the situation will get worse as the campaign reaches more of the country. 

Another church in Chengdu was placed under investigation last week. 

Less than a week after the mass arrest of Early Rain members, police raided a children’s Sunday school at a church in Guangzhou. 

Officials have also banned the 1,500-member Zion church in Beijing after its pastor refused to install CCTV.
In November the Guangzhou Bible Reformed Church was shut for the second time in three months. “The Chinese Communist party (CCP) wants to be the God of China and the Chinese people. 

But according to the Bible only God is God. The government is scared of the churches,” said Huang Xiaoning, the church’s pastor.
Local governments have also shut the state-approved “sanzi” churches. 

Sunday schools and youth ministries have been banned. 

One of the first signs of a crackdown was when authorities forcibly removed more than 1,000 crosses from sanzi churches in Zhejiang province between 2014 and 2016.
“The goal of the crackdown is not to eradicate religions,” said Ying Fuk Tsang, director of the Christian Study Centre on Chinese Religion and Culture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “Xi Jinping is trying to establish a new order on religion, suppressing its blistering development. [The government] aims to regulate the ‘religious market’ as a whole.”
While the CCP is officially atheist, Protestantism and Catholicism are two of five faiths sanctioned by the government and religious freedom has been enshrined in the constitution since the 1980s. 

For decades, authorities tolerated the house churches, which refused to register with government bodies that required church leaders to adapt teachings to follow party doctrine.

Members of the Early Rain Covenant Church pray during a meeting in their church before it was shut down in December 2018.

As China experienced an explosion in the number of religious believers, the government has grown wary of Christianity and Islam in particular, with their overseas links. 

In East Turkestan, a surveillance and internment system has been built for Muslim minorities, notably the Uighurs.
Xi has called for the country to guard against “infiltration” through religion and extremist ideology.
“What happens in East Turkestan and what happens to house churches is connected,” said Eva Pils, a professor of law at King’s College London, focusing on human rights. 

“Those kinds of new attitudes have translated into different types of measures against Christians, which amount to intensified persecution of religious groups.”
There are at least 60 million Christians in China, spanning rural and urban areas. 

Congregation-based churches can organise large groups across the country and some have links with Christian groups abroad.
Pastors such as Wang of Early Rain are especially alarming for authorities. 

Under Wang, a legal scholar and public intellectual, the church has advocated for parents of children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake – deaths caused by poor government-run construction – or for families of those affected by faulty vaccines. 

Every year the church commemorates victims of the 4 June protests in 1989, which were forcibly put down by the Chinese military.
“Early Rain church is one of the few who dare to face what is wrong in society,” said one member. “Most churches don’t dare talk about this, but we obey strictly obey the Bible, and we don’t avoid anything.”
Wang and Early Rain belong to what some see as a new generation of Christians that has emerged alongside a growing civil rights movement. 

Increasingly, activist church leaders have taken inspiration from the democratising role the church played in eastern European countries in the Soviet bloc or South Korea under martial law, according to Lian. 

Several of China’s most active human rights lawyers are Christians.
“They have come to see the political potential of Christianity as a force for change,” said Lian. 

“What really makes the government nervous is Christianity’s claim to universal rights and values.”

Catholics wait to take communion during the Palm Sunday mass at a ‘house church’ near Shijiazhuang.

As of 2018, the government has implemented sweeping rules on religious practices, adding more requirements for religious groups and barring unapproved organisations from engaging in any religious activity. 

But the campaign is not just about managing behaviour. 

One of the goals of a government work plan for “promoting Chinese Christianity” between 2018 and 2022 is “thought reform”. 

The plan calls for “retranslating and annotating” the Bible, to find commonalities with socialism and establish a “correct understanding” of the text.
“Ten years ago, we used to be able to say the party was not really interested in what people believed internally,” said Pils. 

“Xi Jinping’s response is much more invasive and it is in some ways returning to Mao-era attempts to control hearts and minds.”
Bibles, sales of which have always been controlled in China, are no longer available for purchase online, a loophole that had existed for years. 

In December, Christmas celebrations were banned in several schools and cities across China.
“Last year’s crackdown is the worst in three decades,” said Bob Fu, the founder of ChinaAid, a Christian advocacy group based in the US.
In Chengdu, Early Rain has not vanished. 

Before the raid, a plan was in place to preserve the church, with those who were not arrested expected to keep it running, holding meetings wherever they could. 

Slowly, more Early Rain members are being released. 

As of 9 January, 25 were still in detention.
They maintain contact through encrypted platforms. 

On New Year’s Eve, 300 people joined an online service, some from their homes, others from cars or workplaces, to pray for 2019. 

Others gather in small groups in restaurants and parks. 

One member, a student who was sent back to Guangzhou, said he preaches the gospel to the police who monitor him.
The church continues to send out daily scripture and posts videos of sermons. 

In one, pastor Wang alludes to the coming crackdown: “In this war, in East Turkestan, in Shanghai, in Beijing, in Chengdu, the rulers have chosen an enemy that can never be imprisoned – the soul of man. Therefore they are doomed to lose this war.”