#China

CCP Launches Nationwide Crackdown on Zion Church Beginning on October 9, 2025, Chinese authorities launched a coordinated nationwide crackdown against the unregistered Zion Church (锡安教会)—one of the country’s most prominent urban house churches. Police in Beijing, Shanghai, Zhejiang, Shandong, Guangdong, Guangxi, Fujian, and Hainan detained or disappeared at least 30 pastors, preachers, and congregants, searching homes and confiscating personal devices. Senior pastors Jin Mingri (金明日) and Yin Huibin (尹会彬) were arrested in Guangxi and have not been heard from since, while Wang Lin (王林) was taken at Shenzhen Bao’an Airport. Authorities accuse them of “illegal online religious activity” (非法互联网信息宗教传播罪), a charge increasingly used to punish those who hold Bible studies, prayer meetings, or livestreamed sermons outside state control. The Zion Church’s leadership published an Emergency Statement on October 12, condemning the arrests as unconstitutional and appealing for international attention. Founded in 2007 and forcibly closed in 2018 for rejecting Party oversight, the church now faces its most serious repression to date. The operation marks a renewed national campaign to eradicate unregistered “house churches”: Christian congregations operating outside the CCP-controlled Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM). By framing digital worship as “network misuse,” authorities have opened a new frontier of control, one in which faith itself can be criminalized under cybersecurity law. The timing—just days after National Day—underscores Beijing’s ideological assertiveness amid tightening restrictions in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong, and reflects the deepening centralization of religious life under Xi Jinping’s “Sinicization of Religion” (宗教中国化) campaign, which demands that all faiths serve the Party’s political and moral authority. This crackdown marks the erosion of the last remnants of religious autonomy in China. The Zion Church’s ordeal forms part of a broader project to discipline belief itself, extending state power into the most private spaces of conscience. It demands international attention, before the right to believe is extinguished in China.
“A Change Not Seen in a Century 百年未有之大变局” Exhibition of Badiucao, Cagliari, Sardinia, Italy 🇮🇹 September 24 - October 8 2025 Radio X Social Club, Exma via San Lucifero 71, Cagliari More info: The return to Italy of Badiucao, Chinese artist and political dissident, coincides with a historic turning point: the revelation of the Great Firewall Leak, which has shown the world how Beijing’s censorship and surveillance machine is now being exported abroad̶from Myanmar to Pakistan, from Ethiopia to Kazakhstan. Something Badiucao has been warning about for years. His presence in Sardinia is not only an artistic act but also a political gesture: a call to recognize the real risk that authoritarian models may take root in Europe. The title of my exhibition is drawn from a phrase uttered by Xi Jinping to Vladimir Putin on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine: “A change not seen in a century.” Those words did not evoke progress or renewal, but the promise of a new authoritarian axis ready to replace the democratic world order. Exhibiting Badiucao in Sardinia today means bringing to Europe a voice that has for years denounced the violence of regimes, global censorship, and propaganda̶ but also the erosion of Western democracies themselves. After his first stop in Ventotene, where he participated in the European Forum on Democracy alongside Iranian dissidents, Belarusian opposition figures, and Nobel laureates, and after meeting the public in Sassari to present the graphic novel You Must Take Part in Revolution and the documentary China’s Artful Dissident, Badiucao arrives in Cagliari with a new constellation of works that intertwine art and life, dissent and memory.