#Xi Jinping

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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.
#China #religious persecution #Zion Church #house churches #Xi Jinping
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Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping bodyguards acknowledging each other
#Putin #Xi Jinping #bodyguards #Russia #China #Diplomacy #international relations
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Isaac Stone Fish
10个月前
Jimmy Carter is dead at 100. I'm sad to say, but in the 2010s he worked to strengthen the Communist Party of China, and the leadership of Xi Jinping. For my 2022 book America Second, I investigated the Carter Center and its links to Beijing. Here's what I found: First, some background: for decades, the Carter Center worked to promote village elections in China, to try to encourage the spread of democracy there: a worthwhile task. But when Xi came to power, Beijing prohibited Carter from working on village elections. Instead, Xi reportedly suggested Carter improve the U.S.-China relationship -- which Carter interpreted, accurately, as a call to help preserve the Party. In 2015, the Carter Center partnered on a "scholarship exchange" program and conference with the Global Times, a jingoistic Party newspaper. The Carter Center claimed that its website , which it launched in 2002, "became the most visited political reform portal inside and outside China." That might have been true years ago, but when I reported on it for my book, in August 2021, the top story was about Xi's calls to strengthen the Party. (The longtime head of the Carter Center's China program expressed "firm disagreement" with my characterization and said that the Carter Center's China programming "has played an instrumental role in promoting China's democracy and liberalization." When Carter spoke about China later in his life, he did so in an almost uniformly positive tone. China, Carter said in April 2019, is "ahead of us. In almost every way." Carter did wonderful things as an ex-president, an eschewed the consulting that marred Clinton's reputation. It's a shame he did what he did on China.
#Jimmy Carter #Communist Party of China #Xi Jinping