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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