When police stormed homes across nine provinces on the night of Oct. 9, 2025, it marked more than just another chapter in China’s decades-long persecution of faith. It was the beginning of what human-rights observers are now calling the most sweeping coordinated crackdown on Christianity since the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. The target: Beijing’s Zion House Church, the largest and most influential urban house church network in China’s modern history.

For 40 years, since the end of Mao Zedong’s bloody Cultural Revolution, China’s unregistered Protestant and Catholic congregations have operated in a precarious gray zone—technically illegal but often tolerated. That uneasy equilibrium shattered in October.

Zion Church’s founder and senior pastor, Rev. Mingri “Ezra” Jin, was taken from his home in Beihai, Guangxi Province. Within hours, police swept through multiple cities, arresting at least 22 pastors, preachers, and lay leaders, including Pastors Wang Cong, Yin Huibin, Liu Zhenbin, and Sun Cong. Two detention centers in Beihai now hold 13 women and nine men; others have been placed under house arrest or disappeared into China’s labyrinth of “residential surveillance” facilities.

The scale of this campaign is staggering. Zion Church was not a small underground fellowship. It was a sprawling network of more than 5,000 members across 40 cities and roughly 100 congregations, sustained by an online devotional program that attracted more than 10,000 daily participants before its digital presence was erased by authorities.

The message to Catholics is this: ‘Submit to the party’s “patriotic” authority, as sanctioned by Rome.’ The message to evangelicals is ‘Disappear.’

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By any measure, Zion was China’s most dynamic Protestant Christian movement—a living symbol of how urban believers, professionals, and intellectuals could build a nationwide spiritual community outside the Communist Party’s control. It is precisely this vitality, observers say, that provoked the party’s wrath.

While Beijing’s hostility toward religion is nothing new, this 2025 Zion Church crackdown marks a dramatic escalation in method and intent. Unlike earlier campaigns that relied on localized harassment or selective arrests, this new wave was centrally planned and nationally synchronized—evidence of direction from the highest levels of the Ministry of Public Security and the United Front Work Department.

During the Cultural Revolution, the party sought to eliminate all religious expression as “superstition.” But under Xi Jinping, the persecution has taken on a more sophisticated, ideological character—what he calls the “sinicization of religion.” Churches are not merely destroyed; they are forced to submit, to rewrite Scripture, to display portraits of Xi alongside crucifixes, to teach loyalty to the party before loyalty to Christ.

This crackdown thus represents a return to Maoist absolutism cloaked in modern technology. Surveillance cameras monitor house gatherings. Artificial intelligence scans sermons for “illegal religious content.” Christian WeChat groups are infiltrated by state security. The party has learned that total control in the digital age requires both coercion and algorithmic precision.

Zion’s pastors faced not only raids but also digital erasure. Their online platforms—where believers once gathered for prayer, theological training, and humanitarian coordination—were deleted overnight, their bank accounts frozen, and lawyers threatened. Even the church’s elderly volunteers were interrogated about “foreign connections.” This holistic attack—physical, digital, psychological—marks a new stage of total repression unseen since Mao’s Red Guards smashed church altars six decades ago.

Zion Church’s growth terrified the party for one simple reason: It represented a self-organized, educated, urban faith community beyond state control. Its congregants included scholars, business leaders, artists, and young professionals. It was not a rural sect hiding in the mountains, but a thriving network in the heart of China’s cities.

In Beijing alone, Zion drew crowds of hundreds to its Sunday worship before its 2018 ban. That year, Pastor Ezra Jin refused to register with the government’s state-run Three-Self Patriotic Movement, insisting that Christ alone—not the party—was head of the Church. “To be registered under the state,” he said, “is to surrender the soul of the gospel to Caesar.”

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That defiance made him a marked man. Since 2018, authorities repeatedly sealed Zion’s rented venues, cut power to its offices, and harassed its members. Yet the movement only grew—underground, decentralized, and digitally connected. By 2025, it had become a model for China’s independent urban churches. Crushing Zion was thus meant to send a message to all others: No spiritual movement shall exist outside the party’s shadow.

While the Zion case exposes the ferocity of the campaign that specifically targets evangelical Protestants, Beijing’s persecution of independent Catholics follows a different logic. Since the 1950s, the regime has maintained a dual-church system: the state-controlled Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, which answers to the party, and the underground Catholic Church, loyal to Rome.

Evangelical churches like Zion are decentralized, often led by pastors with theological training from seminaries abroad or online. Their leadership is local, and their networks are agile—qualities that make them harder to control. Hence the state’s strategy has been to decapitate the leadership: arrest the pastors, cut off digital communication, and sow fear through intimidation.

In contrast, persecution against independent Catholics has focused on co-optation rather than elimination. The 2018 Vatican-China agreement, advanced by Pope Francis, marked a unprecedented degree of cooperation between the Catholic Church in Rome and the CCP. The agreement allowed the Communist Party to appoint bishops with papal approval, effectively bringing much of the Catholic hierarchy under state supervision. Those who refused this Papal compromise—like the underground Bishop Joseph Zhang Weizhu of Hebei or Cardinal Joseph Zen of Hong Kong—face house arrest, censorship, and isolation by the regime.

The message to Catholics is this: “Submit to the party’s ‘patriotic’ authority, as sanctioned by Rome.” The message to evangelicals is “Disappear.”

The persecution of Zion Church is not just a Chinese tragedy; it is a test for the conscience of the free world. It challenges democracies to decide whether they will treat religious freedom as a universal human right or a negotiable trade concession. It is no accident that the party targets believing Christians who insist on the integrity of their faith outside party control. The CCP sees freedom of conscience as a Western value that is incompatible with one-party totalitarian control, and thus targets Christians both for their religious practices and for their connection to the West and its values.

In justifying the Zion arrests, Beijing accused the church of “illegal dissemination of religious content via the internet” and “fraud”—charges commonly used to criminalize unregistered worship. But behind those legal fictions lies the same authoritarian impulse that built the digital firewall and interned over a million Uyghur Muslims and Christians in Xinjiang.

The timing of this campaign—just weeks before the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in Seoul—cannot be ignored. It is a deliberate show of power, a message from Xi Jinping to the world: We fear no criticism, and we will crush every independent conscience to maintain our totalitarian system under the direction of the Communist Party.

As President Donald J. Trump prepares to meet Xi Jinping on Oct. 30 during the APEC Summit, the moral stakes could not be higher. In his first term, President Trump made historic strides by declaring China’s atrocities in Xinjiang a genocide and prioritizing global religious freedom. Now, the American president is faced with a new opportunity to speak with moral clarity about the persecution of Christians and America’s foundational values.

President Trump must urge Xi Jinping—publicly and unequivocally—to release all Christian prisoners of conscience, including Pastor Ezra Jin, Pastor Wang Yi, Pastor Yang Rongli, and the legendary Christian human-rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who remains missing after years of torture and house arrest. He should also call for freedom for countless Catholic clergy, Tibetan monks, and Falun Gong practitioners languishing in China’s prisons.

The CCP fears Christianity not because it threatens political stability, but because it undermines the party’s monopoly on truth. The Christian gospel teaches that the ultimate authority belongs to God, not to any earthly ruler. That single idea is intolerable to a regime built on absolute ideological control.

Zion Church’s rapid growth is living proof that faith flourishes even under oppression. Its believers did not seek political confrontation—they sought spiritual renewal. They built community, charity, and hope in the heart of China’s cities. Yet to Xi Jinping, even hope is subversive if it does not bow to the party.

In the coming weeks, global attention will turn to Seoul and the APEC Summit. But long after the cameras fade, the question will remain: Can Xi Jinping’s war against faith succeed where Mao’s failed? History answers clearly: no.

When Mao declared religion “poison,” churches went underground but never vanished. When Bibles were burned, believers hand-copied Scripture by candlelight. When pastors were jailed, new ones rose to take their place. The blood of martyrs became the seed of revival.

Today, that same faith endures. Despite mass arrests, believers in Zion Church continue to meet quietly in homes and online under pseudonyms. Their courage exposes the bankruptcy of the Communist Party’s ideology. You can jail pastors, but you cannot jail the gospel.

Since his arrest on Oct. 10, Pastor Ezra Mingri Jin managed to send a single note through his lawyer—a message now circulating among Christians worldwide. It contained only two words, written in capital letters: “FEAR NOT.”

Those words echo through centuries of persecution—from the Roman catacombs to China’s modern prisons. They remind believers and tyrants alike that no power on earth can extinguish the light of conscience.

As Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Matthew 10:28). And as church history—from Acts to modern China—has shown, every empire that wages war against God’s people ultimately wages war against itself.

President Xi would do well to remember this truth: Your war against God will fail. The Church of Christ in China will prevail. For it is written, “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it” (John 1:5).

We look to President Trump, to Vice President JD Vance, and to American Christians to speak loudly and clearly in defense of the right of fellow Christians to freely practice our faith, as an expression of America’s own values—which will hopefully stand in sharp contrast with the values and behavior of China’s corrupt and oppressive communist regime.