Over 70 Christians have been arrested as part of a large-scale crackdown on civil liberties in East China, with 20 having also been fined thousands of Chinese Yuan.
Hostility from the Chinese state has been increasing for around three months and has seen hundreds of police officers and about 200 vehicles deployed to find anyone involved in Bible study groups across the region, according to Open Doors.
The organisation’s research indicates that the authorities are looking to shut down all churches, even including those associated with the state-recognised Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) and Catholic Patriotic Association (CPA), suggesting that Christians are viewed as a major threat to their authority.
Open Doors analyst Thomas Müller (name changed for security reasons) told en that similar problems are being reported from other regions and spoke about how the restrictions are likely to impact upon China’s churches.
“They may decide to stop their meetings for a few weeks, until the situation seems to be more stable again,” he said. “They may also decide to split their already small groups into even smaller groups and meet in varying frequency, sometimes weekly, changing places.
“This response comes with challenges for the churches. Firstly, splitting churches into ever-smaller groups means that more leaders are needed, a resource that cannot be easily multiplied. A second challenge is that with smaller groups meeting in changing places, they tend to lose members who are older and not as mobile as others.
“A third challenge is that it gets ever harder to teach children and youth as the next generation. Online meetings are not really an alternative as they are illegal for non-registered churches, and the implementation of a centralised virtual ID in 2025 further tightens website and social media access control for all.”
Asked if something specific has launched this latest crackdown, Müller said: “There does not seem to be a clear trigger. But we observe in more and more places that pastors, church leaders and even lay people are not just sentenced because of ‘picking quarrels and provoking fight (or trouble)’, a catch-all of earlier years. They are also sentenced because of ‘fraud’ or alleged economic crimes. It should also be noted that this push for control extends across all levels of society, Christian churches being one prominent element of it.”
Despite such an all-encompassing crackdown, the reason for the increased brutality is not immediately clear. Müller believes they are being targeted because they “have found a sense and meaning in following Jesus Christ, and if they are sharing this belief, others may find sense and meaning as well”, which could be hugely problematic for the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
