(Thailand — January 8, 2026) At two o’clock in the morning, urgent knocking echoed outside a residence in the outskirts of Beijing. 

Gao Yingjia (高颖佳) and his wife, Geng Pengpeng (耿朋朋), were hiding at a friend’s home at the time. Several plainclothes men claiming to be police officers stood outside the door. The couple hurried downstairs, trying to keep their footsteps light, and their nearly six-year-old son was asleep upstairs.

They knew time was running out.

Not long afterward, Gao Yingjia was taken from Beijing and escorted to a detention center in southern China’s Guangxi province on the charge of “illegal use of information networks.” Several coworkers who pastored Zion Church alongside him were also detained. 

This operation was one of the largest crackdowns on Christians in China since 2018, drawing attention from the U.S. government, multiple European Union countries, and international human rights organizations.

“As Chinese Christians, we all know that faith entails risk,” Geng Pengpeng later said in a media interview. She subsequently left China with her son to seek temporary safety overseas. “But honestly, you can never truly be prepared.”

Now, she faces a painful choice: whether to return to China in order to be closer to her detained husband, while risking arrest herself; or to remain in Thailand — a country relatively lenient toward Chinese citizens in terms of visas, but one that has previously cooperated with Beijing’s extradition requests. 

In October of last year, 56-year-old Pastor Ezra Jin Mingri (金明日), the founder of Zion Church, was detained along with Gao Yingjia and nearly 30 other pastors and church members. To date, 18 pastors have been formally arrested, while five others have had compulsory measures lifted, though their cases have not been dismissed.

Zion Church was founded in 2007 and, for many years, held public worship services in a converted nightclub in Beijing. However, after China implemented revised Regulations on Religious Affairs in 2018, the church’s physical venue was forced to shut down. That same year, Pastor Wang Yi (王怡) of Chengdu’s house church, Early Rain Covenant Church (秋雨圣约教会), was arrested.

That crackdown pushed Zion Church to adopt a more covert “hybrid model”: online sermons combined with small-scale offline gatherings. Believers developed various ways to evade surveillance, listening to sermons while walking in parks, worshiping with headphones on rented tour buses, and then sharing meals together to complete their time of fellowship.

In September of this year, China introduced new regulations explicitly banning unauthorized religious groups from conducting online preaching. Shortly thereafter, China’s leader Xi Jinping emphasized at a high-level Communist Party Central Committee meeting the need to further advance the “Sinicization of religion.”

Against this backdrop, pressure on Chinese Christians has continued to intensify. In May, Pastor Gao Quanfeng (高全福) of the “Light of Zion Church,” which is not directly affiliated with Zion Church, and his wife were arrested. Almost simultaneously, multiple members of the Golden Lampstand Church in Linfen, Shanxi, were sentenced to lengthy prison terms for fraud. Police also questioned more than 100 Zion Church members, and multiple physical branches were forced to close.

The Chinese Communist regime’s suppression of Christianity is not determined solely by the growth in the number of believers, but is also closely tied to ideological security concerns and the international environment of Sino–U.S. relations. Historically, during the Mao Zedong era, Christians faced severe repression even when their numbers were small; whereas during the reform and opening-up period through the Jiang Zemin era, despite rapid growth in the numbers of Christians, the government adopted a more pragmatic approach to management amid relatively stable foreign relations.

To this day, there is no consistent or authoritative statistic on the actual number of Christians in China. What is certain is that the identities of believers in urban church networks, independent of the official “Three-Self Patriotic Movement,” are becoming increasingly high-risk in the short term. However, if these networks further strengthen their organizational capacity and cross-regional connections, they may also enhance their ability to continue operating, thereby raising the cost of repression.

Zion Church’s international connections, as well as its effective use of tools, are believed to have increased law enforcement difficulties to some extent. Jin Mingri’s daughter, Grace Jin Drexel, expressed that since the 2018 crackdown, the number of core church members has grown from about 1,500 to 5,000, while the audience for online sermons has doubled.

Even so, the church had long been aware that 2025 might bring new trials. In the weeks before the crackdown began, acting leader Pastor Long Jiang’en (龙降恩) privately asked Ezra Jin whether he was mentally prepared to be arrested.

Pastor Jin replied only with one sentence: “Hallelujah — a new wave of revival is about to come.”

Gao Zhensai, Special Correspondent for ChinaAid 

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