(Taishun, Zhejiang — December 29, 2025) In the mountainous regions of China’s southeastern coast, Christmas should have been a time of candlelight, prayer, and hymns. However, in Yayang Town, Taishun County, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, the season was instead replaced by police lights, cordons, and an all-night besiege. This scene was not merely a local law-enforcement action; it reflected deeper tensions in China’s current approach to religious governance.
From around 7:00 p.m. on December 14 until approximately 4:00 a.m. the following morning, hundreds, possibly more than a thousand, police officers were mobilized from various locations to the Yayang Assembly. Multiple videos from different angles show police vehicles and special police units entering the village under the cover of night, then sealing off and storming the church, clearing it out. An anonymous believer recalled that throughout the night, the sounds of prayers and praise hymns inside the church never ceased, echoing over the village; it felt like both a session of worship and a silent protest.
After the operation, two senior church leaders, Lin Enci (林恩慈) and Lin Enzhao (林恩兆), brothers, were placed on a police wanted list and later arrested. They are currently detained at the Wenzhou Detention Center. The church and its supporters pointed out that the detention center has refused to arrange meetings between the detainees and their lawyers, a practice that violates China’s own legal procedures. What shocked observers even more was the authorities’ attempt to bring criminal charges against the two under the highly stigmatizing label of an “organization with characters of a criminal syndicate.” For a Christian Assembly centered on worship and communal life, such a designation appears especially jarring.
Yayang is not an isolated case. Wenzhou has long been known as “China’s Jerusalem,” with a dense Christian population, and has therefore become a focal region for religious control. Since 2014, Zhejiang authorities have reversed four decades of relative tolerance by launching a high-profile “cross removal” campaign. During that movement, the Yayang Assembly resolutely refused to comply, and its church cross was preserved, an outcome that local authorities have harbored a grudge against.
In the years that followed, Wenzhou shut down nearly all children’s Sunday schools, banned minors from entering churches, and incorporated large numbers of house churches into the official system or placed them under the management of subdistrict offices. These measures have oscillated between legality and reality, leaving lasting fractures in society. This time, the Yayang local government once again incited the situation, forcibly planting flags inside the church and carrying out mass arrests.
The history of the Yayang Assembly illustrates precisely the indigenization of Christianity in this region. The church networks in the Taishun area were once part of the Christian missionary society established by British missionaries under the China Inland Mission; later, they were deeply influenced by Chinese church leaders such as Watchman Nee, gradually separating from the foreign missionary society and forming church expressions with strong local characteristics. This was a history of “Sinicization” achieved organically. However, today’s repression is directed precisely at these most indigenous and least foreign-associated assemblies, making the government-promoted “Sinicization of religion” appear internally contradictory.
Recently, measures in Taishun and Yayang Town have taken on a systematic character: sealing and taking over church venues; imposing round-the-clock police presence and quasi-military patrols in rural Christian communities; forcibly dispersing congregations; banning public gatherings; and categorizing prayer, hymns, and public expressions of faith into the framework of “illegal” or “criminal.” This represents a comprehensive shrinkage of the visibility of faith in public space.
History, however, has repeatedly shown that pressure does not necessarily lead to disappearance. In the 1950s, some counties in Wenzhou were once designated “religion-free zones”; during the harshest years of the underground church, faith nonetheless persisted in hidden yet resilient ways, reemerging in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, as Yayang believers continue to worship under lockdown, the message they convey is equally clear: faith is not something that administrative orders can simply eradicate.
In this Christmas season, the story of Yayang reminds people that governance of religion is not merely a matter of order and control; it also concerns how a state understands history, culture, and the boundaries of citizens’ inner worlds. When police lights replace Christmas candlelight, what is truly being tested may not be just one church, but a society’s capacity to tolerate diversity and belief.
During this joyous Christmas season, ChinaAid calls on the Wenzhou authorities to immediately cease all forms of hostile actions against Christianity, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!” (Luke 2:14)
Special Correspondent Gao Zhensai for ChinaAid
