More than 10,000. That is the number of Christians reportedly arrested during Xi Jinping's campaign against churches that worship outside Communist Party control.
More than 10,000 Christians have reportedly been arrested during Xi Jinping's campaign against independent churches, according to an investigation by The Telegraph, as Beijing targets underground churches that refuse to place the state above their faith. The reporting describes night raids, families separated, and pastors imprisoned โ and it reached Western readers this month, seventeen years into a crackdown that Chinese believers have lived under in silence.
The specifics are documented. Authorities reportedly arrested approximately 100 members of Yayang Church in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, between December 13 and 18, 2025, with at least two dozen members remaining in detention. On January 6, 2026, police raided the home of Early Rain Covenant Church leader Li Yingqiang in Deyang and took him away, along with other key church members. Months later, the pattern repeated: on June 14, 2026, Chinese police conducted a large-scale raid of Early Rain Covenant Church in Jiangyou City during a Sunday service in a hotel ballroom, detaining dozens, with two church leaders sentenced to administrative detention.
There was one release. ChinaAid confirmed the release of imprisoned house church pastor Ezra Jin, who founded Beijing's Zion Church in 2007 and arrived in Los Angeles on July 4, 2026. But the arithmetic of that "miracle" is sobering: Chinese authorities detained Jin and other Zion Church leaders during a wider crackdown, eighteen leaders were arrested and accused of "illegally using information networks," and at least eight members remain detained.
The machinery the headlines don't name
The mainstream account is accurate but partial. For the machinery behind the arrests, the most detailed record comes from Bitter Winter, the Turin-based magazine edited by Italian sociologist of religion Massimo Introvigne. Launched in May 2018 and available in eight languages, it is published by the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR). Beijing understands its value: between August and December 2018, Chinese authorities arrested 45 of the magazine's journalists and contributors, 22 of them working in Xinjiang.
Bitter Winter's central point is one no wire story captures: China does not need to prove a crime. "Xie jiao" is an expression the Chinese government itself translates as "evil cults," but it has been used since the early Middle Ages to designate religions the government has prohibited, and literally means "organizations spreading heterodox teachings." Religious organizations the government dislikes can be classified as xie jiao and eliminated without the inconvenience of proving any crime.
The hardest-hit groups rarely make Western front pages.
The China Anti-Xie-Jiao Association functions as a weaponized bureaucracy designed to dismantle groups outside the CCP's ideological boundaries, with primary targets including Falun Gong and The Church of Almighty God, whose members have been tortured, imprisoned, and in some cases killed for their faith. Bitter Winter assesses that the campaign against The Church of Almighty God represents the most extensive and brutal religious crackdown in China.
Why this reaches beyond China
Here the story crosses into the Monarch beat. On March 24, 2026, that same CCP-linked association turned its attention abroad. China reacted to the Tokyo High Court's dissolution of the Unification Church, Bitter Winter reported, with a statement it likened to "a congratulatory telegram mixed with a recruitment brochure." The statement reminded readers that in 1997 the Unification Church was designated a xie jiao by the Chinese government, and faulted it for spreading "anti-communist doctrines" through its connected newspaper, The Washington Times.
The tell is in Beijing's satisfaction. The CCP-affiliated organization suggested that Japan โ an American ally โ had joined China's global effort against an anti-Communist church, treating the case as a geopolitical victory in which a democratic country appears to be adopting the Chinese model of managing religion.
That is the warning worth remembering. The label "cult" is not a Chinese peculiarity; it is a method. In a democracy, the state does not get to decide which doctrines are acceptable and then dissolve the rest โ that is precisely the power China wields through the xie jiao category, and precisely the power Beijing now applauds a democracy for borrowing.
For US legislators, the through-line is simple. The 10,000 arrests are the visible edge of a system that treats disfavored faith as a crime to be managed. When an authoritarian regime cheers a democratic court's ruling, the democracy is obliged to ask a hard question: whose model is it following?