There are no signs, crosses or hymnals. There is nothing to suspect that the gray door on the ground floor of an office building, next to the bathrooms and a stand where they sell sausages, sweet potatoes and various snacks, leads to a church. Upon entering, lying on the floor, there is a rusty sign that still allows you to read, in peeling letters, the official performance of this place: “Stationery Cooperative”. Inside, what is found is a room with a small improvised altar: a low table covered with a piece of white cloth. Above, a Bible and a crucifix. Around it, two rows of plastic chairs.
Feng, one of the custodians of this unconventional Christian temple, explains that when “someone suspicious” asks a lot about what they do inside, he hangs the cooperative’s sign on the door. “We are in Chinaa country with an all-seeing and all-knowing system, so We are not a secret church, but we are clandestine, because we are not legally recognized by the authorities.. The Police, although they come from time to time so that we don’t forget that we are under surveillance, for now have left us more or less alone. But we know that any day now it can come and stop us,” he says.
As Feng has described, we are in a clandestine church that is “hidden” in a building owned by logistics and consulting companies in a large city in southern China. It is part of the All Ranges Churcha Pentecostal movement popularly known as ““The Cryers”.
A woman we will identify as Li, Feng’s wife and also a follower of this cult, explains the reason for the striking nickname. “The most heartfelt emotion, the one that leads to crying during prayers and expressions of repentance, is what has characterized our church, which was founded in the 80s and has several branches. We are similar to Protestantism in terms of not having a unified hierarchical structure,” he details.
The couple claims that their pastor was arrested a couple of years ago and that they now organize the ceremonies. Los Llorones are one of the many underground churches classified by the Communist Party of China (CCP) as xie jiaowhich translates as “heterodox teachings”although it is also used as a qualifier to refer to “evil sects.” They are those that are not registered with the Office of Religious Affairs, the regulator of temples, because they refuse to let the atheist Government appoint their pastorswho must carefully follow the Party line.
Feng and Li say that their community is made up of about thirty people, but that they have agreed that they will not meet again for a while, neither in person nor online (as they often do through a Western application), after the latest offensive by the authorities against clandestine Christian churches. Last week, Nearly 30 religious leaders were arrested in raids which were carried out in centers in various parts of the country.
The news made a lot of noise in the American press because among those arrested was the media founder of the Zion Church, Jin Mingri, who has thousands of followers in China and who extended his network to the United States, where his wife currently lives, who reported that her husband was among those detained.
Following a previous raid in 2018, when Beijing’s Zion Temple was closed in 2019, Jin began organizing online prayer groups. The group describes itself as a non-denominational evangelical church that adheres to orthodox Christian beliefs. “These arbitrary arrests reflect a growing repression of religious freedom. The President’s Government Xi Jinping appears determined to restructure religious practice to favor the interests of the CCP, and congregations that do not face harsh persecution,” said Yalkun Uluyol, spokesperson for Human Rights Watch.
After the arrests, from Washington, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio also publicly accused Beijing of “exercising hostility toward Christians who reject the Party’s interference in their faith and who choose to worship in unregistered churches.”
According to government figures from recent years, China has a considerable Christian population: some 38 million Protestants and almost six million Catholics. Although independent groups assure that the numbers of faithful are much higher and that, under Xi’s mandate, The CCP has promoted sinicization of religiona term used by the Party to describe the crusade to adapt religions to Chinese political and cultural doctrines.
The Chinese Constitution recognizes five religions (Buddhism, Catholicism, Taoism, Islam and Protestantism) and states that citizens “enjoy freedom of religious belief”, but this freedom is limited in practice. In 2020, new regulations required religious groups to “accept and spread the ideology and values of the CCP.” In recent remarks, Xi argued that continuously promoting sinicization of religions was “the only way” to achieve religious, ethnic and social harmony, and long-term stability of the country.
“We are not a dangerous sect and we do not promote civil disobedience as they tell us. We just want to be able to enjoy our faith in freedom“comments Feng, from the All Ranges Church movement. “I understand that the authorities persecute other Christian organizations with extremist and harmful beliefs, but neither we, nor those from the Church of Zion who have been detained, fall into that definition,” he says, referring to other traditionally persecuted groups such as the controversial Eastern Lightning, which also continues to maintain some clandestine churches in the Asian country.
The founder of the aforementioned congregation, which dates back to the early 1990s, a physics professor named Zhao Weishan, built the creed around the belief that Jesus Christ had been reincarnated as a Chinese woman, specifically his lover. In 2012, the Chinese press began to pay special attention to these Christian preachers because, in response to a Mayan prophecy, they made a lot of noise in public demonstrations in which they proclaimed that the end of the world was imminent.
A document from China’s Ministry of Public Security claimed that Zhao, before founding Eastern Lightning, had been part of several radical Christian sects that were dedicated to swindling money from their followers. Zhao fled to the United States, where he received asylum and built the headquarters of his church, which It has spread to many other countries such as Mexico or India. Even in Spain, where it is based in an industrial warehouse Fuenlabrada.